Teaching Values to Students

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that the diversity that exists in America presents a problem in developing the best strategy to employ in educating students in how to learn and how to think critically about the traditions they come from and their place in the America of today. The author points out that an American classroom in a public setting cannot be governed by a particular set of rules that will please every ethnic group, every religious group, nor even the personal needs and desires of all the parents. The paper stresses that to foster tolerance is not only to foster a more American or a better system of values, but also to create a more open and wholesome learning environment that is necessary to the American democratic tradition.

From the Paper:

"However, it is difficult to distill morals from aspects of children's educations in such a clinical fashion, especially when students are just coming to grips with who they are as moral entities. For instance, when a teacher reads the text Charlotte's Web to her students, students may be provoked to debate the ethics of Wilbur's fear of being eaten, or of Fern sparing the life of an apparently useless pig on a functional family farm. Children from vegetarian or farming homes with have different perspectives, and perhaps the best a teacher can do is to give students the intellectual structures through which they might debate controversial issues, rather than take one position or another. However, even to stress mutual toleration is itself a position, and something neither the students nor their parents may agree with."

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