Among the many sins of decision-makers at
the Minneapolis Public Schools is the failure to be adults.
Adults accept responsibility for guiding
youth academically and morally.
In the Introduction to this series as you
scroll on down the blog, I summarize what is necessary to overhaul curriculum
for knowledge intensity, consonant with the core message in these articles that
failure to create a knowledgeable citizenry establishes the dangerous context for
the murder of George Floyd. The key
message of this article is that locally centralized schools systems have also
failed in the responsibility to articulate moral values.
Families serve as the first conveyor of
moral values to children. Freud called
the part of the personality that carries these initially parental moral
messages the “superego.” At best, the
superego instills transcendent empathy and altruistic inclination on the part
of the evolving child, with the possibility that parental instruction can also
be powerfully supplemented by friends and other people and situations in the
moral environment. And behaviorist B.
F. Skinner would say that ultimately the ever-developing person is only as
morally good as her or his environment induces the person to be.
The school experience provides the other,
in many ways more important, conveyor of values to students. Moral values will be transmitted either
tacitly or explicitly. As it is, conveyance
tends to be tacit, since decision-makers in locally centralized school systems
such as the Minneapolis Public Schools fail to take a forceful stand either as
to curriculum or moral values. The
putatively “progressive” approach to education that originated at Teachers College
of Columbia University in the 1920s and insidiously took hold from the 1970s
forward to this very year of 2020 exalted the child’s own ability to create the
education appropriate to her or him upon activation of personal interest.
All of the key supplemental intellectual
detritus spewed forth by those campus lightweights given the undeserved
appellation of education “professor” followed from this view of the child and
of education. By the 1990s, the
self-esteem movement produced classroom presences who did very little teaching
but often showered children of highly variable academic accomplishment with
praise inappropriate to school performance or classroom behavior. Thus, decision-makers and teachers at MPS and
other locally centralized systems failed dually:
(Non-)educators in preK-12 systems not only
failed to provide the precious young people under their responsibility with a
substantive education; just as
corruptly, they failed to convey a firm code of ethics:
Administrators and teachers at the
Minneapolis Public Schools have failed in their adult responsibilities to
develop youth either morally or intellectually.
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Ironically, Social and Emotional Learning
(SEL), as moral instruction is called by the organization known as CASEL
(Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), is avowedly the driving
force at the Minneapolis Public Schools as led by Superintendent Ed Graff. But Graff is not only an academic
lightweight; he is also reprehensible in
not even following through with promulgation of SEL tenets: Many an administrator and teacher in the
system will testify as to the neglect of any vigorous explanation of those
tenets or effort to implement the formulation’s five key emphases: self-awareness, self-management, social
awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.
Four years into the tenure of Ed Graff as MPS
superintendent, the district’s students continue to suffer from both a vacuous academic
program and the lack of ethical instruction.
Social and Emotional Learning not only could not ever serve as the
driver of academic advancement; the
formulation, while advocating the development of desirable personal qualities,
is vague as to any code of ethics.
……………………………………………………………………………..
Administrators and teachers at the
Minneapolis Public Schools have poor grasp of the world’s great religious and
ethical systems. They should be about
learning these post-haste. Study of
these systems would serve as guide to the code of ethics to be imparted to the
students whose moral and academic instruction they are bound to serve as sacred
duty.
Judaism represents a grand struggle over millennia
to understand the Divine, find purpose, and act ethically.
Hinduism conveys a sense of the fragility
and impermanence of terrestrial life and the imperative to end the necessity of
multiple earthly sojourns by achieving an elevated understanding of Truth.
Buddhism focuses relentlessly on the
problem of ego, human striving, and unceasing desire--- and the necessity in the moral life to move
from selfish concerns to compassionate thought and action for the benefit of
all sentient beings.
Christianity stresses the power of Divine
Love active in the world.
Islam emphasizes avoidance of idolatrous distractions
for focus on the one Supreme Divinity.
And animistic belief systems focus on the
ubiquity of Divinity in Nature.
From these great world systems of belief,
thoughtful adults should be able to communicate to young people of various
cultures and ethnicities a system of values that emphasizes
>>>>> the paramount imperative to Love one’s fellow
human beings;
>>>>> the moral duty to act upon that Love with
compassion for all humankind;
>>>>> to abjure violence and to seek resolution of
conflict through mutual understanding;
>>>>> to constantly identify one’s own good with
the good of all humankind;
>>>>> to acknowledge the need to satisfy material needs
but to recognize that Meaning is found only in empathetic understanding and
beneficent action.
…………………………………………………………………………………..
Failure of administrators and teachers at
the Minneapolis Public Schools to model ethical conduct and convey a clear set
of moral values both represents and promotes the failure of our society to do
the same.
And a society without a common set of public
ethics creates the circumstances whereby George Floyd and others are
robbed of both life and Life.
George Floyd was murdered because
physically grown people have failed to be adults.
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