Ana Hirsch Adler (Ed.), 2006
México, Gernika
Volume 1: 188 Mexican pesos, US$14.60 (pbk), 558 pp., ISBN: 970‐637‐105‐2
Volume 2: 188 Mexican pesos, US$14.60 (pbk), 518 pp., ISBN: 970‐637‐106‐0
This work is a compilation of essays devoted to the study of values and moral development within educational settings in Spain and México. It consists of two volumes, each with a separate subject: Valores de los estudiantes universitarios y del profesorado [Values of college students and faculty] and Formación valoral y ciudadana [Education in values and citizenship]. The articles were written by scholars with expertise in both teaching and research from different disciplines. The two volumes are the outcome of an ambitious and multidisciplinary project which encompasses a variety of topics and perspectives such as those of psychology, sociology, philosophy, environmental studies, sciences, humanities and medicine.
It is clear that moral development and ethics are crucial concerns in contemporary education and cannot be disregarded by any profession. Thus, the main assumption of the editor is legitimate: in a context of increasing specialisation, it is necessary to pay attention to the contribution of every discipline to human development. As most of the essays in these volumes demonstrate, this is an important task for two reasons: first, all disciplines need to question how they harmonise their goals with ethical standards; and, second, they also need to be meaningful for both students and professionals. A discipline is not only a means of transformation; it is also a way by which people involved in its practice underscore their own ethical relation with the social world. The latter is an important aspect for consideration, since the democratisation and expansion of higher education has been possible at the cost of jeopardising commitment with knowledge and critical thinking.
In such a context, college education has, for most students, become a path to social mobility and economic security. There is no doubt that this is a fair and reasonable aspiration in a modern society. Yet the challenge for educators is to uphold in their students the ethics of their professions, that is, to show them how their career eventually becomes part of who they are and how they act in the world. The main virtue of this compilation is that most of the essays do understand that a threat to contemporary higher education is the absence of ethical relevance. This implies that many students do not develop a clear understanding of the profession they choose and, as a consequence, they are not able to address its purposes and its methods critically.
Nevertheless, the compilation lacks a theoretical frame and a critical explanation of its purposes. This absence seriously affects its coherence. Both volumes contain a variety of perspectives, a wide range of aspects and experiences, but this diversity requires a more convincing and structured introduction. The introduction to the book, by Ana Hirsch, is basically a description of the articles selected and does not offer the reader an outline of the main issues at stake nor does it provide the criteria upon which inclusion of contributions was made. For example, it would have been interesting to explain why the topics of the articles are restricted to Spain and México, an important detail that is omitted in the title of the work itself.
Another significant problem is the disparity in quality of the papers. In particular, in the first volume most of the articles are based on intuitive assumptions and serious inaccuracies. For example, the article ‘El papel de la ética en la formación del psicólogo’ [‘The role of ethics in the education of the psychologist’], by Ana María Rosado Castillo, argues that contemporary society is divided between the world of those who hold power and the world of daily life (pp. 250–251). Rosado attributes to Jürgen Habermas the expression ‘world of life’. But, in the first place, as we know, this term was coined by Edmund Husserl, not by Habermas; and, secondly, it is hard to understand how the ‘world of life’ could be divorced from the world of power. In another passage of the article (p. 254) Rosado argues that it is a moral imperative to recognise and respect the other [‘reconocer y respetar al “otro”’]. But it should be evident to anyone who has reflected on moral issues that ‘to respect the other’ eventually becomes a paradoxical rule. If this principle were always valid, most of the ethical dilemmas in modern life would be easily solved. Indeed, we can argue that one of the challenges of modern ethics is the difficulty of deciding between ‘respect for the other’ and our rejection of suffering. The conflict between these two moral principles frequently occurs in our times since the acceptance of cultural diversity constantly collides with other values, such as human rights. In another passage, Rosado describes México as a country in which a few people have obtained wealth by impoverishing the majority (p. 256). The author does not provide any evidence for this statement. An obvious question arises: is it acceptable to build moral judgements based on intuitive knowledge?
Indeed, that is what human beings do all the time. For this reason, popular knowledge is a very powerful force for moral assessment. We may think that present times are more violent than past times even if statistics show a different picture; we may feel that the economic gap has increased in recent decades even if we have no scientific proof to support that belief; we may even view the rise of new values—such as gay rights, feminism and atheism—as evidence of moral decadence. But, to be sure, the goal of critical thinking is to understand how people build their moral world and, eventually, to question such assumptions.
Some of the articles address the issues from an intuitive perspective. For example, in Imelda Rodriguez’s, ‘El trabajo de campo en la salud comunitaria. Educación y valores éticos’ [‘Fieldwork in community health. Education and ethical values’] there is no clear distinction between intuitive or popular morality and the critical understanding of ethics; this, of course, does not allow for the rigorous questioning of moral constructions. On the other hand, most of the articles are merely descriptive. They offer statistics and classifications regarding the moral priorities of both students and faculty, but they do not provide any hypotheses to explain them. For example, in ‘Valores y educación en España. Perfil de futuros educadores’ [‘Values and education in Spain. A portrait of future educators’] by Enrique Gervilla, we learn that young students in Spain do not value politics and religion, but the author does not offer a reason for this devaluation. The lack of a critical approach is, indeed, visible in the editor’s article co‐authored with Judith Pérez. In their essay ‘Rasgos de ser “un buen professional”’ [‘Features of a “good professional”’] Hirsch and Pérez describe the values of graduate students in the Universidad de Valencia and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Their research shows that there is a major difference in the moral choices made by both groups of students. But no explanations are offered. One of the conclusions is merely that this contrast should be a matter of further research (p. 91).
Another significant failure is the absence of any consideration of history in most of the papers, disregarding the fact that Spain and México have experienced important social changes in the last decades. How have these changes impacted education and moral values? There is no answer to this question.
Yet an interesting historical approach is to be found in Oscar Walker’s ‘Historia de la educación de valores en los niños mexicanos, 1823–1914’ [‘A history of education in values in Mexican children, 1823–1914’] a compelling essay that scrutinises school textbooks. Another interesting article is Pedro Ortega’s, ‘Educar para vivir’ [‘Education for life’], a consistently constructed essay.
Although the topic addressed is of great contemporary importance, Educación, valores y desarrollo moral [Education, values and moral development] does not offer deep and coherent insights. Certainly, it demonstrates that there is considerable research in this field but also that more critical perspectives are needed.
© 2009, Daniel Salas‐Díaz