Integrative Ethical Education

Education and Development and at the Erasmus Institute during 2003-2004, my students, and the volume editors. Thanks to the Erasmus Institute for supporting a year of writing. Integrative Ethical Education Much of the debate over moral education in recent decades has centered around the advantages and disadvantages of two dominant educational approaches to the moral formation of children, referred to as traditional character education and rational moral education. Traditional character education focuses on the inculcation of virtuous traits of character as the proper aim of education. In contrast, rational moral education seeks to facilitate the development of autonomous moral judgment and the ability to resolve disputes and reach consensus according to canons of fairness. The first approach, then, is concerned with the educational requirements that contribute to the formation of character. The second is concerned with the development of reasoning and autonomy. Unfortunately, the debate has often taken on an either/or quality that has obscured common ground and integrative possibilities. In this chapter a third way, called Integrative Ethical Education is introduced. It offers a holistic approach to ethical education that, on the one hand, acknowledges the goal of cultivating reflective reasoning and a commitment to justice, required for the development of democratic communities and, on the other hand, acknowledges that the demands of citizenship in a pluralistic democracy and the ability to engage in deliberative democratic procedures depend upon having a character of a certain kind. In this chapter, the main themes of the two dominant approaches to moral and character education are reviewed. These prototypes align tolerably well with philosophical positions associated with Aristotle and Kant respectively. The relation of these prototypes to specific educational strategies employed in moral and character education are discussed, including how recent models have attempted to reconcile them. Integrative Ethical Education is introduced as a view that is built on the best from these two traditions but also incorporates knowledge from cognitive science, best practice instruction, and the ancient Greek notions of techne and eudaimonia. These debates are better understood once they are placed in historical context. In the first section, the stage is set by identifying the terms of reference for the debate between traditional character education and rational moral education, a.k.a., the cognitive developmental approach. Moral 1 Education in a Pluralistic Democracy Guttman (1985) pointed out the universal agreement that the family has preeminent responsibility for the moral and character formation …