In Christina Hoff Sommers’ article “Teaching the Virtues”, she begins describing an article she wrote where she condemns the manner in which American colleges teach ethics. Sommers emphasizes that higher educational institutions neglect teaching students about private morality and are too focused on teaching social policy, which in turns “.... gives students the wrong ideas about ethics.” She argues that we must deal with both of them. Although her colleague disagrees and disapproves of Sommers sentiment and believes that Sommers wasted effort on pushing bourgeois morality and virtue is causing harm on enlightening students’ on their social sense of right and wrong, she concedes when she realized that her students had cheated on their take
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Sommers explains when she plays a macabre game with her first-year students, they often reply that acts that are considered to be morally wrong happening to one individual may not be bad for someone else. She points out how the student's capacity of achieving reasonable moral judgment is in trouble and there definitely is a moral drift. Sommers brings up how Harvard University students attending a history class that focuses on the Second World War and the rise of the Nazis did not believe that there was anyone to blame for the Holocaust and they had a “no-fault history” perception of the past. This possible rising generation of “moral stutters” questions what schools should be doing to help children become morally literate and “... mend the hole in the moral …show more content…
Additionally, teachers should be striving to do more than providing instruction on “... the leading of ethical theories and in developing dialectical skill in moral casuistry.” Sommers believes that beginning with Aristotle's work will engage students to think about themselves and what character traits they carry. While students who are in primary school are unable to study philosophy virtue, they are capable of understanding the “moral of the
Sommers explains when she plays a macabre game with her first-year students, they often reply that acts that are considered to be morally wrong happening to one individual may not be bad for someone else. She points out how the student's capacity of achieving reasonable moral judgment is in trouble and there definitely is a moral drift. Sommers brings up how Harvard University students attending a history class that focuses on the Second World War and the rise of the Nazis did not believe that there was anyone to blame for the Holocaust and they had a “no-fault history” perception of the past. This possible rising generation of “moral stutters” questions what schools should be doing to help children become morally literate and “... mend the hole in the moral …show more content…
Additionally, teachers should be striving to do more than providing instruction on “... the leading of ethical theories and in developing dialectical skill in moral casuistry.” Sommers believes that beginning with Aristotle's work will engage students to think about themselves and what character traits they carry. While students who are in primary school are unable to study philosophy virtue, they are capable of understanding the “moral of the