Thoughts on an international curriculum in ethical education
In early April 2005, the IB held a seminar
at Babson College, near Boston. The Boston
seminar was titled “Toward a urriculum in
Ethical Education.” The question it asked
was, “How can we best strengthen and refi ne the way
ethics are taught across the curriculum in IB schools?”
In practical terms, what will our curriculum be? And
what should we study to prepare us to devise an
effective curriculum in Ethical Education? Here are
a few possibilities:
Psychology: The science of the human mind, including the developing human mind, is the first discipline we think of when we are looking for new ideas in education. It is a natural place to look for guidance in any project in educational innovation.
Biography and autobiography: These have been
always been used to teach the young how the good got
to be good and the wicked got to be wicked. But
biography and autobiography can teach us a great deal
more. They can, for example, teach us a great deal
about the machinery of self-deception. Jean Renoir said
that even the villains have their reasons and it is most
useful to understand how they arrived at their reasons.
Or they can teach us how decent people like Primo Levi
and Alexander Solzynitsin survived – or, like Anne Frank,
did not survive – man’s worst brutality.
Biology: How, in what ways and to what degree, are our
ethics rooted in our biology? What, if anything, in our
physical nature disposes us toward what we call
decency, even goodness? Why do some species seem
predisposed to act altruistically toward one another?
And where does man fit in?
Literature: Literature has historically been assumed
to have a strong moral infl uence, especially on the
young. Indeed, the value of a work of fi ction, poetry or
drama has often been thought to depend on the value
of the “moral,” or “message” it contained. (Dr Johnson
criticized Shakespeare for not drawing a clearer moral
from As You Like It). The question for us is, is that
assumption true? Does moral literature do anyone any
actual moral good?
Introspection and Retrospection: That is, the habit of looking backward and inward in order to discover what formed our own moral characters and our own code of ethics; the habit of using our own lives as text; self-study in its profoundest sense.
Theology: Of course. But, of course, whose?
Who is competent to presume to teach other people
how to live? Clearly, the answer to both questions is
“no-one.” But that answer will not do. The International
Baccalaureate’s students represent a unique cross
section of the world’s young. If we don’t try, who will?
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What should we study to prepare us to devise an effective curriculum in Ethical Education?
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