This is a perfect example of Values Clarification (UNESCO)
Catholic Culture : Library : Values Clarification Destroys Conscience
Mr. Chau. She says, “I was taught that communism was bad until I took history in the international baccalaureate program at Richmond High.”
Schools face problems with nonjudgmentalism
Condensed from an article by John Leo
In 20 years of college teaching, professor Robert Simon has never met a student who denied that the Holocaust happened. What he sees quite often, though, is worse; students who acknowledge the fact of the Holocaust but can’t bring themselves to say that killing millions of people is wrong. Mr. Simon says that 10-20% of his students feel this way. Usually they deplore what the Nazis did, but their disapproval is expressed as a matter of taste or personal preference, not moral judgment. "Of course I dislike Nazis," one student told him, "but who is to say they are morally wrong?"
Overdosing on nonjudgmentalism is a growing problem in the schools. Two disturbing articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education say that some students are unwilling to oppose large moral horrors, including human sacrifice, ethnic cleansing and slavery, because they think it seems obvious that no one has the right to criticize the moral views of another group or culture.
One of the articles is by Mr. Simon, who teaches philosophy at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY. The other is by Kay Haugaard, a free-lance writer who teaches creative writing at Pasadena College in California. Miss Haugaard writes that her current students have a lot of trouble expressing any moral reservations or objections about human sacrifice. The subject came up when she taught her class Shirley Jackson’s "The Lottery," a short story about small town American farm families who kill one person each year to make the crops grow. In the tale, a woman is ritually stoned to death by her husband and children.
In classes she has taught since 1970, Miss Haugaard says that "Jackson’s message about blind conformity always spoke to my students’ sense of right and wrong." No longer, apparently. A class discussion of human sacrifice yielded no moral comments, even under Miss Haugaard’s persistent questioning. One male said the ritual killing "almost seems like a need." Asked if she believed in human sacrifice, a woman said, "I really don’t know. If is was a religion of long standing." Miss Haugaard writes, "I was stunned. This was a woman who wrote so passionately of saving the whales, of concern for the rain forests and tender care of a stray dog."
Both writers believe multiculturalism has played a role in spreading the vapors of nonjudgmentalism. Miss Hauguarrd quotes a fifty-something nurse in her class who says, "I teach a course for our hospital in multicultural understanding, and if it is a part of a person’s culture, we are taught not to judge."
Christina Hoff Sommers, author and professor of philosophy at Clark University in MA, says that students who can’t bring themselves to condemn the Holocaust will often say flatly that treating humans as superior to dogs and rodents is immoral. Moral shrugging may be on the rise, but old-fashioned and rigorous moral criticism is alive and well on certain selected issues– smoking, environmentalism, women’s rights, animal rights.
Miss Sommers points beyond multiculturalism to a general problem of so many students coming to college "dogmatically committed to a moral relativism that offers them no grounds to think" about cheating, stealing and other moral issues. Mr. Simon calls this "absolutophobia"–the unwillingness to say that some behavior is just wrong. Many trends feed the fashionable phobia. Postmodern theory on campus denies the existence of any objective truth: All we can have are clashing perspectives, not true moral knowledge. The pop-therapeutic culture has pushed nonjudgmentalism very hard. Intellectual laziness and the simple fear of unpleasantness are also factors.
The "values clarification" programs in the schools surely would come in for some lumps, too. Based on the principle that teachers should not indoctrinate other people’s children, they left the creation of values up to each student. Values emerged as personal preferences, as unsuited for criticism or argument as personal decisions on pop music or clothes.
But the wheel is turning now, and "values clarification" is giving way to "character education" and the paralyzing fear of indoctrinating children is gradually fading. The search is on for a teachable consensus rooted in simple decency and respect. As a spur to shaping it, we might discuss a culture so morally confused that students are showing up at colleges reluctant to say anything negative about mass slaughter.
