Her articles have been featured in New Journal of Medicine, the American Scholar, Atlantic monthly, the Partisan Review, Chronicles of higher Education, and numerous other publications. Currently, she is at work on a third book, The War Against Boys.

- Are We Living in a Moral Stone Age?
Philosopher Christina Sommers charges that today's young people are suffering from "cognitive moral confusion". They not only have trouble distinguishing right from wrong - they question whether such standards even exist. The threat this moral relativism poses to society is greater than any external danger. (IMPRIMIS Vol. 27, No. 3, 1998.)
- Teaching the Virtues
Here Professor Christina Hoff Sommers co-editor of Virtue and Vice in Everyday Life, argues that this crisis can in larger part be attributed to the deterioration of moral education. (IMPRIMIS Vol. 20, No. 11, 1991.)

Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the monthly journal of Hillsdale College.

We hear a lot today about how Johnny can't read, how he can't write, and the trouble he is having finding France on a map. It is also true that Johnny is having difficulty distinguishing right from wrong. Along with illiteracy and innumeracy, we must add deep moral confusion to the list of educational problems. Increasingly, today's young people know little or nothing about the Western moral tradition.

This was recently demonstrated by Tonight Show, host Jay Leno. Leno frequently does "man-on-the-street" interviews, and one night he collared some young people to ask them questions about the Bible. "Can you name one of the Ten Commandments?" he asked two college-age women. One replied, "Freedom of speech?" Mr. Leno said to the other, complete this sentence: Let he who is without sin..." Her response was, "have a good time?" Mr. Leno then turned to a young man and asked, "Who, according to the Bible was eaten by a whale?" The confident answer was "Pinocchio."

As with many humorous anecdotes, the underlying reality is not funny at all. These young people are morally confused. They are the students I and other teachers of ethics see every day. Like most professors, I am acutely aware of the "hole in the moral ozone." One of the best things our schools can do for America is to set about repairing it-by confronting the moral nihilism that is now the norm for so many students.

I believe that schools at all levels can do a lot to improve the moral climate of our society. They can help restore civility and community if they commit themselves and if they have the courage to act.

When you have as many conversations with young people as I do, you come away both exhilarated and depressed. Still, there is a great deal of simple good-heartedness, instinctive fair-mindedness, and spontaneous generosity of spirit in them. Most of the students I meet are basically decent individuals. They form wonderful friendships and seem to be considerate of and grateful to their parents-more so than the baby boomers were.

In many ways they are more likable than the baby boomers-they are less fascinated with themselves and more able to laugh at their faults. An astonishing number are doing volunteer work (70 percent of college students, according to one annual survey of freshmen). They donate blood to the Red Cross in record numbers and deliver food to housebound elderly people. They spend summer vacations working with deaf children or doing volunteer work in Mexico. This is a generation of kids that, despite relatively little moral guidance or religious training, is putting compassion into practice.

Conceptually and culturally, however, today's young people live in a moral haze. Ask one of them if there are such things as "right" and "wrong," and suddenly you are confronted with a confused, tongue-tied, nervous, and insecure individual. The same person who works weekends for Meals on Wheels, who volunteers for a suicide prevention hotline or a domestic violence shelter might tell you, "Well, there really is no such thing as right or wrong. It's kind of like whatever works best for the individual. Each person has to work it out for himself." The trouble is that this kind of answer, which is so common as to be typical, is no better than the moral philosophy of a sociopath.

I often meet students incapable of making even one single confident moral judgment. And it's getting worse. The things students now say are more and more unhinged. Recently, several of my students objected to philosopher Immanuel Kant's "principle of humanity" - the doctrine that asserts the unique dignity and worth of every human life. They told me that if they were faced with the choice between saving their pet or a human being, they would choose the former.

We have been thrown back into a moral Stone Age; many young people are totally unaffected by thousands of years of moral experience and moral progress. The notion of objective moral truths is in disrepute. And this mistrust of objectivity has begun to spill over into other areas of knowledge. Today, the concept of objective truth in science and history is also being impugned. An undergraduate at Williams College recently reported that her classmate, who had been taught that "all knowledge is a social construct," were doubtful that the Holocaust ever occurred. One of her classmates said, "Although the Holocaust may not have happened, it's a perfectly reasonable conceptual hallucination."

A creative writing teacher at Pasadena City College wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about what it is like to teach Shirley Jackson's celebrated short story "The Lottery" to today's college students. It is a tale of a small farming community that seems normal in every way; its people are hardworking and friendly. As the plot progresses, however, the reader reams this village carries out an annual lottery in which the loser is stoned to death.

It is a shucking lesson about primitive rituals in a modem Americium setting. In the past, the students had always understood "The Lottery" as a warning about the dangers of mindless conformity, but now they merely think that it is "Neat!" or “Cool!" Today, not one of the teacher’s current students will go out on a limb and take a stand against human sacrifice.

It was not always thus. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he did not say, “At least that is my opinion.” He declared it as an objective truth. When Elisabeth Cady Stanton amended the Declaration of Independence by changing the phrase “all men” to “all men and women,” she was not merely giving an opinion; she was insisting that females are endowed with the same rights and entitlements as males

The assertions of both Jefferson and Stanton were made in she same spirit-as self-evident truths and not as personal judgments. Today's young people enjoy the fruits of the battles fought by these leaders, but they themselves are not being given the intellectual and moral training to argue for and to justify truth. In fact, the kind of education they are getting is systematically undermining their common sense about what is true and right.

Let me be concrete and specific: Men end women died courageously fighting the Nazis. They included American soldiers, Allied soldiers, and resistance fighters. Because brave people took risks to do what was right and necessary Hitler was eventually defeated. Today, with the assault on objective truth, many college students find themselves unable to say why the United States was on the right side in that war. Some even doubt that America was in the right. To add insult to injury, they are not even sure that the salient events of the Second World War ever took place. They simply lack confidence in the objectivity of history.

Too many young people are morally confused, ill-informed, and adrift. This confusion gets worse rather than better once they go to college. If they are attending an elite school, they can actually lose their common sense and become clever and adroit intellectuals in the worst sense. George Orwell reputedly said, “Some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” Well the students of such intellectuals are in the same boat. Orwell did not know about the tenured radicals of the 1990s, but he was presciently aware that they were on the way.

The problem is not that young people are ignorant, distrustful, cruel, or treacherous. And it is not that they are moral skeptics. They just talk that way. To put it bluntly, they are conceptually clueless. The problem I am speaking about is cognitive. Our students are suffering from “cognitive moral confusion.”

What is to be done? How can we improve their knowledge and understanding of moral history? How can we restore their confidence in the great moral ideals? How can we help them become morally articulate, morally literate, and morally self-confident?

In the late 1960s, a group of hippies living in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco decided that hygiene was a middle class hang-up that they could best do without. So, they decided to live without it. For example, baths and showers, while not actually banned, were frowned upon. The essayist and novelist Tom Wolfe was intrigued by these hippies who, he said, “sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the post and start out from zero."

Before long, the hippies' aversion to modern hygiene had consequences that were as unpleasant as they were unforeseen. Wolfe describes them: "At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.” The itching and the manginess eventually began to vex the hippies, leading them to seek help from the local free clinics. Step by step, they had to rediscover for themselves the rudiment of modern hygiene. Wolfe refers to this as the “Great Relearning.”

The Great Relearning is what has to happen whenever earnest reformers extirpate too much. When, “starting from zero,” they jettison basic social practices and institutions, abandon common routines, defy common sense, reason, conventional wisdom-and, sometimes, sanity itself.

We saw this with the most politically extreme experiments of our century: Marxism, Maoism, and fascism. Each movement had its share of zealots and social engineers who believed in “starting from zero.” They had faith in a new order and ruthlessly cast aside traditional arrangements. Among the unforeseen consequences were mass suffering and genocide. Russians and Eastern Europeans are just beginning their own "Great Relearning.” They now realize, to their dismay, that starting from zero is a calamity and that the structural damage wrought by the political zealots has handicapped their societies for decades to come. They are also learning that it is far easier to tear apart a social fabric then it is to piece it together again.

America, too, has had its share of revolutionary developments-not so much political as moral. We are living through a great experiment in “moral deregulation,” an experiment whose first principle seems to be: “Conventional morality is oppressive.” What is right is what works for us. We question everything. We casually, even gleefully: throw out old-fashioned customs and practices. Oscar Wilde once said, “I can resist everything except temptation.” Many in the Sixties generation made succumbing to temptation and license their philosophy of life.

We now jokingly call looters “non-traditional shoppers.” Killers are described as “morally challenged”-again jokingly, but the truth behind the jokes is that moral deregulation is the order of the day. We poke fun at our own society for its lack of moral clarity. In our own way, we are as down and out as those poor hippies knocking at the door of the free clinic.

We need our own Great Relearning. Here, I am going to propose a few ideas on how we might carry out this relearning. I am going to propose something that could be called “moral conservationism.” It is based on this premise: We are born into a moral environment just as we are born into a natural environment. Just as there are basic environmental necessities, like clean air, safe food, fresh water, there are basic moral necessities. What is a society without civility, honesty, consideration, self-discipline? Without a population educated to be civil, considerate, and respectful of one another, what will we end up with? Not much. For as long as philosophers and theologians have written about ethics, they have stressed the moral basics. We live in a moral environment. We must respect and protect it. We must acquaint our children with it. We must make them aware it is precious and fragile.

I have suggestions for specific reforms They are far from revolutionary, and indeed some are pretty obvious They are "common sense," but unfortunately, we live in an age when common sense is becoming increasingly hard to come by

We must encourage and honor institutions like Hillsdale College, St. Johns College, and Providence College, to name a few, that accept the responsibility of providing a classical moral education for their students. The last few decades of the twentieth century have seen a steady erosion of knowledge and a steady increase in moral relativism. This is partly due to the diffidence of many teachers who are confused by all the talk about pluralism. Such teachers actually believe that it is wrong to “indoctrinate” our children in our own culture and moral tradition.

Of course, there are pressing moral issues around which there is no consensus; as a modern pluralistic society we are arguing about all sorts of things. This is understandable. Moral dilemmas arise in every generation. But, long ago, we achieved consensus on many basic moral questions. Cheating, cowardice, and cruelty are wrong. As one pundit put it, “The Ten Commandments are not the Ten Highly Tentative Suggestions.”

While it is true that we must debate controversial issues, we must not forget there exists a core of noncontroversial ethical issues that were settled a long time ago. We must make students aware that there is a standard of ethical ideals that all civilizations worthy of the name have discovered. We must encourage them to read the Bible, Aristotle's Ethics, Shakespeare's King Lear, the Koran, and the Analects of Confucius. When they read almost any great work, they will encounter these basic moral values: integrity, respect for human life, self-control, honesty, courage, and self-sacrifice. All the world's major religions proffer some version of the Golden Rule, if only in its negative form: Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you.

We must teach the literary classics. We must bring the great books and the great ideas back into the core of the curriculum. We must transmit the best of our political and cultural heritage. Franz Kafka once said that a great work of literature melts the “frozen sea within us.” There are also any number of works of art and works of philosophy that have the same effect.

American children have a right to their moral heritage. They should know the Bible. They should be familiar with the moral truths in the tragedies of Shakespeare, in the political ideas of Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln. They should be exposed to the exquisite moral sensibility in the novels of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Mark Twain, to mention some of my favorites. These great works are their birthright.

This is not to say that a good literary, artistic, and philosophical education suffices to create ethical human beings; nor is it to suggest that teaching the classics is all we need to do to repair the moral ozone. What we know is that we cannot, in good conscience, allow our children to remain morally illiterate. All healthy societies pass along their moral and cultural traditions to their children

And so I come to another basic reform: Teachers, professors, and other social critics should be encouraged to moderate their attacks on our culture and its institutions. They should he encouraged to treat great literary works as literature and not as reactionary political tracts. In many classrooms today, students only learn to “uncover” the allegedly racist, sexist, and elitist elements in the great books.

Meanwhile, pundits, social critics radical feminists, and other intellectuals on the cultural left never seem to tire of running down our society and its institutions and traditions. We are a society overrun by determined advocacy groups that overstate the weaknesses of our society and show very little appreciation for its merits and strengths. I would urge those professors and teachers who use their classrooms to disparage America to consider the possibility that they are doing more harm than good. Their goal may be to create sensitive, critical citizens, but what they are actually doing is producing confusion and cynicism. Their goal may be to improve students’ awareness of the plight of exploited peoples, but what they are actually doing is producing kids who are capable of doubting that the Holocaust took place and kids who are incapable of articulating moral objections to human sacrifice.

In my opinion, we are today not unlike those confused, scrofulous hippies of the late 1960s who finally showed up at the doors of the free clinics in Haight-Ashbury to get their dose of traditional medicine. I hope we have the good sense to follow their example. We need to take an active stand against the divisive unlearning that is corrupting the integrity of our society.

William Buttler Yeats talked of the “center” and warned us that it is not holding. Other talk of the threats to our social fabric and tradition. But we are still a sound society; in more than one sense, we have inherited a very healthy constitution from our founding fathers. We know how to dispel the moral confusion and get back our bearings and our confidence. We have traditions and institutions of proven strength and efficacy, and we are still strong.

We need to bring back the great books and the great ideas. We need to transmit the best of our political and cultural heritage. We need to refrain from cynical attacks against our traditions and institutions. We need to expose the folly of all the schemes for starting from zero. We need to teach our young people to understand, respect, and protect the institutions that protect us and preserve our kindly, free and democratic society.

This we can do. And when we engage in the Great Relearning that is so badly needed today, we will find that the lives of our morally enlightened children will be saner, safer, more dignified, and more humane.

Not very long ago, I published an article called "Ethics without Virtue" in which I criticized the way ethics is being taught in American colleges. I pointed out that there is an overemphasis on social policy questions, with little or no attention being paid to private morality. I noted that students taking college ethics are debating abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, DNA research, and the ethics of transplant surgery while they learn almost nothing about private decency, honesty, personal responsibility, or honor. Topics such as hypocrisy, self-deception, cruelty or selfishness rarely come up. I argued that the current style of ethics teaching which concentrated so much on social policy was giving students the wrong ideas about ethics. Social morality is only half of the moral life; the other half is private morality. I urged that we attend to both.

A colleague of mine did not like what I said. She told me that in her classroom she would continue to focus on issues of social injustice. She taught about women’s oppression, corruption in big business, multinational corporations and their transgressions in the Third World-that sort of things. She said to me, “You are not going to have moral people until you have moral institutions. You will not have moral citizens until you have a moral government.” She made it clear that I was wasting time and even doing harm by promoting bourgeois morality and bourgeois virtues instead of awakening the social conscience of my students.

At the end of the semester, she came into my office carrying a stack of exams and looking very upset.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“They cheated on their social justice take-home finals. They plagiarized!” More than half of the students in her ethics class had copied long passages from secondary literature. “What are you going to do?” I asked her. She gave me a self-mocking smile and said, “I’d like to borrow a copy of that article you wrote on ethics without virtue.”

There have been major cheating scandals at many of our best universities. A recent survey reported in the Boston Globe says that 7S percent of all high school students admit to cheating; for college student the figure is 50 percent. A US News and World Report survey asked college-age students if they would steal from an employer. Thirty-four percent said they would. Of people forty-five and over, six percent responded in the affirmative.

Part of the problem is that so many students come to college dogmatically committed to a moral relativism that offers them no grounds to think that cheating is just wrong. I sometimes play a macabre game with first year students, trying to find some act they will condemn as morally wrong: Torturing a child. Starving someone to death. The reply is often: “Torture, starvation and humiliation may be bad for you, but who are you to say they are bad for someone else?”

Not all students are dogmatic relativists; nor are they all cheaters and liars. Even so, it is impossible to deny that there is a great deal of moral drift. The students’ ability to arrive at reasonable moral judgments is severely, even bizarrely, affected. A Harvard University professor annually offers a large history class on the Second World War and the rise of the Nazis. Some years back, he was stunned to learn from his teaching assistant that the majority of students in the class did not believe that anyone was really to blame for the Holocaust. The graduate assistant asserted that if these Harvard students were sitting in judgment at Nuremberg they would have let everyone off. No one was to blame. In the students’ minds, the Holocaus was like a natural cataclysm: it was inevitable and unavoidable. The professor refers to his students’ attitude about the past as “no-fault history.”

One philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, has said that we may be raising a generation of “moral stutterers”. Other call it moral illiteracy. Education consultant Michael Josephson says “there is a hole in moral ozone.” Well what should the schools be doing to make children morally literate, to put fault back into no-fault history, to mend the hole in the moral ozone?

First, a bit of history. Let me remind you of how ethics was once taught in American colleges. In the nineteenth century, the ethics course was a high point of college life. It was taken in the senior year, and was usually taught by the president of the college who would uninhibitedly urge the students to become morally better and stronger. The ethics course was in fact the culmination of students’ college experience. But as the social sciences began to flourish in the early twentieth century, ethics courses gradually lost prominence until they became just one of several electives offered by philosophy departments. By the mid-1960s, enrollment in courses on moral philosophy reached an all time low and, as one historian of higher education put it, “college ethics was in deep trouble.”

At the end of the ‘60s, there was a rapid turnaround. To the surprise of many a department chair, applied ethics courses suddenly proved to be very popular. Philosophy departments began to attract unprecedented numbers of students to courses in medical ethics, business ethics, ethics for everyday life, ethics for lawyers, for social workers, for nurses, for journalists. More recently, the dubious behavior of some politicians and financiers has added to public concern over ethical standards which in turn has contributed to the feeling that college ethics is needed. Today American Colleges and universities are offering thousands of well attended courses in applied ethics.

I too have been teaching applied ethics courses for several years, but my enthusiasm for them tapered off when I saw how the students reacted. I was especially disturbed by comments students made again and again on the course evaluation forms. “I learned there was no such thing as right or wrong, just good or bad arguments.” Or: “I learned there is no such thing as morality.” I asked myself what it was about these classes that was fostering this sort of moral agnosticism and skepticism. Perhaps the students themselves were part of the problem. Perhaps it was their high school experience that led them to become moral agnostics. Even so, I felt that my classes were doing nothing to change them.

The course I had been giving was altogether typical. At the beginning of the semester we studied a hit of mortal theory, going over the strengths and weaknesses of Kantianism, utilitarianism, social contract theory and relativism. We then took up topical moral issues such as abortion, censorship, capital punishment, world hunger, and affirmative action. Naturally, I felt it my job to present careful and well-argued positions on all sides of these popular issues. But this atmosphere of argument and counterargument was reinforcing the idea that all moral questions have at least two sides, i.e., that all of ethics is controversial.

Perhaps this reaction is to he expected in any ethics course primarily devoted to issues on which it is natural to have a wide range of disagreement. In a course specifically devoted to dilemmas and hard cases, it is almost impossible not to give the student the impression that ethics itself has no solid foundation.

The relevant distinction here is between “basic” ethics and “dilemma” ethics. It is basic ethics that G.J. Warnock has in mind when he warns his fellow moral philosophers not to be bullied out of holding fast to the “plain moral facts.” Because the typical course in applied ethics concentrates on problems and dilemmas, the students may easily lose sight of the fact that some things are clearly right and some are clearly wrong, that some ethical truths are not subject to serious debate.

I recently said something to this effect during a television interview in Boston, and the skeptical interviewer immediately asked me to name some uncontroversial ethical truths. After stammering for a moment, I found myself rattling off several that I hold to be uncontroversial: It is wrong to mistreat a child, to humiliate someone, to torment an animal. To think only of yourself, to steal, to lie, to break promises. And on the positive side: it is right to he considerate and respectful of others, to be charitable and generous.

Reflecting again on that extemporaneous response, I am aware that not everyone will agree that all of these are plain moral facts. But teachers of ethics are free to give their own list or to pare down mine. In teaching ethics, one thing should be made central and prominent: right and wrong do exist. This should be laid down as uncontroversial lest one leaves an altogether false impression that everything is up for grabs.

It will, I think, be granted that the average student today does not come to college steeped in a religious or ethical tradition in which he or she has uncritical confidence. In the atmosphere of a course dealing with hard and controversial cases, the contemporary student may easily find the very idea of a stable moral tradition to be an archaic illusion. I am suggesting that we may have some responsibility here for providing the student with what the philosopher Henry Sidgwick called “moral common sense.” (Sometimes he spoke of “established morality” as it is commonly understood and accepted.) More generally, I am suggesting that we should assess some of the courses we teach for their edificatory effect. Our responsibility as teachers goes beyond purveying information about the leading ethical theories and in developing dialectical skill in moral casuistry. I have come to see that dilemma ethics is especially lacking in edificatory force, and indeed that it may even be a significant factor in encouraging a superficial moral relativism or agnosticism.

I shall not really argue the case for seeing the responsibility of the teacher of ethics in traditional terms. It would seem to me that the burden of argument is on those who would maintain that modern teachers of ethics should abjure the teacher’s traditional concern with edification. Moreover, it seems to me that the hands-off posture is not really as neutral as it professes to be. (Author Samuel Blumenfeld is even firmer on this point. He says, “You have to be dead to be value neutral.”) One could also make a case that the new attitude of disowning responsibility probably contributes to the student’s belief in the false and debilitating doctrine that there are no “plain moral facts” after all. In tacitly or explicitly promoting that doctrine, the teacher contributes to the student’s lack of confidence in a moral life that could be grounded in something more than personal disposition or political fashion. I am convinced that we could be doing a far better job of moral education.

If one accepts the idea that moral edification is not an improper desideratum in the teaching of ethics, then the question arises: What sort of course in ethics is effective? What ethical teachings are naturally edificatory? My own experience leads me to recommend a course on the philosophy of virtue. Here, Aristotle is the best place to begin. Philosophers as diverse as Plato, Augustine, Kant and even Mill wrote about vice and virtue. And there is an impressive contemporary literature on the subject. But the locus circus is Aristotle.

Students find a great deal of plausibility in Aristotle’s theory of moral education, as well as personal relevance in what he says about courage, generosity, temperance and other virtues. I have found that an exposure to Aristotle makes an immediate inroad on dogmatic relativism; indeed the tendency to dismiss morality as relative to taste or social fashion rapidly diminishes and may vanish altogether. Most students find the idea of developing virtuous character traits naturally appealing.

Once the student becomes engaged with the problem of what kind of person to be, and how to become that kind of person, the problems of ethics become concrete and practical and, for many a student, morality itself is thereafter looked on as a natural and even inescapable personal undertaking. I have not come across students who have taken a course in the philosophy of virtue saying that they have learned there is no such thing as morality. The writings of Aristotle and of other philosophers of virtue are full of argument and controversy, but students who read them with care are not tempted to say they learned “there is no right or wrong, only good or bad arguments.”

At the elementary and secondary level students may be too young to study the philosophy of virtue, but they certainly are capable of reading stories and biographies about great men and women. Unfortunately, today’s primary school teachers, many of whom are heavily influenced by what they were taught in trendy schools of education, make little use of the time-honored techniques of telling a story to young children and driving home “the moral of the story.” What are they doing?

One favored method of moral education that has been popular for the past twenty years is called “Values Clarification,” which maintains the principle that the teacher should never directly tell students about right and wrong; instead the students must be left to discover “values” on their own. One favored values clarification technique is to ask children about their likes and dislikes: to help them become acquainted with their personal preferences. The teacher asks the students, “How do you feel about homemade birthday presents? Do you like wall-to-wall carpeting? What is your favorite color? Which flavor of ice cream do you prefer? How do you feel about hit-and-run drivers? What are your feelings on the abortion question?” The reaction to these questions-from wall-to-wall carpeting and to hit-and-run drivers-is elicited from the student in the same tone of voice-as if one’s personal preferences in both instances are all that matters.

One of my favorite anecdotes concerns a teacher in Newton, Massachusetts who had attended numerous values clarification workshops and was assiduously applying its techniques in her class. The day came when her class of sixth graders announced that they valued cheating and wanted to be free to do it on their tests. The teacher was very uncomfortable. Her solution? She told the children that since it was her class, and since she was opposed to cheating, they were not free to cheat. “In my class you must be honest, for I value honesty. In other areas of your life you may be free to cheat.”

Now this fine and sincere young woman was doing her best not to indoctrinate her students. But what she was telling them is that cheating is not wrong if you can get away with it. Good values are “what one values.” She valued the norm of not cheating. That made this value binding on her, and gave her the moral authority to enforce it in her classroom; others, including the students, were free to choose other values “elsewhere.” The teacher thought she had no right to intrude by giving the students moral direction. Of course, the price for her failure to do her job of inculcating moral principles is going to be paid by her bewildered students. They are being denied a structured way to develop values. Their teacher is not about to give it to them lest she interfere with their freedom to work out their own value systems.

This Massachusetts teacher values honesty, but her education theory does not allow her the freedom to take a strong stand on honesty as a moral principle. Her training has led her to treat her “preference” for honesty as she treats her preference for vanilla over chocolate flavored ice cream. It is not hard to see how this doctrine is an egotistic variant of ethical relativism. For most ethical relativists, public opinion is the final court of ethical appeal; for the proponent of values clarification, the locus of moral authority is to be found in the individual’s private tastes and preferences.

How sad that so many teachers feel intellectually and “morally” unable to justify their own belief that cheating is wrong. It is obvious that our schools must have clear behavior codes and high expectations for their students. Civility, honesty and considerate behavior must be recognized encouraged and rewarded. That means that moral education must have as its explicit aim the moral betterment of the student. If that be indoctrination. so be it. How can we hope to equip the students to face the challenge of moral responsibility in their lives if we studiously avoid telling them what is right and what is wrong?

The elementary schools of Amherst New York provide good examples of an unabashedly directive moral education. Posters are placed around the school extolling kindness and helpfulness. Good behavior in the cafeteria is rewarded by being able to sit at a “high table” with a tablecloth and flowers. One kindergarten student was given a special award for having taken a new Korean student under her wing. But such simple and reasonable methods as those practiced in Amherst New York are rare. Many school systems have given up entirely the task of character education. Children are left to fend for themselves. To my mind, leaving children alone to discover their own values is a little like putting them in a chemistry lab and saying, “Discover your own compounds, kids.” If they blow themselves up, at least they have engaged in an authentic search for the self.

Ah, you may say: we do not let children fend for themselves in chemistry laboratories because we have knowledge about the chemicals. But is there really such thing as moral knowledge? The reply to that is an emphatic “Yes.” Have we not leaned a thing or two over the past several thousand years of civilization? To pretend we know nothing about basic decency about human rights, about vice and virtue, is fatuous or disingenuous. Of course we know that gratuitous cruelty and political repression are wrong, that kindness and political freedom are right and good.

Some opponents of directive moral education argue that it could be a form of brainwashing. That is a pernicious confusion. To brainwash is to diminish someone’s capacity for reasoned judgment. It is perversely misleading to say that helping children to develop habits of truth telling or fair play threatens their ability to make reasoned choices. Quite the contrary: good moral habits enhance one’s capacity for rational judgments.

The paralyzing fear of indoctrinating children is even greater in high schools than it is in elementary schools. One favored teaching technique, allegedly avoiding indoctrination is dilemma ethics. Children are presented with abstract moral dilemmas: Seven people art in a lifeboat with provisions for four-what should they do? Or Lawrence Kohlberg’s famous case of Heinz and the stolen drug. Should the indigent Heinz whose dying wife needs medicine steal it? When high school student study ethics at all, it is usually in the form of pondering such dilemmas or in the form of debates on social issues: abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment and the like. Directive moral education is out of favor. Storytelling is out of fashion.

Let's consider for a moment just how the current fashion in dilemmas differs from the older approach to moral education which often uses moral tales and parables to instill moral principles in students in the primary grades. Saul Bellow asserts that the survival of Jewish culture would he inconceivable without the stories that gave point and meaning to the Jewish moral tradition. One such story, included in a collection of traditional Jewish tales that Bellow edited, is called “If Not Higher.” I sketch it here to contrast the story-approach with the dilemma-approach in primary and secondary education, but the moral of the contrast also applies to the teaching of ethics at the college level as well:

There was once a rabbi in a small Jewish village in Russia who vanished every Friday morning for several hours. The devoted villagers boasted that during these hours their rabbi ascended to Heaven to talk with God. A skeptical newcomer arrived in town, determined to discover where the rabbi really was. One Friday morning the newcomer hid near the rabbi’s house, watched him rise, say his prayers and put on the clothes of a peasant. He saw him take an ax and go into the forest chop down a tree and gather a large bundle of wood. Next the rabbi proceeded to a shack in the poorest section of the village in which lived an old woman and her sick son. He left them the wood which was enough for the week. The rabbi then quietly returned to his own house.

The story concludes that the newcomer stayed me in the village and became a disciple of the rabbi. And whenever he hears one of his fellow villagers say, “On Friday morning our rabbi ascends all the way to Heaven” the newcomer quietly adds, “if not higher.”

In a moral dilemma such as Kohlberg’s Heinz stealing the drug, or the lifeboat case there are no obvious heroes or villains. Not only do the characters lack moral personality, but they exist in a vacuum outside of traditions and social arrangements that shape their conduct in the problematic situations confronting them. In a dilemma there is no obvious right and wrong, no clear vice and virtue. The dilemma may engage the students’ minds; it only marginally engages their emotions, their moral sensibilities. The issues are finally balanced, listeners are on their own and they individually decide for themselves. As one critic of dilemma ethics has observed, one cannot imagine parents passing down to their children the tale of Heinz and the stolen drug. By contrast, in the story of the rabbi and the skeptical outsider, it is not up to the listener to decide whether or not the rabbi did the right thing. The moral message is clear: “Here is a good man-merciful, compassionate and actively helping someone weak and vulnerable. Be like that person.” The message is contagious. Even the skeptic gets the point.

Stories and parables are not always appropriate for high school or college ethics courses, but the literary classics certainly are. To understand King Lear, Oliver Twist, Huckleberry Finn or Middlemarch requires that the reader have some understanding of (and sympathy with) what the author is saying about the moral ties that bind the characters and that hold in place the social fabric in which they play their roles. Take something like filial obligation. One moral of King Lear is that society cannot survive when filial contempt becomes the noun Literary figures can thus provide students with the moral paradigms that Aristotle thought were essential to moral education.

I am not suggesting that moral puzzles and dilemmas have no place in the ethics curriculum. To teach something about the logic of moral discourse and the practice of moral reasoning in resolving conflicts of principles is clearly important. But casuistry is not the place to start, and, taken by itself, dilemma ethics provides little or no moral sustenance. Moreover, an exclusive diet of dilemma ethics tends to give the student the impression that ethical thinking is a lawyer’s game.

If I were an educational entrepreneur I might offer you a four- or five-stage program in the manner of some of the popular educational consultants. I would have brochures, audio-visual materials. There would be workshops. But there is no need for brochures, nor for special equipment, nor for workshops. What I am recommending is not new, it has worked before, and it is simple:

1. Schools should have behavior codes that emphasize civility, kindness and honesty.

2. Teachers should not be accused of brainwashing children when they insist on basic civility, decency, honesty and fairness.

3. Children should be told stories that reinforce goodness. In high school and college, students should be reading, studying and discussing the moral classics.

I am suggesting that teachers must help children become acquainted with their moral heritage in literature, in religion and in philosophy. I am suggesting that virtue can be taught, and that effective moral education appeals to the emotions as well as to the mind. The best moral teaching inspires students by making them keenly aware that their own character is at stake.