Teaching Morals and Ethics in Public Schools Essay -- Religion in Publ

Teaching Morals and Ethics in Public SchoolsThe point of whether or not indoctrinates should teach morality and moral philosophy is misleading, because morals and morals are two different things. Websters Dictionary defines ethics as a particular system of principles and rules concerning duty, whether true or false, and morals as motive based on ideas of right and wrong. As I take it, ethics implies a aim of prefatorial rules to abide by, whereas morals strictly set down what to deal, and what not to. I have no objections to schools teaching ethics, up to now I do not think schools, or any place for that matter, should be teaching children morals. In this country, we have an accepted system of ethics that children begin to learn in the lower levels of education. This system tells them such basic rules as treat others as you would treat yourself, share with others, etc. These rules assistance children to learn how to interact with other people. A child will not learn much if he only talks with other children on the dot like himself--he must be able to get along with his teachers, and his peers who may or may not be of the same background. A divided up system of basic ethics regarding living with other human beings is demand in any society, and in school. Along with this system of ethics, however, we have unnumberable systems of morals, and it is impossible to determine which is the right one to teach. Morals, like beliefs, are all told subjective, and they are, in my opinion, personal. The method of Authority, described by Charles Sanders Peirce in The Fixation of Belief, has no place in the formation of anyones morals, because no Authority has the ability to draw between right and wrong. The freedom to believe what one wishe... ...uld the public school system, and, inherently, the United States government, want to educate unethical people? I believe it is because the public schools exist to create not good people, exactly what Kozol refers t o as good citizens defeated, unprovacative people that will fill the indispensable jobs, pay the necessary taxes, and perform all the other duties put forth to them by the national government, such as voting, and jury duty. The fact that this process has not changed since Kozol wrote The darkness Is Dark... is a testament to how well the public schools carry out their task. The ancestor to the problem of education we face today lies in a whirling of ethical teaching within the public schools, not in moralize children with a certain dogma. A persons morals, and beliefs are things that should not be taught, but developed over the course of their life.