The Morals We Want and the Morals We Have

The Cardinal Virtues: Temperance, Prudence, Fortitude, and Justice

A comment on my last post brought up some questions that I want to address publicly. Discussing the Archbishop of Canterbury’s comments to the House of Lords on the need for better moral education in British schools, one of my readers had this to say:

The ‘civic excellence’ [the Archbishop] wants is a collective virtue, not just an individual one. To achieve it, the British would not only have to educate their poor in values, they would have to look seriously at the values of the society, including those that tolerate economic deprivation and isolation.

I agree with that assessment, and I think it raises an interesting issue that another commenter on this blog has been trying to raise in another thread and which I have been a little slow to hear: namely, the dissonance between the morals we want to teach to kids and the morals reflected by the society as a whole.

Moral Education, the London Riots, and the Entanglement of Economics and Schooling

 My series on the fraught status of the teaching profession is still unfinished, but I wanted to put up a quick post on another topic. The Guardian’s political blog reported  yesterday, on comments by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, on the role that schools should take in the long-term response to the riots (and, inevitably in such discussions, the role that schools have taken in permitting the riots to occur).

Williams, speaking in the House of Lords, said:

There is nothing to romanticise and there is nothing to condone in the behaviour that has spread across our streets. This is indeed criminality – criminality pure and simple."

For Williams, the cure for further outbreaks could only be found in the long-term and in the reorientation of schools towards teaching virtues rather than skills:

Over the last two decades, our educational philosophy at every level has been more and more dominated by an instrumentalist model; less and less concerned with a building of virtue, character and citizenship — 'civic excellence' as we might say. And a good educational system in a healthy society is one that builds character, that builds virtue.

Character involves… a deepened sense of empathy with others, a deepened sense of our involvement together in a social project in which we all have to participate.

Are we prepared to think not only about discipline in classrooms, but also about the content and ethos of our educational institutions — asking can we once again build a society which takes seriously the task of educating citizens, not consumers, not cogs in an economic system, but citizens.

The nice thing about having a state church, I guess, is that there’s a voice for old fashioned ideas of morality and spiritual health in public debates. It says something about the state of a society, though, when the strongest public advocate for humanism is the church. I’m deeply sympathetic to Williams’s desire to view people in more than purely economic terms: citizenship is a far more worthy goal for education than consumerhood. Williams’s exclusive focus on character, however, ignores obvious economic factors that must play a major role in what’s going on in England right now. Viewed in the most cynical terms, his ideas of virtue and character appear to be tools for keeping the downtrodden from acting out: religion as the opiate of the masses.