Every School Teaches Morals, the Only Question Is Which Ones

There is no such thing as a values-free school, and the proof hangs on the wall by the front office. It is the poster that says bullying is not tolerated, next to the one about honesty, next to the one about respect, all in a cheerful font. Somebody decided those words belonged on the wall. Somebody decided what they meant.

The claim that schools should stay out of morality is one of the most repeated and least examined ideas in American education. I want to examine it. I will state my terms, build the argument in numbered premises, give the opposing view its best statement, and then say which virtues a pluralist republic can and must teach.

The terms

By morals I mean beliefs and habits about right and wrong conduct: what we owe each other, what we owe ourselves and what kind of person is worth being. By virtue I mean a settled habit of acting well: honesty, courage, self-control, justice, diligence. By neutral I mean taking no position. The question is whether a school can be neutral about morals, and if it cannot, who decides.

I want to be clear about what this argument is not. It is not an argument that public schools should teach a religion. It is not an argument that teachers should lecture children about politics. It is an argument that the choice is not between teaching morals and not teaching them. The choice is between teaching them on purpose and teaching them by accident.

The argument in six premises

One. Every school has rules of conduct. No school can run without them. Students may not hit each other, steal each other's lunches, copy each other's homework or shout down the teacher.

Two. Every rule of conduct embodies a moral judgment. A rule against cheating says honesty matters more than a grade. A rule against hitting says a person's body is not yours to harm. A rule that students must wait their turn says fairness matters. These are not technical regulations. They are moral claims with a hall pass attached.

Three. Every school enforces its rules. Enforcement teaches. A child who sees cheating punished learns something about the world; a child who sees it ignored learns something else. The lesson is moral either way.

Four. Every school chooses what children read and discuss. A story chosen for a second grader presents someone as brave, or foolish, or kind. A history lesson presents a person as a hero or a villain. Selecting texts is selecting examples to admire and to avoid, and that is moral instruction by another name.

Five. A school that claims neutrality still teaches a morality. The claim "values belong only at home" is itself a value. It says private conviction is one thing and public conduct is another, and it makes a school a place where the second can be taught without the first. That is a philosophy, and an old and contestable one.

Six. Therefore the question is not whether, but which, and on what foundation. A school cannot opt out of moral formation. It can only do the job well or badly, openly or covertly, with accountability to parents or without it.

That is the argument. Each premise is difficult to deny, and the conclusion follows from them.

What the tradition said

The tradition did not think this was controversial. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, argued that moral virtue is acquired by habit: we become just by doing just things, and brave by doing brave things. It follows that a school, which shapes a child's habits for six hours a day, is a moral institution whether it admits it or not. Aristotle thought the purpose of education was to make people good citizens as well as clever ones, and he thought a city that ignored the matter would find out its mistake in its politics.

The American founding put the same thought into law. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 declared that "religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." Washington's Farewell Address of 1796 wrote that "religion and morality are indispensable supports" among the dispositions and habits that lead to political prosperity. John Adams wrote in 1798 to the Massachusetts militia that "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." These are not the words of men who thought moral education was a private hobby. They thought free government rested on it, because a people who cannot govern themselves must be governed by someone else.

Nineteenth-century America built its schools to match. The McGuffey Readers, which began appearing in 1836 and sold in the tens of millions, taught children to read through stories of honesty, kindness, industry and thrift. The point was not subtle, and it was not considered controversial. See The McGuffey Readers Taught Reading and Virtue to Millions of Americans for that story, and Religion, Morality and Knowledge, the Northwest Ordinance's School Clause for the ordinance's clause in full.

The detour and the return

In the middle of the twentieth century, a different idea gained ground. Values clarification, associated with the educators Louis Raths and Sidney Simon, whose book Values and Teaching appeared in 1966, held that teachers should not tell children what is right but should help them discover their own values. The aim was to avoid imposing. The effect, in many classrooms, was to teach that morality was a matter of personal preference, which is a strong moral claim in its own right and a poor preparation for a child who finds a wallet.

By the early 1990s a reaction had set in. The character education movement returned to the old premise that schools should deliberately form habits of virtue. Thomas Lickona's 1991 book Educating for Character gave it a scholarly voice. In 1992 a group of educators and ethicists gathered in Aspen, Colorado, and issued a statement on the "Six Pillars of Character," trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship, which the Character Counts coalition promoted from 1993. Whatever you think of the packaging, the movement notably found support across party lines. A virtue like honesty does not belong to a party.

The lesson of that cycle is that moral teaching does not disappear when schools stop doing it on purpose. It goes underground. It comes back as a set of unexamined assumptions that nobody voted on.

The steelman: values belong at home

The strongest opposing view is worth stating carefully, because it is held by thoughtful people, including many conservatives.

It runs like this. Parents are the first educators of their children. Moral formation, especially about religion, family, sexuality and the meaning of life, is the deepest of family matters. In a pluralist country, with parents of every faith and none, a public school cannot teach a thick set of values without taking a side, and the state that picks sides in moral questions is a state that has overreached. The Supreme Court said as much in West Virginia v. Barnette in 1943, in a sentence every citizen should know: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."

I agree with that sentence completely, and I believe it strengthens my argument rather than weakening it. Here is why.

The answer

First, the steelman gets one thing exactly right: parents are the primary educators, and the state is a junior partner. Where schools teach contested moral and religious questions, parents have a right to know and a right to object. That is why Mahmoud v. Taylor and the Storybooks That Brought Opt-Outs Back to School matters, and it is why transparency laws, covered in Curriculum Transparency Laws, What They Require and Why They Help Teachers, matter too.

Second, Barnette is about compelled confession of belief, not about the teaching of conduct. The Court in that case struck down a compulsory flag salute for schoolchildren. It did not say schools could not forbid cheating, require courtesy or teach honesty. The prohibition is on forcing a child to affirm a creed. It is not a prohibition on forming a child's habits.

Third, there is a large set of virtues that people of every faith, and of no faith, agree on. Honesty, courage, perseverance, self-control, fairness, kindness, responsibility, gratitude and respect for others are not Baptist or Catholic or Jewish or secular. A school can teach them without teaching a theology. A teacher does not need a catechism to say that cheating is wrong, and no parent of any faith will object.

Fourth, the "home only" view quietly assumes that every home does the job. Some do it superbly. Some do not, through no failing of the children. A school that says nothing about honesty, kindness or self-control leaves a child with a gap only the school can fill. It also leaves the child to learn the culture's lessons from screens, which are not neutral and are not accountable.

Fifth, neutrality is a hard stance to hold in practice. Each time a school says "we do not take a position on whether it is wrong to bully," it has taken a position. The only honest options are to teach virtue openly and answer for it, or to teach it covertly and hope nobody asks.

What a pluralist republic can and must teach

So what, specifically, should a public school teach? I would put it in three tiers.

Tier one: the shared virtues. Honesty, courage, self-control, diligence, fairness, kindness, gratitude, responsibility. These are the virtues of the old readers and of the 1990s movement. A school should teach them through the stories it assigns, through the heroes it studies, through how it enforces its rules and through the example of its adults. No creed is required.

Tier two: the civic virtues. The republic needs citizens who respect the rule of law, tell the truth in public, disagree without violence, honour the principle of equal rights in the Declaration, and take part in self-government. A school that teaches the Constitution, the story of the founding and the practice of reasoned debate is teaching these, and the republic is the primary beneficiary.

Tier three: contested questions, taught as contested. On matters where reasonable families differ, religion, the ultimate meaning of life, sexual ethics, partisan politics, the school should present the range of views fairly, avoid advocacy and respect the parent's role. When a school takes a side on a contested question, it ought to be prepared to explain itself and let parents opt out.

This three-tier approach is neither a fantasy nor a compromise. It describes what good schools already do, and it is what the Founders expected. It also gives parents a clear test: a school should be able to say, at each tier, what it teaches, why and on what authority.

What to ask your school

Parents who want to apply this can start with a handful of questions.

1. What virtues does the school say it teaches? Is there a list, and can you see it?
2. How does the school teach them: through assigned reading, through discipline, through service, through assemblies, through advisory periods?
3. When a student cheats, lies or bullies, what happens, and is it the same for every student?
4. What books and programmes are used for character or social-emotional instruction, and who wrote them? (See Social-Emotional Learning, What It Was Meant to Be and What It Became for how that field has drifted.)
5. When a lesson touches a contested moral question, how does the school handle parental notice and opt-out?
6. Do the adults model what the posters say? A school that preaches honesty while hiding its curriculum has a poster problem.

That last one is half a joke. It is also the best test of all, because children learn more from what adults do than from what the wall says. A school with a banner reading INTEGRITY and a locked filing cabinet reading DO NOT ASK has taught a lesson, and it is not the one on the banner.

The measure against the Founding

The Founders were realists about human nature. In Federalist No. 51, usually attributed to Madison, we read that "If men were angels, no government would be necessary," and in No. 55 the same author observed that republican government "presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form" of government, speaking of virtue and trust among the people. Because men are not angels, a republic depends on citizens who have been formed to restrain themselves. The state that tells its schools not to form them is cutting the branch it sits on.

Every school teaches morals. The only open questions are whether it does so on purpose, whether parents can see how, and whether the virtues it teaches are worth the name. A pluralist republic can answer yes to all three, and should.

The case in brief

1. Every school has rules, enforces them, and chooses what children read, so every school teaches morals, and a claim of neutrality is itself a moral position.
2. The tradition from Aristotle on habit to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Washington's Farewell Address and the McGuffey Readers treated moral formation as a basic task of education.
3. Values clarification in the 1960s tried to step back and left a vacuum, and the character education movement of the 1990s returned to the older view.
4. The best objection, that values belong at home, is right about the primacy of parents and about Barnette's ban on compelled belief, but it does not follow that schools should be silent about honesty, courage and fairness.
5. A pluralist republic can teach shared virtues and civic virtues openly, treat contested questions as contested and give parents the information and the opt-outs that respect their role.

What you can do: ask your principal for the school's written statement of the character traits it teaches, and read it at the next parent meeting.