The Challenge of Moral Education

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Philosophy Now
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The Challenge of Moral Education

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Wendy Turgeon on ways of getting children to think about values.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/84/The ... _Education
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HexHammer
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Re: The Challenge of Moral Education

Post by HexHammer »

Denmark is an excellent example of how kids are behaving bad, we have the term "curling kids" for children that are spoiled and in general are inept to survive society, thus getting traumatized by the slightest opposition, because their whole world views along with their parents are sickly self centeredness and at all cost avoid being sad, thus they spoil themselves as much as possible.

Our kids often embarrass themselves on vacations, trashing hotel rooms and acting puerile with no regards for others.
It's the humanists fault, they have taken all this "understanding", "protective" and "talk about it" too far, thus we getting kids that never really grow up. They have no respect for others and will act violently if opposed with reason, spitting people their faces, yell and scream.

Unfortunately too many parrots sits at the health care ministry to change the ways we live, they only indulge in farfetched ideals, instead of reality.
Even this year, I saw an old class mate, she wasted 15 mill crowners to rebuild the local library to facilitate a children playground ...IN THE *****ING LIBARY!!!!! ..so that the parents could read a book while keeping an eye on the children, complete madness!!! In any reasonable intelligent country they would abolish noise!!!! But now we have a vastly inferior smaller library that is filled with noise!
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Immanuel Can
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Re: The Challenge of Moral Education

Post by Immanuel Can »

Turgeon's making a very common error in thinking about Moral Education...the idea that it can be done in a completely non-indoctrinatory way, devoid of any reference to particular ideology. This idea has been tried and tried, in public education; and it has been found wanting every time. Its disasters are writ large across the face of modern educational history.

In one of her other papers she says, for example, "The challenge is to chart a course between the twin shoals of an egotistic individuality and a self-erasing communality."

Really? So what we've got to fear is selfishness on the one hand, or submersion by the collective on the other?

The point about egoism may be clear enough (though a good many types of philosophy would doubt even that: Randians, Egoist Pragmatists and what have been called here "Desirists" come to mind); but what Turgeon never doubts is that the moral road between that and some undefined type of collectivism contains the right moral coordinates. That the line she describes might not contain any correct moral precepts at all is one she does not appear to entertain.

Still, depending on the "collective" she might specify, we might have strong reasons to doubt. What is the "right" middle point between atomistic egoism and, say Marxist collectivism? Or is the "right" middle point somewhere between Islamic egoism and the ISIS ummah (collective)?

I would suggest anything we might call "moral" is on no line between either of those; and yet Turgeon never doubts that somewhere between unspecified egoism and unspecified community is moral balance. And all we have to do is strike that balance, leaving both ends of the ideological line loose and unspecified, open to all.

Ontology precedes ethics, wrote Joseph Kapuyil, and he was quite right. Turgeon claims to get the point that there are some problems to be worked out, but looks to "continuing dialogue" to solve them. But how do you "dialogue" with someone whose ontological commitments tell them you are an infidel or a pawn of some other sinister agency, whose defeat and destruction is not regrettable or that these outcomes are even morally required? How do you "dialogue" with someone who does not even agree about what moral objects are included in the moral universe? What standard will arbitrate such a discussion?

The ontology of the "egoist" or "community" determines where the line between them is drawn. Some communities have incorrect ontological suppositions (take the Raelians, the Thuggees, or the Jim Jones Cult for wild examples), and what the history of public education really teaches us is that no misguided liberal attempt to embrace all ideologies without regard for their ontological content will result in anything morally educative.
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