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Quote

Just a short piece ...

8 DECEMBER 2008

NO 1383

Morality

'Well you find us having a free activity period this morning, and in our free activity period each little individual chooses his or her own form of occupation. Get out from under the table there please Sydney. Yes, some of us paint and some of us do plasticine work or go to the sandtable over there. We feel that each little individual has got to get to the bottom of himself and learn what he wants of life. Who is making that buzzing noise? Well stop it please, Neville. Hazel dear, come away from the door and get something to do. I do love to see them all so happily occupied, each little one expressing his own personality . . . George, don't do that.'

Joyce Grenfell's wonderfully observed picture of a very English infant school teacher has caused a gentle smile to cross many a face over the years. It is painted with love and affection and is just the slightest bit tongue in cheek. What is sometimes missed on listening to the monologue is the very clear philosophy of education behind it, a philosophy laden with values. From the very first line it is implicit that free activity is a `good thing' and that finding out what one is and what one wishes to be are also `good things'. Many people may agree with such values, but they are at the very least debatable. Over 2,000 years ago Plato argued that the purpose of education is not to let children `do their own thing', nor to let them find out what they want from life, but to fit them for the role in society to which they are most suited. The two values of individual choice and social utility may coincide, but they need not. A child may well wish to do something and be totally unsuited to it. The idea of free activity periods, then, under a socially oriented educational philosophy, would be at best a waste of time, at worst an opportunity for the child to unlearn the role society is giving him or her.

In similar vein, when Sydney is told to get out from under the table, or Neville to stop making his buzzing noise, or George to stop doing whatever it is he is doing, the message is clear: certain behaviours are valued, others are discouraged. Education, then, is radically, unavoidably, impregnated with values. Every educationalist is inevitably involved, just like Joyce Grenfell, in choosing what is worthwhile for a generation to know and how a future generation might think and behave.

Are these, though, moral values? Why talk of `the morality of the school'? Are educational activities such as choosing what people might know and how they might think and behave essentially moral in nature? It depends, of course, on what you mean by `moral'. The meaning of terms like this and hence their application have been argued about since the beginnings of western philosophy, and a brief introduction to a book is not the place to get embroiled in this debate. However, a working definition of morality might be: `that area concerned with the ways in which people treat and affect other people'. The reader may have already begun to formulate objections to this definition. Since amendments to it will be made as the book progresses, it can suffice as a beginning.

MIKE BOTTERY

Bottery, Mike. (1990). Introduction. The Morality of the School: The theory and practice of values in education. London. Cassell Educational Ltd. p.1-2

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