Each person can have good and bad qualities. It usually depends on how each individual decides to behave. The field of concern is currently alternatively referred to as values education, character education, moral education, personal and social education, citizenship education, civic education, religious education, moralogy, and democratic education, among other rubrics. Now, it would not be so worrisome nor so troublesome if these terms were truly interchangeable, but they are not.
Values and character are not equivalent, as we shall demonstrate in a later section. Furthermore, values and character are not necessarily in the domain of morals. One can speak of moral values and non-moral values, for example. A useful way to demonstrate this last distinction is through the work of Elliot Turiel and his colleagues. Turiel (1983) offers the distinction between three domains of social knowledge: moral, social-conventional, personal. The moral domain is characterised by issues of universal prescriptivity deriving from intrinsic harmfulness.
Furthermore moral issues are unalterable in their rightness or wrongness. For example, killing is a moral issue because the ban on killing is applicable to all humans regardless of nationality, race, gender, religion, or ethnicity. It is wrong because it intrinsically robs victims of their mortal existence. And it is unalterable; i. e. , no authority has the power to make killing morally right. This is not to argue that there may not be circumstances in which killing is the lesser of two evils; only that in general, killing is morally wrong.
The Term Paper on Moral Education
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The domain of social-conventions is a bit different. It concerns issues that are considered wrong not because of their intrinsic nature, but rather because of social agreement that they are wrong. They are therefore alterable by the appropriate social authorities and only apply to those within the purview of the social agreement. In some cultures, for example, it may be scandalous for an adult male to hold hands with an unmarried, unrelated adult female. In others it would be perfectly acceptable.
The same may be said for two adult males holding hands in public as they walk casually down the street. Holding hands does no intrinsic harm, but it can be harmful if there is social agreement banning it. Without such agreement, it is perfectly acceptable. The critical point is that such social agreement does not make it morally wrong. Therefore, when schools teach social conventions, they must be prepared for moral evaluation of the validity of those conventions, no matter how widely accepted they may be.
