Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Morals

The San Francisco Examiner


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Feb 7, 2006 11:17 AM ET





From readers



Morals Must Be Taught

As difficult a decision it was to make to forfeit the season, Sequoia High Principal Morgan Marchbanks said it was necessary to preserve the school’s integrity.



“I think the sports program is integral to high school. But our model of teaching morals is paramount,” Marchbanks said. “While this was a painful action to take, we had to clean our house in order to set an example.”

I went to Menlo-Atherton High School and played basketball from 1967-1970. I also played with Charles Johnson at Cal, who was the best basketball player ever at Sequoia High. I was an academic counselor at San Jose State University in the ’90s.

More than half of the freshman class at San Jose State Unversity took remedial English and math. It was the dumbing down of the academic standards and now any school’s moral integrity.

For students, it has meant wholesale confusion about moral values: learning to question values they have scarcely acquired, unlearning values taught at home, and concluding that questions of right and wrong are always merely
subjective.

It is because the failure of moral education in the schools. In brief, students are being taught by the wrong method — a method that looks more and more like a fad that won’t go away.

It has meant that the development of moral education curriculums has been turned over to theorists who have repeatedly expressed disdain for concepts such as virtue, character and good example; the same theorists have dismissed past culture and history as being irrelevant to the search for values.

Ted Rudow III,MA


Menlo Park

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