Newsgroups: bit.listserv.edpolyan
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1992 12:00:04 EST
              <EDPOLYAN@ASUACAD.BITNET>
From:         JFCOVALE@SUVM.BITNET
Subject:      morality?

I am confused: we started talking about moral questions and we moved to
religion rather quickly.  I asked at one point if the propostion was that
only Christians could be moral; got no answer.  I'd like to try again,
answering my own question.

First of all, I take it to be a piece of empirical datum that there are
highly moral people of all faiths, as well as highly moral agnostics, as well
as highly moral atheists.  If someone has evidence that there are no moral
atheists, I would be willing to reconsider my assertion.

So what?  US law requires that we not teach one group's religious doctrines
in schools funded by a larger public (and the coincidental fact that the
society was once based in Christian beliefs, if true, might be interesting
to historians but hardly seems relevant to the matter at hand; our
Constitution has a Bill of Rights just to protect minorities, specifically
religious minorities).  So we cannot teach religion (though we can discuss
it, and teach about it).

But what does that have to do with moral questions?  Can we seriously
entertain the proposition that, because we cannot teach the Bible as revealed
truth in public schools that we can therefore not tell children "Thou shalt
not kill"?  Of course not.  What we need to do is recognize that moral prin-
ciples are socially grounded, even for believers: Germany was a Christian
country in the 30's, and as was pointed out on this list, so was Czarist
Russia.  Neither was a paragon of what we would recognize as morality.  Or
look at Northern Ireland today; lack of strong religious faith does not
appoear to be the major problem they face.  Foundational religious documents
like the Bible or the Koran tend to be ambiguous, which us right back to
social grounding, even if we want to base morality in a God, our knowledge of
that God is socially bound.

Of course, we teach our children moral principles; learning precepts of what it
means to be a good person is what children do placed around adults and each
other.  I do agree with those who hold that we are not doing a good job of it
right now, but the reason for that lack is not, I suggest, the fact that we can
not teach religion, but that we do not take moral questions seriously.  As
evidence of this, consider the agreement between those
who support and those who oppose the teaching of Christian Morlaity in schools:
both often argue that we cannot teach morality without religion.  In conse-
quence the former advocate teaching religion and the latter advocate abandoning
teaching morality (which is impossible to abandon; we can teach morality badly,
or we can teach wrong things about morality, but we cannot avoid teaching some-
thing about morality).  Both, I think, are wrong.  We can, and should, help
our students (and each other and ourselves) learn how to think clearly about
moral issues and the sort of society (and people) we wish to be (and become).

Sorry for the length of this.


****************************************************************
*                                                              *
*                    John F. Covaleskie                        *
*      Cultural Foundations of Education and Curriculum        *
*  259 Huntington Hall                                         *
*  Syracuse University                 Maloff Towers, #2       *
*  Syracuse, NY  13244                 Chittenango, NY  13037  *
*  315/443-3343                        315/687-5595            *
*                   JFCOVALE@SUVM.BITNET                       *
*                                                              *
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