5.3.8 Teaching Values

Another really big issue, as far as I'm concerned, is the issue of smart versus good. If you peel everything away, there are only two purposes for education. Make kids smart and make them good. Now lets look at this, if you make kids smart without making them good, you've created a menace to society. And yet in schools today we spend a lot more
time making kids smart and we don't spend very much time at all helping them to be good. I think that's wrong. I think that's a real confusion of goals. If I can make a kid good without making him smart at least he's not a menace. But the ideal of education, the purpose of education is to make a kid smart and good. And I think we should be
equally concerned about making kids smart and good. Making them smart by itself is dangerous. How many schools and teachers really accept the responsibility to help kids be good?

It seems to me that the reason they aren't taught to be good is because parents send their kids off to school for education only and not to be a guide in their life. Historically, many people thought that the family was where kids learned to be good and the school is where they learned to be smart. I happen to think that's foolish because everything we do in life either reinforces the way we are behaving or helps us change the way we're behaving. Kids spend an awful lot of time in school and whether the school realizes it or not is teaching values. We can either do so intentionally or unintentionally. Everything from learning how to stand in line or take your turn or principals of honesty or cheating. You can never isolate schools from values. The place where it gets confusing is that some of the values are controversial. We need to understand that about 2/3 of the values are absolutely not controversial. What has happened is that the controversial values have received so much attention that the schools have given up trying to teach the non-controversial values because they've gotten all caught up in the controversy over the values which are controversial. First of all we want to desegregate it and realize that most of the values around are not controversial at all. That's a different problem than the problem of how do you deal with the controversial values because I think you
have to deal with those as well. As I mentioned earlier, it's a matter of balance, certainly we don't want to sneak up on parents. But on the other hand neither can we allow a minority of parents to tyrannize the majority. If a parent has a minority point of view, that minority point of view will either be within the society, in which case it should be
tolerated and supported by the school in the sense of supporting the right of the parent to transmit that value, or its outside of the values of society, in which case the school has no obligation to support the parental point of view at all. In fact, the parent has to be shaped up in terms of recognizing that this value is simply outside the values of society. It isn't a simple situation at all. Nonetheless, I go back to my belief that the school has a definite responsibility for both smart and good. Question or comment.

Schools are kind of in a no win position on this because almost whatever they do, its wrong. Some schools take different positions than other schools. This is both good and bad. Part of that is good in the sense of being the tradition of local control and part of that is bad because its inconsistent and confusing both to kids and parents. The
very same thing can be good or bad and, again, contributes to the confusion which comes as much from the confusion of the society as anything else. Society is confused about these issues in terms of what position to take. I know that I find myself with all sorts of strange bedfellows. On the one hand I'm a strong advocate of prayer in the
schools which aligns me with one kind of group and on the other hand I'm a strong supporter of sex education in the schools which aligns me with another group. So I wind up being lonesome on about everything. I've alienated about everybody somewhere along the line. But I go back in terms of a matter of principal, to me. I think that the school has the obligation to teach kids to be good as well as smart. And I think that the school has the obligation not to sneak up on parents and let parents know exactly the values that they're going to be teaching. And I also think that schools have an obligation to teach value positions that will be offensive to different groups of parents at different stages and that the school should accept some responsibility for helping the parents and those kids deal with that divergence. In other words, its not just tough on you kid, but if a parent feels strongly about prayer, do you provide a way to allow the child not to participate in that prayer in a way that is not embarrassing to the child and yet not intrusive into the program. That would be my objective, to try and honor the parents' point of view without allowing parents with a minority view, to terrorize the majority program.

Why can we never isolate schools from values?

As a new literature teacher that was placed in one of the toughest inner-city high schools of Chicago, Mrs. Baker is not at all aware of how to handle the difficulties that her students face outside of her classroom that they bring with them to school each day. How can she use her value system along with those of the school board to help her students overcome their problems outside of the classroom and gain a more positive academic and social outlook?