Article #2
The Failure of MPS Decision-Makers to Be Adults >>>>>
The Need for the Articulation of Moral Values
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 teacher 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.
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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;
>>>>> rejection of violence in favor conflict resolution through mutual understanding;
>>>>> identification of none’s own good with the good of all humankind;
>>>>> acknowledgement of the biological imperative to satisfy material needs but to recognize that Meaning is found only in empathetic understanding and beneficent action.
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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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