BEYOND SCHOOL REFORM:EDUCATION AS THE

FORMATION OF MORAL HEALTH

Scott Martin

"Education is not the art of training and subjugating people to serve the profit of others. It is the art of helping people to know themselves." W. K. Hoy

Let’s say that we woke up tomorrow and every school in every neighborhood across America graduated every

student with honors (students aced tests, made straight A’s, scored 5s on AP exams, hit every benchmark, all AYPs were met, etc.), and every student had the opportunity to

go to the college or university of his/her choice.

Would we have achieved “success” in education?Would students be “well-educated”?

Would we have arrived at the formation of more ethical cultures?

Would this “success” solve our deepest problems?

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

Culture formed by cultic practices-Specific and intentional rituals, practices, aims and objectives that create “image bearers” of a specific vision of humanity“The question is not, does or doesn’t schooling create a public? The question is, What kind of public does it create?” (Postman, 1996)

“If education reform should have its way, students would not just be lovers of the mall, but shaped, in

deliberate, cultic ways, for the mall: engaging in such self-interested, profit-maximizing behaviors that would

end in the consumption of us all”http://youtu.be/6O21Cvm0Vns (Black Friday)

CULTURAL “WORLD-MAKING”:WHAT WE MAKE OF THE WORLD, BY WHAT

WE MAKE OF OURSELVES (CROUCH, 2008)

HOMO ECONOMICUS

Sees others as competitive co-consumer in life-sized version of Monopoly

Values decisions and others through the lens of ROI and cost-benefit analysis

The Wall Street “master of the universe” who envisions the world as a “socially detached array of economic actors” (Dionne, 2012)

The narcissistic hedonist concerned with power, pleasure and profit, whose moral maxim is “Greed is Good”

What is “Moral Health”? --Morality is a lot like nutrition: both are concerned with good health. There is that which brings life and that which brings decay, ruin and death --Moral Health is concerned with the following ideas:

--virtue and vice (Aristotle) vs “right and wrong” --not just doing good work, but on doing work that is

Good--living paradoxically in the human experience--wrestling with “Tragedy”

THE NEED FOR MORAL HEALTH