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Why Teach Moral Development

I will first say that I do not teach philosophy or ethics as defined by philosophers. I work with students in the interdisciplinary area of educational studies. It is a major at Colgate and, while we offer a very small number of students certification in elementary or secondary education, our faculty also look at education with a broad view and our majors study education from foundational areas of psychology, philosophy, history, policy, and cultural studies. It is in this department that I offer a course titled Moral Development and Education, and it is in this context that I respond to the question guiding this forum. In the introduction to this forum, Bernard Prusak asks, Is virtue teachable? He thinks about that and compares learning virtue to learning language. " [N]ot only do language and virtue not develop simply naturally; they are also not picked up first and foremost through formal instruction, which is to say in the classroom. Instead, they develop through what we, in English, somewhat infelicitously call habit – repeated doings, in give-and-take with others of our kind, that call on and give shape to our natural powers and interest. " He then goes on to ask: " Crudely put, what good are lectures and what good is Aristotle's book as it has come down to us? " (Prusak 2013, 16). That is a useful question, but I want to distinguish two aspects of classroom instruction and argue that reasoning about moral issues can be taught in a classroom, although perhaps not in lectures. The two aspects of a classroom that I want to distinguish are curriculum and pedagogy. Curriculum is the material that we teach in our classrooms. If it is delivered to students in a lecture format, it cannot teach virtue or moral reasoning. But the way we teach – our pedagogy – can provide instruction in this area. Before discussing why this distinction is important, I want to be clear on what I mean by " moral. " We must understand what is meant by the word in order to decide whether teaching it at the college level is worth doing; it does not have only one meaning. I often ask my students to define moral, and they provide multiple definitions. While the answers are varied, they do cluster around certain themes. Students say that morality consists of rules that help us know how to …