On Moral Pedagogy: A Response to the Contemporary Debate over Moral Education
by Vigen Guroian
Years ago in a series of essays entitled, simply enough, “Education, or the Mistake About the Child,” G. K. Chesterton entered into a debate that then was no less important than it is today. That debate is about what counts for moral education. In conclusion, I want to review what Chesterton had to say, thus bringing this conversation around full circle to the claim I made at the start—that stories, especially fairy tales, are invaluable resources for the moral education of children.
Modern educators have not been well disposed toward traditional fairy tales and their like. They write them off as too violent or not contemporary enough and so forth. They favor “practical” and “realistic” stories—stories about the lives children live today that easily lend themselves to distillation into useful themes, principles, and values. What some educators can’t find they create. From the pens of textbook writers on values, stories spill whose sole purpose is to clarify so-called moral problems or draw out reasons for making intelligent moral decisions. These stories are of the disposable kind, made to be discarded like empty cartons once the important “stuff” that was packed in them has been removed. Teaching reasoning skills, and not the virtues, is considered the means to a moral education; values-clarification, not character, is regarded as the goal.
These educators think that moral education is like teaching children reading or arithmetic. But that is not even quite accurate, because in the case of moral education children are supposed to be permitted to discover and clarify for themselves their own values and personal moral stance in the world.Yet we do not permit children to invent their own math: we teach them the multiplication tables; nor do we encourage children to make up their own personal alphabets: we teach them how to read. What might be the outcome of an education that did permit children to invent their own alphabets and math? No doubt the result would be confusion or chaos. Should we be surprised at the outcome of our recent efforts to help children clarify their own values, in fact, invent their own personal moralities?
In his own inimitable way, G. K. Chesterton exposed the flaw and deception in this modern approach to moral education. And he identified the dogmatizing in its antidogmatic rhetoric. In our day this modern approach is justified by prior commitments to certain psychological theories that elevate personal autonomy and self-realization above what we dismissively call “external authority.” The teacher must not introduce values into the classroom but instead work to “draw out” from children their own moral beliefs and through a process of clarification help them to better formulate their own values. But here is how Chesterton characterized this historic debate:
The real corruptions of moral education are an imperious moralizing, on the one hand, and the indulgence of spurious argument and undisciplined opinion, on the other. Nevertheless, a valid and effective moral education is bound to be coercive at times and even do a kind of violence, whether or not opinion is “drawn out” from the student or dogma is “put into” him.
Second, fairy tales show us that there is a difference between what is logically possible and what is morally felicitous, between what is rationally doable and what is morally permissible. In fairy tales the character of real law belongs to neither natural necessity nor rational determinism. Rather, real law is a comprehensible sign of a primal, unfathomable freedom and of a numinous reality and will. Real law, the realest law, can be obeyed or broken, and in either case for the very same reason— because the creature is both subject of and participant in this primal freedom. Fairy-tale heroes are called to be both free and responsible, thus virtuous and respectful of the moral law.
Fairy tales and modern fantasy stories project fantastic other worlds; but they also pay close attention to real moral “laws” of character and virtue. These laws ought not to be high-handedly shoved down the throats of children (or of anyone else). More accurately, they are norms of behavior that obtain in patterns of relation between agent, act, other, and world. Rational cognition is capable of grasping these norms. They become habit, however, only when they are lived, or, as in the case of fairy tales, experienced vicariously and imaginatively through the artful delineation of character and plot in story. Thus, while fairy tales are not a substitute for life experience, they have the great capacity to shape our moral constitution without the shortcomings of either rigidly dogmatic schooling or values-clarification education. By portraying wonderful and frightening worlds in which ugly beasts are transformed into princes and evil persons are turned to stones and good persons back to flesh, fairy tales remind us of moral truths whose ultimate claims to normativity and permanence we would not think of questioning. Love freely given is better than obedience that is coerced. Courage that rescues the innocent is noble, whereas cowardice that betrays others for self-gain or self-preservation is worthy only of disdain. Fairy tales say plainly that virtue and vice are opposites and not just a matter of degree. They show us that the virtues fit into character and complete our world in the same way that goodness naturally fills all things.
I realize that the views I have expressed defy what the advocates of late modernity or postmodernity insist on, that there is no such thing as a common human condition or a perennial literature that lends expression to the experience of that condition. I do not expect to persuade those who are entrenched in these positions to change their minds. I can only appeal to that certain “stuff” of human existence that the human imagination takes hold of and makes moral sense of in fairy tales. I mean such things as: the joy in the birth of a first child and the crippling sorrow of illness and deformity; childhood fears of getting lost matched by childhood desires to escape parental authority; the love that binds siblings together and the rivalry that tears them apart; the naming we do that gives identity and the naming we also do that confuses identity; the curses of dread malefactors and the blessings of welcome benefactors; the agony of unrequited love and the joy of love that is reciprocated.
I could go on. But the skeptics and critics will not be satisfied. The skeptics say there is nothing of commonality in such things, just individual lives and the particular conditions in which these lives flourish or fail. I am not convinced. Nothing of what these people say is proven, and as I grow older and become more traveled and my memory fills with so many different lives and human faces, the wisdom of fairy tales, the wisdom of a common human condition underlying and running through all of the diversity and difference, seems far more reasonable than moral and cultural relativism. One last thing in which I agree with Chesterton. Fairy tales lead us toward a belief in something that if it were not also so veiled in a mystery, common sense alone would affirm: if there is a story, there must surely also be a storyteller.
Source: Vigen Guroian, "Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 33 - 39.
by Vigen Guroian
Years ago in a series of essays entitled, simply enough, “Education, or the Mistake About the Child,” G. K. Chesterton entered into a debate that then was no less important than it is today. That debate is about what counts for moral education. In conclusion, I want to review what Chesterton had to say, thus bringing this conversation around full circle to the claim I made at the start—that stories, especially fairy tales, are invaluable resources for the moral education of children.
Modern educators have not been well disposed toward traditional fairy tales and their like. They write them off as too violent or not contemporary enough and so forth. They favor “practical” and “realistic” stories—stories about the lives children live today that easily lend themselves to distillation into useful themes, principles, and values. What some educators can’t find they create. From the pens of textbook writers on values, stories spill whose sole purpose is to clarify so-called moral problems or draw out reasons for making intelligent moral decisions. These stories are of the disposable kind, made to be discarded like empty cartons once the important “stuff” that was packed in them has been removed. Teaching reasoning skills, and not the virtues, is considered the means to a moral education; values-clarification, not character, is regarded as the goal.
These educators think that moral education is like teaching children reading or arithmetic. But that is not even quite accurate, because in the case of moral education children are supposed to be permitted to discover and clarify for themselves their own values and personal moral stance in the world.Yet we do not permit children to invent their own math: we teach them the multiplication tables; nor do we encourage children to make up their own personal alphabets: we teach them how to read. What might be the outcome of an education that did permit children to invent their own alphabets and math? No doubt the result would be confusion or chaos. Should we be surprised at the outcome of our recent efforts to help children clarify their own values, in fact, invent their own personal moralities?
In his own inimitable way, G. K. Chesterton exposed the flaw and deception in this modern approach to moral education. And he identified the dogmatizing in its antidogmatic rhetoric. In our day this modern approach is justified by prior commitments to certain psychological theories that elevate personal autonomy and self-realization above what we dismissively call “external authority.” The teacher must not introduce values into the classroom but instead work to “draw out” from children their own moral beliefs and through a process of clarification help them to better formulate their own values. But here is how Chesterton characterized this historic debate:
The important point here is only that you cannot anyhow get rid of authority in education....The educator drawing out is just as arbitrary and coercive as the instructor pouring in: for he draws out what he chooses. He decides what in the child shall be developed and what shall not be developed. He does not (I suppose) draw out the neglected faculty of forgery. He does not (so far, at least) lead out, with timid steps, a shy talent for torture. The only result of this pompous and precise distinction between the educator and the instructor is that the instructor pokes where he likes, and the educator pulls where he likes. (Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (NewYork: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1910) 252-253)In answer to the skeptics, Chesterton stated what he thought to be obvious. Whether we admit it or not, education is bound to indoctrinate and bound to coerce. Rabbi Mendal especially thanked and praised his first teacher because he faithfully inculcated in his young student the necessary rudiments of culture and passed on the essentials of a religious and moral way of life. The Oxford English Dictionary defines indoctrination as to imbue with learning or bring into a knowledge of something, such as a dogma. Chesterton argued that an authentic moral education is not possible unless something like this occurs. He spoke of the responsibility to affirm “the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.” (Chesterton, 254)
The real corruptions of moral education are an imperious moralizing, on the one hand, and the indulgence of spurious argument and undisciplined opinion, on the other. Nevertheless, a valid and effective moral education is bound to be coercive at times and even do a kind of violence, whether or not opinion is “drawn out” from the student or dogma is “put into” him.
Exactly the same intellectual violence is done to the creature who is poked and pulled. Now we must all accept the responsibility of this intellectual violence. Education is violent because it is creative. It is creative because it is human. It is reckless as playing on the fiddle; as dogmatic as drawing a picture; as brutal as building a house. In short, it is what all human action is; it is an interference with life and growth. (Chesterton, 253)But Chesterton was not an advocate of the blunt and heavy instrument; nor am I. This is one reason why fairy tales appealed to him so much. Fairy tales might not qualify as scientific hypotheses or theories, but they do resonate with the deepest qualities of humanness, freedom, and the moral imagination. At the same time, they deny the psychological and material determinism that lurks behind much of the modern talk of human liberation, and they discredit the hubris of reason and rationality that displaces faith and confidence in truth. Again, they show us a way of envisioning the world—a world in which everything that is need not have been and the real moral law connotes freedom and not necessity. The fairy-tale philosopher, wrote Chesterton, “is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it could have been scarlet...He is pleased that snow is white on the strictly reasonable ground that it might have been black. Every colour has in it a bold quality as of choice; the red of garden roses is not only decisive but dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood. He feels that something has been done,”(Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, Doubleday and Co., 1959) 59) that there is something willful in all of it, as if someone decided that things ought to be this way instead of another way and that these things are repeated either in order to improve them or simply because they are a source of delight in their repetition.The fairytale philosopher respects the deeper mystery of freedom in its transcendent source.
Second, fairy tales show us that there is a difference between what is logically possible and what is morally felicitous, between what is rationally doable and what is morally permissible. In fairy tales the character of real law belongs to neither natural necessity nor rational determinism. Rather, real law is a comprehensible sign of a primal, unfathomable freedom and of a numinous reality and will. Real law, the realest law, can be obeyed or broken, and in either case for the very same reason— because the creature is both subject of and participant in this primal freedom. Fairy-tale heroes are called to be both free and responsible, thus virtuous and respectful of the moral law.
Fairy tales and modern fantasy stories project fantastic other worlds; but they also pay close attention to real moral “laws” of character and virtue. These laws ought not to be high-handedly shoved down the throats of children (or of anyone else). More accurately, they are norms of behavior that obtain in patterns of relation between agent, act, other, and world. Rational cognition is capable of grasping these norms. They become habit, however, only when they are lived, or, as in the case of fairy tales, experienced vicariously and imaginatively through the artful delineation of character and plot in story. Thus, while fairy tales are not a substitute for life experience, they have the great capacity to shape our moral constitution without the shortcomings of either rigidly dogmatic schooling or values-clarification education. By portraying wonderful and frightening worlds in which ugly beasts are transformed into princes and evil persons are turned to stones and good persons back to flesh, fairy tales remind us of moral truths whose ultimate claims to normativity and permanence we would not think of questioning. Love freely given is better than obedience that is coerced. Courage that rescues the innocent is noble, whereas cowardice that betrays others for self-gain or self-preservation is worthy only of disdain. Fairy tales say plainly that virtue and vice are opposites and not just a matter of degree. They show us that the virtues fit into character and complete our world in the same way that goodness naturally fills all things.
I realize that the views I have expressed defy what the advocates of late modernity or postmodernity insist on, that there is no such thing as a common human condition or a perennial literature that lends expression to the experience of that condition. I do not expect to persuade those who are entrenched in these positions to change their minds. I can only appeal to that certain “stuff” of human existence that the human imagination takes hold of and makes moral sense of in fairy tales. I mean such things as: the joy in the birth of a first child and the crippling sorrow of illness and deformity; childhood fears of getting lost matched by childhood desires to escape parental authority; the love that binds siblings together and the rivalry that tears them apart; the naming we do that gives identity and the naming we also do that confuses identity; the curses of dread malefactors and the blessings of welcome benefactors; the agony of unrequited love and the joy of love that is reciprocated.
I could go on. But the skeptics and critics will not be satisfied. The skeptics say there is nothing of commonality in such things, just individual lives and the particular conditions in which these lives flourish or fail. I am not convinced. Nothing of what these people say is proven, and as I grow older and become more traveled and my memory fills with so many different lives and human faces, the wisdom of fairy tales, the wisdom of a common human condition underlying and running through all of the diversity and difference, seems far more reasonable than moral and cultural relativism. One last thing in which I agree with Chesterton. Fairy tales lead us toward a belief in something that if it were not also so veiled in a mystery, common sense alone would affirm: if there is a story, there must surely also be a storyteller.
Source: Vigen Guroian, "Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 33 - 39.
