Race, Community and Moral Education: Kohlberg and Spielberg as civic educators

Literature on moral education has contributed surprisingly little to our understanding of issues of race and education. The creation of inter-racial communities in schools is a particularly vital antiracist educational goal, one for which public support in the United States has weakened since the 1970s. As contexts for antiracist moral education, such communities should involve racially plural groups of students learning about, and engaging in, common aims, some of which must be distinctly antiracist: an explicit concern to institute racially just norms within the community (re ̄ ecting, yet going beyond, Kohlberg’ s own communitarian justice focus in his Just Community schools) and to foster social justice in society generally; and an appreciation of distinct cultural and racial identities within a community. Popular culture has an important role to play in providing salient cultural imagery of inter-racial co-operation and antiracist activity. In this regard, several ® lms of Stephen Spielberg, a ® lm-maker who takes his responsibilities as moral educator seriously, are promising yet ultimately disappointing. I will be speaking today about issues of race and moral education. Although my focus will be the United States, many other nations face similar issues and I trust that, in some form, my remarks will be applicable to these contexts as well. President Clinton of the United States has drawn the nation’ s attention to issues of race, and particularly to communication about race among people of different racial groups. In this light it is worth looking at what moral education can contribute to our understanding of race and racism. For a racismo has become as ® rmly entrenched in our moral vocabulary as the more time-honoured vices of dishonesty, cruelty and cowardice. To charge a person, an action or an institution with a racismo is to condemn it in very strong terms. Whatever work the concept of a racismo has done as a category of historical analysis, in the past several decades it has unalterably become a moral concept as well. While moral philosophy should help to elucidate the moral character of that conceptÐ and that is not my goal todayÐ moral education in the area of race should tell us the range of moral goals bearing on race and racism that we should pursue in our education of children. Yet when we consult the most popular or esteemed practically orientated books in our ® eld, we ® nd a distinctly This is the text of the 11th Lawrence Kohlberg Memorial Lecture, delivered at the 24th annual conference of the Association for Moral Education, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA; November, 1998. ISSN 0305-7240 (print)/ISSN 1465-3877 (online)/99/020125-19 Ó 1999 Journal of Moral Education Ltd