Evolution of Moral/Values/Virtues Education

In the Western world at least, traditional moral education was mostly about punishing children when they did something 'bad', i.e., against the accepted norms of some authority. This was based on a 'Christian' (albeit anti-Biblical) dogma of "Original Sin", according to which we have all inherited the sin of Adam and Eve, are therefore born 'in sin' and 'with sin', and that children could be trained to resist this innate sin through punishment, which was often very cruel and did more harm than good to their character.

This was accompanied by a "copy-book" method of moral education that consisted in memorizing lengthy collections of short phrases or 'maxims', taken from the Bible, poems, and other sources, which summarized the accepted norms of society.

During the second half of the 20th century, with the rise of a more secular, relativistic worldview, moral education was largely removed from schools, but soon returned by popular demand as "values clarification", which consisted in helping students clarify their own personal values. This was based on the relativistic assumption that values are only a matter of personal preference, at the same level as their favorite color, food or music, and that there could be no truly universal values.

Currently, however, there seems to be a gradual movement toward a more virtues-centered moral education, which could be seen as a move in the direction of spiritual education. This has largely been triggered by recent scientific discoveries of virtues that appear to be innate from earliest childhood.

One example of this is the scientific discovery that babies show signs of empathy, e.g, acting distressed when a nearby baby cries, the discovery of "mirror neurons" that enable us to feel what others feel, and the use of brain scans that show the same reaction to other people's happiness and sadness as to our own. Another example is the discovery by Robert Axelrod and others, using the tools of game theory, that fundamental virtues such as fairness, generosity, forgiveness, and cooperation are actually the necessary basis for all social and economic development and well being, and always have been.

This realization that we have innate virtues (albeit supposedly evolved during the hunter-gatherer era as adaptive survival mechanisms) has given rise to a growing movement to cultivate those virtues in children as part of the school curriculum or through extra-curricular activities. For example, there is a fast-growing body of literature available on how to cultivate empathy in children and youth, and how to organize "cooperative sports and games", as a Web search will testify.

The fundamental change underlying this new development is very significant. As a society, we are moving from the assumption that all children are born with an "innate depravity"--an idea that has been supported by both pseudo-religion and pseudo-science--to a realization that we do have innate virtues that can actually be cultivated. If there were no seeds of virtue in the soil of the human heart, it made no sense to try to cultivate them, but now that we know the seeds are there, it makes sense to make sure they germinate, sprout and grow.

Although this is still far from being a true spiritual education based on a deeper understanding of our inner nature and fundamental purpose in life, the potential of this approach for the future of humanity's spiritual and material development should not be underestimated.