Teaching Values in Diverse American Classrooms Today

Introduction: The Ideal Teacher and the Values Question

The quotation "gladly would he learn, and gladly teach" from The Canterbury Tales presents, in many ways, the image of the ideal teacher (Chaucer, 1981, p. 17). According to the classical ideal, a teacher both teaches and learns from his or her students as an integral part of the educational process. However, the role of the contemporary teacher in a public school setting — particularly in the lower grades — has become especially murky with regard to values education.

Individuals such as former Secretary of Education and conservative educator William Bennett have suggested, in texts such as The Book of Virtues, that a true education is impossible without children being instilled with a society's core set of values. Bennett alleges, in contrast to educators such as Robert Banks and his stress upon "Multicultural Education in the New Century," that core American values have become lost in recent years due to liberal influences and questioning. He further argues that education must provide the values that the modern home lacks (Bennett, 1993).

Bennett's Case for a Core Values Curriculum

Bennett's position rests on the premise that a coherent national identity requires a shared moral foundation, and that schools are uniquely positioned — perhaps obligated — to transmit that foundation to the young. Without explicit instruction in virtue, Bennett contends, students are left morally adrift in a culture that no longer reliably transmits its own traditions.

Yet 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 those values in different ways and in different cultural contexts. The question worth asking is whether students are truly lacking in values, or simply lacking in the specific values held dear by Bennett himself.

The Limits of a Universal Moral Framework

A teacher must acknowledge his or her students' cultural and spiritual differences while also embracing their shared location within a common American mosaic — or melting pot, depending on the metaphor one prefers. Contrary to Bennett, one might argue that, given the diversity that exists in a country like America, the best strategy would be to leave moral education to the family and to focus instead on teaching students how to learn and how to think critically about the traditions they come from and their place in contemporary America.

It is, however, difficult to distill morals from other aspects of children's education in such a clinical fashion, especially when students are just beginning to grapple with who they are as moral entities. For instance, when a teacher reads Charlotte's Web aloud to her class, students may be prompted to debate the ethics of Wilbur's fear of being slaughtered, or of Fern's decision to spare the life of an apparently useless pig on a working family farm. Children from vegetarian homes and children from farming backgrounds will bring very different perspectives to that debate. Perhaps the best a teacher can do is equip students with the intellectual structures needed to discuss controversial issues, rather than advocate for one position or another. Even so, stressing mutual toleration is itself a position — and one that neither students nor their parents may agree with.