Moral Abdication in British Schools
Moral Abdication in British Schools -- A Sign of the Times
Posted: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 at 3:56 am ET
A newly-proposed national curriculum for British schools means that the schools will no longer attempt to teach the difference between right and wrong. As The Times [London] reports:
Schools would no longer be required to teach children the difference between right and wrong under plans to revise the core aims of the National Curriculum.
Instead, under a new wording that reflects a world of relative rather than absolute values, teachers would be asked to encourage pupils to develop "secure values and beliefs".
In addition, a responsibility to teach Britain's cultural heritage is also to be removed in favor of this: "The school curriculum should contribute to the development of pupils' sense of identity through knowledge and understanding of the spiritual, moral, social and cultural heritages of Britain's diverse society."
Over twenty years ago, in The Closing of the American Mind the late Allan Bloom observed this: "There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative." The kind of educational vision represented by this proposed curriculum, and similar atrocities in the United States, produces just the kind of student Professor Bloom encountered in his teaching at the University of Chicago.
An education without reference to right and wrong is a total abdication to moral relativism and a denial of the very aim of education -- to produce a person of character who not only knows a great deal, but is also capable of moral discernment.
A nation that adopts such a worldview is in its death throes, having lost confidence in itself and its founding truths. To cite Bloom again: 'We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part."
© All rights reserved, www.AlbertMohler.com
Posted: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 at 3:56 am ET
A newly-proposed national curriculum for British schools means that the schools will no longer attempt to teach the difference between right and wrong. As The Times [London] reports:
Schools would no longer be required to teach children the difference between right and wrong under plans to revise the core aims of the National Curriculum.
Instead, under a new wording that reflects a world of relative rather than absolute values, teachers would be asked to encourage pupils to develop "secure values and beliefs".
In addition, a responsibility to teach Britain's cultural heritage is also to be removed in favor of this: "The school curriculum should contribute to the development of pupils' sense of identity through knowledge and understanding of the spiritual, moral, social and cultural heritages of Britain's diverse society."
Over twenty years ago, in The Closing of the American Mind the late Allan Bloom observed this: "There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative." The kind of educational vision represented by this proposed curriculum, and similar atrocities in the United States, produces just the kind of student Professor Bloom encountered in his teaching at the University of Chicago.
An education without reference to right and wrong is a total abdication to moral relativism and a denial of the very aim of education -- to produce a person of character who not only knows a great deal, but is also capable of moral discernment.
A nation that adopts such a worldview is in its death throes, having lost confidence in itself and its founding truths. To cite Bloom again: 'We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part."
© All rights reserved, www.AlbertMohler.com
