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Million (2005) noted, however, how moral education, which was integral to public schools in early America, eroded in the 1940 and 1950 decades because of educators prioritizing academics above an educational focus on morals teaching. Another educational shift occurred in the 1960s and 1970s placing the education of students in the moral domain to a historic low (Million, 2005).

John Dewey, this century’s educational spokesperson, wrote that, “the best and the deepest moral training is that which one gets by having to enter into proper relations with others,” and that “present educational systems, so far as they destroy or neglect this unity, render it difficult or impossible to get any regular, moral training” (Gilness, 2003, p. 243). Moral training, however, endured many philosophical onslaughts throughout the duration of the century due to the rise of a variety of philosophical forces that were all responsible in part to eroding the consensus supporting character education (Lickona, 1993). As presented in by Lickona (1993), the century witnessed the rise of Darwinism, logical positivism, personalism, pluralism, and both values clarification and moral reasoning. Darwinism projected the idea that morality and every-thing else was in flux.

One of the philosophical forces from Europe that reshaped the character education of the 1900s was logical positivism. The dichotomous view of logical positivism replaced the curriculum consensus of the previous century. Logical positivism “asserted a radical distinction between facts (which could be scientifically proven) and values (which positivism held were mere expressions of feeling, not objective truth)” (Lickona, 1993, p. 6). Positivism did not leave morality unaffected in that morality was now “relativized and privatized –made to seem a matter of personal ‘value judgment,’ not a subject for public debate and transmission through the schools” (Lickona, p. 6).

1950s

In the 1950s, “schools were expected to reflect the best values of their communities” (Smith, 1989, p. 34). Character education termed ‘character development’ in this decade taught a clear difference between right and wrong, told stories which taught hard work and loyalty, and presented clear lessons of American patriotism. In the late 1950s, “Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg began to overthrow the behaviorism dominating the academy of the time” (Hymowitz, 2003, ¶ 3). Changing the source of moral behavior, Hymowitz noted that “Kohlberg introduced a new theory of moral development that prized rational thinking and autonomous judgment as the source of moral behavior” (¶ 3). Consequently, for Kohlberg, teaching students good habits or established moral truths was only overly simplistic sermonizing that must be reformed into child-centered approaches to teaching character (Hymowitz). Kohlberg saw no need for textbooks with morally uplifting stories, and replaced them with values clarification and self-esteem lessons. Kohlberg’s vision of educating for character matched the anti-authoritarian attitudes so indicative of the sixties’ era, and was philosophically aligned with the civil libertarians, “who sought to remove all signs of religion from the schools and who championed the civil and personal rights of students over school authorities” (Hymowitz, ¶ 3).

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Source:  OpenStax, Character education: review, analysis, and relevance to educational leadership. OpenStax CNX. Sep 24, 2009 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11119/1.1
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