Ethics, Morals and Values in Education By: Plyson Manyani Muzumara Many people in our country feel children today are growing up in an environment of moral distortion and decay. Children are exposed to evil influences from different dimensions within and outside of their communities. It is not uncommon to listen to the news and hear of corruption, thefts, child defilement, examination malpractices, gender-based violence and similar vices. We see a gradual erosion of values and morals in our society, but little effort is being spent to change it. Reflecting upon our culture’s history should give us the opportunity to prepare our teachers to assume the role of moral educators as well as the conveyers of subject content. This book focuses on the need to introduce and promote ethics, morals and values education in Zambia at both school and teacher education levels. It draws information generated by the author from schools, colleges of education and universities. Without a well-defined education policy in favour of promoting pupil and teacher ethics, morals and values in our learning institutions, efforts to promote the same in our education system are doomed to fail.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Teaching Ethics in Schools Teaching Ethics in Schools shows how an ethical framework forms a natural fit with recent educational trends that emphasise collaboration and inquiry-based learning.

In this book, eleven prominent scholars discuss the moral condition of contemporary society and the appropriate response from universities. Specifically, they address such issues as the extent to which university curriculums should treat ethics or human values; what universities and faculties should do to improve the moral thinking and responsibility of students; and what contributions universities can make in improving the morality of society in general.

Ethical education should help students become more sensitive to the perspectives and experiences of others. However, the field is dominated by the teaching of moral values as a subject-matter, or by the fostering of character traits in students, or by moral reasoning. This book proposes an alternative to these limited moralistic approaches. It places human relationships at the core of ethical education, in its understanding of both ethics and education. With contributions from renowned international scholars, this approach is laid out in three parts. Part One develops the underlying theory of ethics and education; Part Two focuses on the relevant pedagogical principles, and Part Three provides illustrations of emergent innovative ethical educational practices in worldwide schools. Against a backdrop of divisiveness and apathy, the innovative practices described in this book show how a new vision for ethical education might be centred around caring for students' well-being.

Children must be taught morality. They must be taught to recognise the authority of moral standards and to understand what makes them authoritative. But there’s a problem: the content and justification of morality are matters of reasonable disagreement among reasonable people. This makes it hard to see how educators can secure children’s commitment to moral standards without indoctrinating them. In A Theory of Moral Education, Michael Hand tackles this problem head on. He sets out to show that moral education can and should be fully rational. It is true that many moral standards and justificatory theories are controversial, and educators have an obligation to teach these nondirectively, with the aim of enabling children to form their own considered views. But reasonable moral disagreement does not go all the way down: some basic moral standards are robustly justified, and these should be taught directively, with the aim of bringing children to recognise and understand their authority. This is an original and important contribution to the philosophy of moral education, which lays a new theoretical foundation for the urgent practical task of teaching right from wrong.