Thomas Lickona of Educating for Character

Sum Up the book “Buku Educating for Character” of Thomas Lickona Read by Judha Sinulingga Why doesn’t School want to deal with values? It is related to the issue of pluralism. Pluralism produced paralysis; schools for the most part ended up trying to stay officially neutral on the subject of values. (p.3) But now, it comes a summons to the schools: Take up the role of moral teachers of our children. (p. 4) The most basic kinds of moral knowledge seem to be disappearing from our common culture. (p.5)  For example: the rule we used to use, like the Golden Rule, doesn’t speak something anymore. Smart and Good are the two great goals of education (p. 6) In the late 1920s, yale University Psychologists Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May propounded the “doctrine of specificity”: honest or dishonest behavior by a person is highly variable and determined by the spesific situation (such as the degree of risk involved), not by some consistent internal state that one could call “character”. (p.7-8). >>> this was weakening the support for traditional character education. Meanwhile, “logical positivism” introduced a fundamental distinction between “fact” and “value”. Moral or value statements were considered “emotive” – expressions of feeling rather than fact. (p.8). A value judgement was automatically dismissed as “just your personal opinion” rather than as a rational, objective claim about what’s good or bad, better or worse. The rise of personalism in 1960s and 1970s. (p.9) In 1960s, personalism celebrated the worth, dignity, and autonomy of the individual person, including the subjective self or inner life of the person. It emphasized rights more than responsibility, freedom more than commitment. Personalism spawned a new selfishness. Personalism gave birth to “values clarification”. (p. 10) This was a new approach to values in the schools. Done with the publication of Values and Teaching by Columbia University Professor Louis Raths in 1966. What did values clarification tell teachers to do? Not to try to teach values at all. Instead, the teacher’s job was to help students learn how to “clarify” their own values. Examples of Values Clarification:  Values Whip The teacher or student poses a question to the class and provides a few moments for the members to think about their answers. Then the teacher whips around the room calling upon students to give their answers.  Values Voting The teacher reads aloud, one by one, questions which begin, “How many of you …?” Then the class votes with a show of hands. In practice, teachers often weren’t sure what to do after students had clarified their values. (p. 10) At it best, values clarification raised some important value issues for students to think about and encouraged them to close the gap between a value

professed (e.g. “Pollution is bad”) and personal action (“What are you doing about it?”). At it worst, values clarification mixed up trivial (= not important or serious) questions with important ethical issues. Values clarification discussions made no distinction between what you might want to do and what you ought to do. There was no requirement to evaluate one’s values against a standard, no suggestion that some values might be better or worse than others. In the end, values clarification made the mistake of treating kids like grownups who only needed to clarify values that were already sound. It forgot that children, and a lot of adults who are still moral children, need a good deal of help in developing sound values in the first place. Other approaches we should consider: Lawrence Kohlberg’s “moral dilemma discussions”; and “rational decision-making” (was developed by moral philosophers) (p.12) – check out at chapters 12 and 13. These approaches rejected values clarification’s moral relativism and attempted to help students develop ethically valid ways of reasoning about moral issues. But their focus was still on “process” – thinking skills – rather than moral content. Teachers still didn’t see it as their role to teach or foster particular values. SUMMING UP THE CASE FOR VALUES EDUCATION (pp. 20 - .. ) Ten good reasons why schools should be making a clearheaded and wholehearted commitment to teaching moral values and developing good character: 1. There is a clear and urgent need. 2. Transmitting values is and always has been the work of civilization. Historically, three social institutions have shared the work of moral education: the home, the church, and the school. 3. The School’s role as moral educator becomes even more vital at a time when millions of children get little moral teaching from their parents and where value-centered influences such as church or temple are also absent from their lives. 4. There is common ethical ground even in our value-conflicted society. 5. Democracies have a special need for moral education, because democracy is government by the people themselves. 6. There is no such thing as value-free education. 7. The great questions facing both the individual person and the human race are moral questions. 8. There is broad-based, growing support for values education in the schools. 9. An unabashed commitment to moral education is essential if we are to attract and keep good teachers. 10.Values education is a doable job. The parents who are most effective, the research indicates, are “authoritative” – requiring obedience from their children but providing clear reasons for their expectations, so that children eventually internalize the moral rationale and act responsibly on their own. (p. 30) Love, like authority, is foundational (p.30) What’s the family role? (p.30) So, the role of the school can’t do so much without the role of the parents.