February 15, 2004
THE TRULY IMPORTANT WALL OF SEPARATION (via Mike Daley):
Particularity: The Root of Character: a review of The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good or Evil By James Davison Hunter (Robert Heineman, Texas Education Review)
In this closely reasoned and remarkably readable book, James
Davison Hunter, William R. Kenan Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, describes the dilemma that grips moral education in America's schools. From Hunter's perspective there is little of serious ethical worth left in education's approach to instilling
morality in the nation's youth. In their efforts to be inclusive, educators have weakened the very particularity that provides the deep grounding essential to moral belief and judgment.Hunter begins with a "Post-Mortem," in which he lays out his basic themes. He contends that the beliefs essential to a concept of character have been seriously undermined, perhaps beyond recovery.
Character for Hunter is the unquestioning acceptance of virtues embedded in the institutions and habits of a society. Values may be true, but their prominence in discussion and debate deprives them of the unconscious allegiance that the components of character possess. Individual moral choices are not the source of the difficulty. Much more powerful historical and sociological forces have removed character as an influential moral force in the American nation.
Following his "post-mortem," Hunter uses an historical, sociological perspective to demonstrate that character has mattered throughout Western history. He contends that the fundamental truths that have constituted this concept have resulted from particularity in society. However, today, the search for inclusiveness by American educators has marginalized the importance of social differences. Those striving to implement moral education have used essentially three broad strategies to try to recoup ethical standards in society. Hunter identifies these as the psychological, which emphasizes shared method; the neoclassical, which stresses shared virtues; and the communitarian, which focuses on shared experiences.
These strategies appear throughout the book, and, although Hunter assigns some influence to the latter two, in his mind the psychological regime dominates the modern American educational approach toward morality. Moving from a time in which morality was "conviction of truth made sacred," the concept of character has been replaced by that of personality. It is this latter notion that all three strategies have now made, in some cases unwittingly, the central focus of morality. Hunter is especially emphatic that his analysis of moral education is about society generally. The educational practices and assumptions of America's school systems "mirror" those of society as a whole.
In chapters three (coauthored with James L. Nolan, Jr.) and four, Hunter traces the history of moral education in America. Early in the nation's history education was heavily theological and, specifically, Calvinist in orientation. At this time it was understood that church and state would work together in building a common Christian civilization. But as America moved into the latter nineteenth century, industrial and material values began to supplant the claims of the churches. The increasing religious diversity of American society encouraged movement away from theologically based morality toward a more "inclusive," and secular, civic idealism. By the end of the nineteenth century, 41 of 46 states specifically prohibited sectarian influence in their public schools.
The Progressive movement completed this trend. The inculcation of traditional values was replaced by an emphasis on method and personal effectiveness. The most serious damage was inflicted by John Dewey, whose impact on American education was, and remains, tremendous. Dewey had no use for the substantive values of revealed religion in education, and emphasized
instead the importance of process in learning. Hunter concludes that as the Progressive era drew to a close the concept of character was no longer creditable in education. By the 1970s the Progressive reliance on method had evolved into the "values clarification" movement, which avoided substantive values in favor of individual sensitivity to those feelings engendered in each particular situation. Morality became "situation specific."
Summarizing the chronology of moral education, Hunter suggests a dialectical movement in which the proponents of moral education have continually sought inclusiveness in reaction to increasing diversity. Thus, the Calvinists were followed by the more inclusive Evangelical Christians,
who were in turn succeeded by the Progressives. Today the psychologists hold claim to the imprimatur of inclusiveness. At each stage, diversity has been met with an increasingly abstract level of moral inclusiveness which in turn has removed character and its attendant virtues further from a grounding in the institutions and habits of particular communities.
Diversity and morality are antithetical concepts.
As James Q. Wilson wrote to Daniel Patrick Moyniohan:
[E]recting walls that separate "us" from "them" is a necessary correlate of morality since it defines the scope within which sympathy, fairness, and duty operate...The great achievement of Western culture since the Enlightenment is to make many of us peer over the wall and grant some respect to people outside it; the great failure of Western Culture is to deny that walls are inevitable or important.
Or, as Alfred North Whitehead put it:
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
MORE:
-ESSAY: A Living Lesson: An Essay by James Davison Hunter (NPR, 9/30/01)
-ESSAY: When Psychotherapy Replaces Religion (James Davison Hunter, Spring 2000, National Interest)