Moral education in schools

In keeping with the vision of the Rulers, schools in the UAE have been directed to offer moral education as a mandatory part of the curriculum.

Moral growth is as essential as physical and intellectual growth, and is nurtured through the path of inner development from the smallest gesture to the grandest idea elegantly stated.

School is of great importance when it comes to moral development. Parents and other authorities should play a part in this process. However, it is in school that young people find themselves confronted for the first time with the fact that they are members of both a larger society and also mankind. School has an obligation to foster the students to become persons who act in a morally correct way. You can teach norms easily, but you cannot teach easily to obey the rules unless you teach ethics. Therefore, teaching ethics in school is important.

Young people these days gets exposed to thousands of negative influences, and social problems through media and the real world, add to this the sad fact that parents are spending less time with their children. The decline of the family unit and collapse of society create the need for morals to be taught in schools.

How many times have we heard about school shootings, bullying, and cheating in examinations? Then, too, we read about degrading of women, advocacy of violence, condoning of dishonesty, mishandling of public funds and projects by highly trained engineers and officers; patients misguided by well-educated medical staff; children tortured and so on.

It was Teddy Roosevelt who said: “A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.” If moral values were taught in schools, we would have fewer of these problems.

Hence the efforts of education must not be to generate educated monsters to become skilled psychopaths. Reading, writing, mathematics is only important when they help your children to become more human. It is important to teach our children to consider issues and behaviour by a moral yardstick rather than more usual measures of success. If we expect our children to grow up with respect, then we need to teach them about making moral choices and having a value system as a basis for their decision-making.

So the real challenge for schools will be: How can these principles realistically be implemented and scaled in a school reform era intensely focused on academic achievement? For without proper ethical considerations, we are in danger of society becoming increasingly fragmented and unstable as self-interest overshadows the public good.

-The reader is a former teacher based in Dubai