Learn, and Gladly Would He Teach --

¶ … Learn, and Gladly Would He Teach -- Teaching Values to Students in the Classroom Today This quotation from The Canterbury Tales in many ways presents the image of the ideal teacher. (Chaucer, 1981, 17) According to the classical ideal, a teacher teaches his or her students, and learns from his or her students as well as a part of the learning process. However, the ideal role of the contemporary teacher in a public school setting, particularly in the lower grades, has become especially murky in regards to values education.

Individuals such as the former Secretary of Education and conservative educator William Bennett have suggested in texts such as his The Book of Virtues, that a true education is impossible without children becoming instilled with a society's core set of values. Bennett alleges, in contrast to educators such as Robert Banks' stress upon "Multicultural Education in the New Century," that core American values have become lost in recent years, due to liberal influences and questioning, and states that education must provide the values that the modern home lacks.

(Bennett, 1993) However, Bennett ignores the increasingly multicultural and diverse fabric of the American ideological condition. Even an America that embraces certain core values such as justice and fairness may express these values in different ways, in different cultural contexts.

Are students truly lacking in values, or simply lacking in the specific values held dear by Bennett? A teacher must acknowledge his or her students cultural and spiritual differences as well as embrace his or her children's 'sameness' and location within a common American mosaic or melting pot, depending on the metaphor one prefers to use.

Contrary to Bennett, one might suggest that given the diversity that exists in such a land as America, the best strategy to employ might be to resign morals education to the family and to focus on educating students in how to learn and how to think critically about the traditions they come from and their place in the America of today.

However, it is difficult to distill morals from aspects of children's educations in such a clinical fashion, especially when students are just coming to grips with who they are as moral entities. For instance, when a teacher reads the text Charlotte's Web to her students, students may be provoked to debate the ethics of Wilbur's fear of being eaten, or of Fern sparing the life of an apparently useless pig on a functional family farm.

Children from vegetarian or farming homes with have different perspectives, and perhaps the best a teacher can do is to give students the intellectual structures through which they might debate controversial issues, rather than take one position or another. However, even to stress mutual toleration is itself a position, and something neither the students nor their parents may agree with.

In his essay on multicultural education, although not written in direct response to Bennett but to conservative educators and philosophers in general, Robert Banks stated that all Americans must bring, in the form of a diverse, multicultural education, a kind of cultural citizenship of participation. (Banks, 2001) Through the common, educational process, individuals come together and share their differences as well as their similarities. It is this sharing, Banks suggests, that is truly the most American of values.

This common civic culture does indeed constitute a value that teachers must instill, but it is broad and general enough in its expansive reach that it is one that American society can and must accept. However, this sharing is not as easy as such assertions of diversity may seem, Banks acknowledges. As Banks also points out, unlike previous waves of immigration, however diverse, much of the recent wave of immigration is racially as well as geographically dispersed, particularly from Latin America and Asia.

Children who do not speak English as their first language pose additional challenges for educators, and the sharing of common civic values may be impeded by not-so simple linguistic differences.

What Banks does not state, but what teachers may find, is that, however well-meaning, teacher's assertion of English or non-culturally substantiated values of tolerance of difference, even of the idea that one can 'be all that one can be' in America, might run up against familial values of gender norms and expectations of children's obedience, rather than the value of children questioning old traditions and ideals.

Also, unstated by Banks, but still a factor that cannot be ignored in the discussion that even the popular assertion of the value of 'diversity' is itself a value. Toleration of difference is not as universally accepted a norm as one might like to believe.

For a teacher in a public education setting to include diversity toleration within his or her curriculum as a principle to be upheld, much less taught and discussed, is to make a claim, however implicit, about what it means to be an American in a positive sense, just as surely as it is for a teacher in a parochial school setting to discuss religion or abstinence in a theological educational class as one of the tenants of the church. However, any classroom is a community.

An American classroom in a public setting cannot be governed by.