A Failure of Values in Education
"The moral education that is today supposed to be the great
responsibility of the family cannot exist if it cannot present to the
imagination of the young a vision of a moral cosmos and of the rewards
and punishments for good and evil, sublime speeches that accompany and
interpret deeds, protagonists and antagonists in the drama of moral
choice, a sense of the stakes involved in such a choice, and the
despair that results when the world is ‘disenchanted’.
Otherwise, education becomes the vain attempt to give children
‘values’. Beyond the fact that parents do not know what they believe,
and surely do not have the self-confidence
to tell their children much more than that they want them to be happy
and fulfill whatever potential they may have, values are such pallid
things.†…teachers of writing in state universities…have
told me that they cannot teach writing to students who do not read, and
that it is practically impossible to get them to read, let alone like
it.†-Allan Bloom, 1987.