Can Ethics Be Taught?

March 23, 2006

It has become the most popular movement in education in decades. School boards across Canada have adopted it, and the Ontario government is working on a plan to introduce it in schools throughout the province — but is character education working or is it just another buzzword?

“The ultimate aim of character education is the development of prosocial capacities and tendencies in kids,” says Marvin Berkowitz, a professor of character education at the University of Missouri, the only endowed professorship in character education in the United States.

When it first became popular in the mid-1990s, character education was criticized by some parents who objected to schools imposing their view of morality on children.

Today, such resistance largely no longer exists, and school boards and governments across Canada have seized on character education. Ontario’s McGuinty government is currently working on a plan to introduce the programs in every school across the province.

Yet, while character education has been trumpeted as a way to combat bullying and foster a spirit of social responsibility in schools across North America, critics say the program is often all talk and no substance.

“A lot of character education programs exist that don’t really do anything,” says Clark Power, a developmental psychologist at Indiana’s University of Notre Dame. “They’ll ask kids if they’re virtuous or if they value certain virtues and, of course, they’re going to say yes — but you need to do more than that to develop character in kids.”

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A project currently underway at the University of Notre Dame’s moral psychology lab confirms what pioneering developmental psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg suspected decades ago: the way people make moral judgments is remarkably similar, regardless of religious or cultural factors.

Using Kohlberg’s so-called moral judgment interview — a means of eliciting children’s reasoning about moral issues — Notre Dame psychologist Clark Power and his team has sat down with close to 100 students in Grades 5 through 8 over the past two years to get their take on right and wrong. “There’s a lot that we have in common,” says Power of the results so far. “People worry about cultural and religious differences, but we’ve found there’s an amazing amount of similarity in the way we make judgments and in our sense of fairness.”

Still, says Power, a person’s ethical beliefs are often tied to their degree of exposure to ways of thinking different from their own.

“Making moral progress depends a lot on who you associate with and what kinds of interactions you have,” says Power. “What’s going to change you if your world is simple and homogenous?”