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Thomas Lickona of Educating For Character PDF

The document summarizes key ideas from the book "Educating for Character" by Thomas Lickona about the history and need for character education in schools. It discusses how pluralism led schools to remain neutral on values, but there is now a need for moral teaching. It describes different approaches that were tried, like values clarification in the 1960s, which aimed to help students clarify their own values but made no judgment on right and wrong. The document argues there are good reasons for schools to explicitly teach moral values and develop good character, including the clear need, their historical role, and that democracy requires morally educated citizens. It notes that effective moral education requires partnership between schools and parents.

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Dewi khumairoh
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1K views2 pages

Thomas Lickona of Educating For Character PDF

The document summarizes key ideas from the book "Educating for Character" by Thomas Lickona about the history and need for character education in schools. It discusses how pluralism led schools to remain neutral on values, but there is now a need for moral teaching. It describes different approaches that were tried, like values clarification in the 1960s, which aimed to help students clarify their own values but made no judgment on right and wrong. The document argues there are good reasons for schools to explicitly teach moral values and develop good character, including the clear need, their historical role, and that democracy requires morally educated citizens. It notes that effective moral education requires partnership between schools and parents.

Uploaded by

Dewi khumairoh
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Sum Up the book “Buku Educating for Character” of Thomas Lickona

Read by Judha Sinulingga

Why doesn’t School want to deal with values?


It is related to the issue of pluralism. Pluralism produced paralysis; schools for the
most part ended up trying to stay officially neutral on the subject of values. (p.3)
But now, it comes a summons to the schools: Take up the role of moral teachers of
our children. (p. 4)
The most basic kinds of moral knowledge seem to be disappearing from our
common culture. (p.5)  For example: the rule we used to use, like the Golden
Rule, doesn’t speak something anymore.

Smart and Good are the two great goals of education (p. 6)

In the late 1920s, yale University Psychologists Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May
propounded the “doctrine of specificity”: honest or dishonest behavior by a person
is highly variable and determined by the spesific situation (such as the degree of
risk involved), not by some consistent internal state that one could call “character”.
(p.7-8). >>> this was weakening the support for traditional character education.

Meanwhile, “logical positivism” introduced a fundamental distinction between “fact”


and “value”. Moral or value statements were considered “emotive” – expressions of
feeling rather than fact. (p.8). A value judgement was automatically dismissed as
“just your personal opinion” rather than as a rational, objective claim about what’s
good or bad, better or worse.

The rise of personalism in 1960s and 1970s. (p.9)


In 1960s, personalism celebrated the worth, dignity, and autonomy of the individual
person, including the subjective self or inner life of the person. It emphasized rights
more than responsibility, freedom more than commitment. Personalism spawned a
new selfishness.

Personalism gave birth to “values clarification”. (p. 10) This was a new approach to
values in the schools. Done with the publication of Values and Teaching by
Columbia University Professor Louis Raths in 1966. What did values clarification tell
teachers to do? Not to try to teach values at all. Instead, the teacher’s job was to
help students learn how to “clarify” their own values.
Examples of Values Clarification:
 Values Whip
The teacher or student poses a question to the class and provides a few
moments for the members to think about their answers. Then the teacher
whips around the room calling upon students to give their answers.
 Values Voting
The teacher reads aloud, one by one, questions which begin, “How many of
you …?” Then the class votes with a show of hands.
In practice, teachers often weren’t sure what to do after students had clarified their
values.

(p. 10) At it best, values clarification raised some important value issues for
students to think about and encouraged them to close the gap between a value
professed (e.g. “Pollution is bad”) and personal action (“What are you doing about
it?”).
At it worst, values clarification mixed up trivial (= not important or serious)
questions with important ethical issues.
Values clarification discussions made no distinction between what you might want
to do and what you ought to do. There was no requirement to evaluate one’s values
against a standard, no suggestion that some values might be better or worse than
others. In the end, values clarification made the mistake of treating kids like grown-
ups who only needed to clarify values that were already sound. It forgot that
children, and a lot of adults who are still moral children, need a good deal of help in
developing sound values in the first place.

Other approaches we should consider: Lawrence Kohlberg’s “moral dilemma


discussions”; and “rational decision-making” (was developed by moral philosophers)
(p.12) – check out at chapters 12 and 13. These approaches rejected values
clarification’s moral relativism and attempted to help students develop ethically
valid ways of reasoning about moral issues. But their focus was still on “process” –
thinking skills – rather than moral content. Teachers still didn’t see it as their role to
teach or foster particular values.

SUMMING UP THE CASE FOR VALUES EDUCATION (pp. 20 - .. )


Ten good reasons why schools should be making a clearheaded and wholehearted
commitment to teaching moral values and developing good character:
1. There is a clear and urgent need.
2. Transmitting values is and always has been the work of civilization.
Historically, three social institutions have shared the work of moral education:
the home, the church, and the school.
3. The School’s role as moral educator becomes even more vital at a time when
millions of children get little moral teaching from their parents and where
value-centered influences such as church or temple are also absent from
their lives.
4. There is common ethical ground even in our value-conflicted society.
5. Democracies have a special need for moral education, because democracy is
government by the people themselves.
6. There is no such thing as value-free education.
7. The great questions facing both the individual person and the human race
are moral questions.
8. There is broad-based, growing support for values education in the schools.
9. An unabashed commitment to moral education is essential if we are to attract
and keep good teachers.
10.Values education is a doable job.

The parents who are most effective, the research indicates, are “authoritative” –
requiring obedience from their children but providing clear reasons for their
expectations, so that children eventually internalize the moral rationale and act
responsibly on their own. (p. 30)
Love, like authority, is foundational (p.30)
What’s the family role? (p.30)
So, the role of the school can’t do so much without the role of the parents.

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