Making sense of approaches to moral education

Abstract

This paper presents a metatheoretical analysis of ‘approaches’ to moral education and how we make sense of them. Such approaches are commonly analyzed with simple, binary category schemes, for example, being categorized as either ‘indirect’ or ‘direct’ in nature. This kind of minimal framework clearly oversimplifies the complex nature of any approach. Despite this, the moral education literature continues to suffer from a lack of appropriately complex, systematic, and robust analytic frameworks to help us understand the complexities of moral education and its study. Our analysis elaborates some basic challenges in making sense of approaches to moral education. We then develop a framework that can meet these challenges, and assist students, scholars and researchers in developing a critical understanding of the complex underpinnings of any approach to moral education, and the analyses of those approaches found in the moral education literature.

Notes

We employ a broad meaning of ‘moral’, which pertains to a domain that provides guidance in our deliberations, actions, judgements, character, ways of living, and our responses to and relationships with others (following most works in moral education in ignoring the distinction between morality and ethics).

One concern with Chazan's work is that despite actually referring to contingent factors in his discussion, he leaves no place for them in his formal framework. Further, we think the framework that follows allows for any inquirer to comprehensively trace the determinants of or influences on various approaches, given that they do not depend on particular issues or topics (like ‘action’, ‘reason’ and ‘principles’) as Chazan's framework does.

This initial category scheme is similar to Heslep's discussion of the ‘goal’, ‘content’ and ‘pedagogy’ of programs of moral education, but are elaborated somewhat differently (see Heslep, 1995).

The concept of ‘direction of fit’ is sometimes helpful here, since these two kinds of theories have opposite directions of fit. That is, metaethical theories aim to fit our ideas and beliefs about morality to the actual nature of our moral lives, and thus we might say that they are ‘world corrected’. Normative theories aim to fit our lives to what they tell us, and can be called ‘world correcting’ (Darwall, 1998).

Of course this leaves plenty of room for debate on whether and in what sense our moral discourse and practice actually are objective, universal, and so on.