DATE: Monday, June 30, 1997                 TAG: 9706290036

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SERIES: Teaching kids values

SOURCE: BY LORRAINE EATON, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   98 lines

TEACHING VALUES IN SCHOOLS HAS A LONG VARIED HISTORY

In 1969, U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War peaked, and so did protests against the war, the ``establishment'' and all things American.

But in Portsmouth in Mrs. Nelson's second-grade classroom at Churchland Elementary School, lessons about citizenship continued quietly while the rest of the country seemed to fall apart.

Catherine Perry Nelson of Portsmouth, who retired in 1973, never questioned that lessons about pride and honesty and trustworthiness were as important as memorizing multiplication tables.

At the front of her class, a red-white-and-blue chart proclaimed: ``A good citizen: is proud, tries, thinks, helps, is dependable, respects others, is fair, is honest, is polite, tends to his own business.''

Mrs. Nelson believed that all Americans should know how to properly ``roll'' the flag, folding it into a triangle so that no red was visible.

She organized her classroom into a small democracy, complete with an elected president (terms were for one week) and appointed officers who could be impeached for values infractions.

Mrs. Nelson was doing what teachers have done since the time of Aristotle - teaching character education. It's an ancient concept just now capturing headlines.

``Moral education goes back to the Greeks and Romans,'' said Joanne Olson, who, with Susan McGreevy, recently completed a study on the subject at Mary Washington College.

Aristotle warned that ``a culture that neglects to cultivate good habits will soon find itself the prisoner of bad habits.''

Since the 1640s, when the first school bells sounded in the colonial United States, character education has been an educational issue.

In those early years, teachers across New England used the Bible to teach lessons on morals and values, said Jennings L. Wagoner, professor of the history of education at the University of Virginia. But as the country became more ethnically diverse, the practice would come into question.

Publicly funded education in The U.S. got its start around 1840 during a period of immigration and industrialization.

Horace Mann, known as the father of public education in the United States, warned that character development based on Bible reading could be controversial in an increasingly pluralistic society.

Mann was right.

Religious factions clashed over how to use the Bible in the classroom and what version should be used.

Enter William Holmes McGuffey, a moral philosophy professor at U.Va.

McGuffey wrote a series of primers for schools, the famed McGuffey readers, that not only taught the three R's, but contained lessons on loyalty, trustworthiness, thriftiness, honesty and responsibility.

Between 1836 and 1870, 47 million copies were sold.

The readers contained stories McGuffey made up about how students shouldn't play hooky and popular stories based on historical figures, such as George Washington chopping down the cherry tree.

The primers were passed down from generation to generation. By 1919, the McGuffey readers had the largest circulation of any book in print, with the exception of the Bible, Olson and McGreevy found.

The readers, Wagoner said, ``shaped the values and tastes of the American people.''

At the turn of the century, McGuffey was still a household name, but society was changing, science was expounding new ideas, and ideas about teaching values were changing, too.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution had some people thinking that perhaps morality was also evolving and that a fixed set of values was impossible.

Meanwhile, educational philosopher John Dewey was espousing ``progressivism,'' the idea that students should be able to explore and test all ideas and values, Olson and McGreevy said.

Dewey's influence over character education extended into the 1950s, a time when the moralistic McGuffey reader was replaced by the ``See Dick run'' variety of primer, with no history and no moral lessons, Wagoner said.

In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional laws that required recitation of the Lord's prayer or Bible verses in public schools.

In the 1960s, when Mrs. Nelson was mid-way through her teaching career, personal freedom reigned over traditional values as America began to experience a cultural and sexual revolution.

This was when ``values clarification'' became a buzz word in education circles.

Instead of tidy lessons on how to live their lives, this new method focused on teaching children to think through moral dilemmas and arrive at their own values.

A backlash was inevitable.

The most recent ``reform'' toward character education started in the early 1980s as escalating juvenile crime, teen pregnancy and drug-abuse rates, and a breakdown of the traditional two-parent family sounded alarms.

Since then, educators have been seeking ways to make Johnny be good and dozens of models have been developed. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Martin Smith-Rodden/The Virginian-Pilot

Catherine Perry Nelson taught classes...

Graphic

Loyalty

Courage

[Definitions] KEYWORDS: VALUES EDUCATION

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu