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The referral was not unlike hundreds of others I have received over my short career in public education—parents divorced for three years, violence in the home, suspicion of drug and alcohol use, failing school grades . . . the list goes on. For the past three weeks, Troy has attended an anger management group I co-facilitate with the school guidance counsellor, and we seem to be barely scratching the surface of his needs. I can't put my finger on it, but I have a real uneasiness with the way the other facilitator allows the students' thoughts and feelings to be expressed without any resolution or clarification. The counsellor assures me that Troy and the other seven teens will come to their own conclusions if they are just allowed to share their feelings in a /"safe" place, free from judgement and indoctrination.
Something in my stomach turns. Every week, I leave the school wondering if Troy has come any closer to making sense of his world after an hour of listening to himself and others cry out for someone to tell them where the line is, what's black and what's white, what's right and what's wrong. I'm more frustrated with myself than with anyone else. I slowly realize that I, like my friend Troy, am the product of the so-called "decision-making model of moral education" that began about the time I entered grade 1. This philosophy involves no teaching of values. Rather, it encourages students to clarify their own values through an emphasis on feelings, personal growth and totally non-judgemental attitudes. In his book, Why Johnny Can't Tell Right From Wrong, William Kilpatrick states that "in these curricula a lot of time and energy are spent exchanging opinions and exploring feelings, but practically no time is spent providing moral guidance or firm character."
All of a sudden, I am able to identify the cause of the twinge in my stomach. Right here in the 1990s, the weakness of our attempts at providing moral education is even more blatant than when it all began in the mid-1960s. Very subtly, we have allowed our schools to teach our children that we can be good people without any training in goodness.
Somehow, my parents (and probably my church) dug their heels in. They showed me where the line was between right and wrong, in the face of an educational system that was just starting to feed me the line that a value is anything that I like, love or want to do. I have only four more weeks to show Troy where that line is. Some of my colleagues would say that I don't have the right to impose my values on an innocent child, but hopefully I'll have the guts to stand up and say they're wrong.
Kelly Schwartz is the director of the youth leadership program at Canadian Nazarene College in Calgary. When this article was written in 1995, he was also working as a psychologist with the Calgary Catholic Board of Education. This article was first published in Insight, a publication of Calgary Youth for Christ.
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