Seeing the Spectrum: North American Approaches to Emotional, Social, and Moral Education

Educational Forum, The, Fall 2004 by McKenzie, Marcia

Abstract

Interest in emotional, social, and moral (ESM) concerns in K-12 education in North America has grown considerably during the past decade. This increased concern is considered a response to the increased prevalence of social problems experienced by children and youth, such as bullying, substance abuse, and depression, and to research indicating that schools can influence the likelihood of students having these types of problems (Schonert-Reichl 2000). Research and theory in psychology which suggests that emotional development is an essential foundation of cognitive development and, therefore, is related to academic achievement also has contributed to this expanded interest (Martin and Reigeluth 1999). A variety of names, including affective education, social and emotional learning, values education, character education, caring education, and moral education, have been used in discussing ESM. Despite the prevalent use of these terms in the literature, the school programs that actually have been implemented under these various auspices are discussed rarely. Further, little, if any, research has explored the relative effectiveness of various approaches. Through a review of the literature, this article provides an overview of the history of ESM education in North America. It also outlines the spectrum of contemporary approaches to ESM education and explores the similarities and differences of these approaches, making suggestions for further theoretical and empirical work.

To obtain historical and contemporary approaches to ESM education, a variety of searches were undertaken using the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) electronic database. Table 1 shows the terms searched, the number of sources found, the number of sources chosen for review, and the approximate number of sources actually obtained and reviewed. Sources were chosen for review if they discussed an approach to ESM education in the school setting. A number of other sources identified through . previous research also were also included in the review, bringing the total sources reviewed to over 300.

Pre-1960s

Character and citizenship education flourished in the early part of the 20th century in North America through both direct (e.g., discussions, pledges, and rules) and indirect (e.g., sports and community involvement) means (Jones 1935). Character education decreased in popularity in the United States beginning in the 1930s, largely as a result of an extensive five-year study conducted by Teachers College at Columbia University which criticized the theory, methods, and effectiveness of character education (Hartshorne, May, and Shuttleworth 1930). According to Pietig (1977, 175), this study assessed the character-related behavior of more than 10,000 students from 23 U.S. communities and "found little evidence to support the existence of unified character traits." Titus (1994, 2) suggested that the decline of character education also may have been related to the influence of logical positivism, as "morality was portrayed by positivists as personal, dependent upon unscientific value judgments, and inappropriate for schools to transmit." The rise of cultural pluralism and a series of decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court curtailed the teaching of religious values in public schools, thereby causing a further decrease in character education. By the 1950s, formal character education programs had almost disappeared from U.S. schools (Titus 1994).

From 1960 to 1980

During the 1960s, two different moral education approaches were developed and introduced into North American schools: values clarification and cognitive-developmental moral education. Though both were based on the work of Dewey and opposed to character education's imposition of values on students, these approaches differed considerably. Raths, Harmin, and Simon (1966) introduced the values clarification approach. Developed from the ideas of Dewey and humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow, values clarification entailed eliciting students' own judgments or opinions about issues or situations in which values conflict. Though this approach was widely adopted both in Canada and the United States during the late '60s and early '70s (Sullivan and Beck 1975), its popularity soon decreased and is now largely out of use. The primary reasons for this decline were the lack of empirical evidence demonstrating its effectiveness (Leming 1995) and the criticism that the approach was too relativistic. Kohlberg (1975, 673) explained:

Values clarification . . . does not attempt to go further than eliciting awareness of values; it is assumed that becoming more self-aware about one's values is an end in itself. . . . If this program is systematically followed, students will themselves become relativists, believing there is no 'right' moral answer. For instance, a student caught cheating might argue that he did nothing wrong, since his own hierarchy of values, which may be different from that of the teacher, made it right for him to cheat.