|
Promoting Cultural and Moral Values In Higher Education
David E. Payne
I want to couch each of these failures in terms of changes in student behavior because my wife, who is an elementary school teacher, constantly reminds me that education is not worth anything unless it changes behavior. It is easy to see behavior change when looking at a technical skill like mixing chemicals or inserting an IV into a patient, but it is much more difficult to measure behavior change on issues more central and critical to what we consider an educated person. It has been put this way: "Education is what is left after you have forgotten what you have been taught." I want to talk about the things that should be the measures of an educated person, which we largely fail to produce or to measure in our students—the things that make them truly educated. The four failures I wish to talk about are: The failure of students to acquire basic moral values The failure of students to acquire critical thinking without acquiring cynical thinking The failure of our students to acquire a rich and civil culture The failure of our students to acquire a love for service and willingness to serve The Failure of Students to Acquire Basic Moral Values Let me talk about one basic value as an example of this problem: honesty or integrity. Calhoon (1995) calls this the master virtue—the one from which many others flow. As such it is the most critical. The last course I taught at my university (now a few years back) was a management course, which I taught to a large degree using the case study method. As we began a section on business ethics I presented a case where an arms contractor was being unsuccessful in getting government bids over a period of years. As we entered the case he realized that if he did not get the next contract he was bidding on, he would have to lay off large numbers of employees. Arriving at his office one morning, he discovered a sealed envelope on his desk. Inside the envelope were the bids of his competitors. He knew immediately that a friend of his from the Pentagon had delivered the illegal document to assist him in making his bid thus violating federal law. My problem for the students was to make a decision about whether they would use the illegal document or whether they would not use it and to provide a rationale for their decision. I informed them that they would not be graded on their decision but on the quality of their rationale. After a day of discussion the papers were turned in and to my surprise all but two of the students had chosen to use the illegal data. I spent the next week talking with the students about basic ethics and their importance. At the end of the week I had them rewrite their answers using the same rules. This time their rationales were much more sophisticated and thoughtful but to my surprise all of the students had chosen to use the illegal information. I had totally failed to help the students understand the importance of honesty and integrity and incorporate those values into their behaviors. As I was discussing my experience with one of our philosophy professors, he said that he felt the students had all made the correct choice. While honesty is an important social value it is not a critical one. In his view students should be taught that honesty and integrity are relative values and should be abandoned when appropriate. In his mind all values should be transient and subject to abandonment. He even sent me readings to explain the position (Calhoon, 1995). His example of the correctness of this position was "look at what religious fanatics do because of the values they hold uncompromisingly." This helped me understand why students were not acquiring this value. Their professors did not agree on it. Even this most basic value and its transmission are not accepted by all in the professional university community. Let me carry the example of honesty a bit further. Dr. Steve Davis, (Davis, Grover, Becker, and Mcgregor, 1992; Davis and Ludvigson, 1995; Davis, 1997) in studies using 17,500 students from all types of colleges and universities and in all parts of the United States, found that about 75 percent of college students had cheated on exams in high school and about 60 percent had already cheated on exams in college (remember that the students surveyed included about even proportions of freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors). About 50 percent of the students reported being regular exam cheaters. Davis says that if we were able to include plagiarism, data fabrication, purchased papers, and so on, the rate of reported cheating would be much higher. Some examples of written responses by those taking the questionnaires were: "I don’t feel guilty; I’m going to make an A." "Old morals in new times just don’t mix." "Cheating in high school is for grades; cheating in college is for a career." "Ten minutes of cheating is better than two hours of studying." It is a cliché of American higher education that when universities talk about having honor systems it means that universities have the honor and students have the system. These data seem to support that notion. There are a few universities that do somewhat better; for example, a few military or religious schools. But, even in these cases, there is some cheating. Perhaps our failure to help students incorporate basic honesty into their behavior is simply a reflection of the reality of our own behavior as testified to by regularly reported faculty research fraud or failure of faculty to keep office hours; sexual harassment; or administrative deception and conniving. We and the faculty have responsibility for our failing to help students who come to the university without basic integrity to acquire that set of behaviors and that responsibility begins with who we are and what we do. Students Don’t Acquire Critical Thinking Without Acquiring Cynical Thinking. One of the basic tasks of higher education is to help students develop the ability to think critically. If we fail in this task, then our students have not acquired a basic tool they need for successful living in today’s world. A student who does not think with analytic skill will be a professional failure and a manipulated pawn in the social political world in which he/she lives. The application of this skill requires that students look at issues and problems and see weaknesses and deficiencies. However, it also is vital in this process that the critical thinker see the strengths of the position, practice, or people being studied. What I often see happening though, is that the students only complete the first part of the task. They learn to see the weaknesses and faults and think the task is finished and they need go no farther. This leaves them belittling, critical of, or hostile to others or their ideas and unwilling or unable to see the good and the strengths. Thirty years ago, as a young college student, I fell victim to this very problem in one of my psychology classes. Our professor had us read a different journal article each week and type an abstract of that article on a five-by-eight-inch card. We were to summarize the findings of the study, review the theory, and critically evaluate. After one particularly caustic evaluation on my part the professor wrote a note on my abstract: "Your criticism was interesting. This article is one of the best articles in current psychological literature." With the hindsight of years, I can hear him really saying: "Why don’t you see the good also?" or "Why don’t you get a realistic picture of how hard it is to do really good research?" or "You have lost the value of this article by being too critical." One interesting side effect of our inability to teach this value is that students are so consumed with seeing faults with others that they don’t see the faults in themselves. Some see no contradiction in violently protesting violence in others. They excuse their own poor performance on an exam but are harshly critical of a poorly prepared lecture by a professor. Unfortunate outcomes are the fault of others, which we have trained them so well to see. As I hear student appeals each year, I have come to understand that their problems, in their minds, are almost never the result of something they have done but the result of something some foolish other has done to them. Though I have been unable to find the source, I believe it was Goethe who said: The attitude of belief is fertile, while the attitude of cynicism is sterile. I fear that we are creating a generation of highly educated but sterile attack cynics rather than one of thoughtful and analytical civic contributors. We must help students to acquire a variety of critical thinking which incorporates compassion, charity, and patience for others. The Failure of Students to Acquire a Rich and Civil Culture One of the things a university education is supposed to do, as a central task, is to create a lifelong love of the finer arts produced through the generations. How well are we doing? While it doesn’t answer the question of how behavior is being changed, a first step is to assess how much instruction is being given. Last year at Sam Houston State University, a university of 13,000 students, there were only 318 nonmusic majors who took a music appreciation course. Even allowing students four years to take the course, less than 10 percent of the students would have taken the course. Only 121 nonart majors took an art appreciation course. Again allowing four years of opportunities, this would mean that less than 4 percent of our students would ever take a course in art appreciation. These figures would be typical of many if not most universities. If we try to extend the analysis into the area of behavior change in music, for example, the issue becomes much more complex. I have no statistical measures relative to this. However, I regularly attend concerts, performances, exhibits, and recitals and have been observing the audience for years. Attendance at major performances is dominated by community members. Attendance by students is small. Attendance at faculty and student recitals is regularly less than fifty, most of whom are music students. The more meaningful question—"Will these students choose to enrich their cultural lives after graduation?"—is unanswered and we have never attempted to gather such data of alumni. Even if we knew they would continue cultural activities after graduation, the most important question remains: "Did the university enrich the students’ cultural values or not? Did those students who go to concerts after graduation, go to concerts before they ever entered the university, or did we do something to enrich their musical heritage. Such longitudinal analysis of cultural value added is totally absent from my university’s and most American university’s databases. One bright spot where we do appear to be achieving some success and it is measurable is in participation in the political process. In the 1996 presidential election, college graduates participated by voting almost 30 percent more than high school graduates. (Saprio and Rosenstone, 1998). Students Have not Acquired the Love for Service and Willingness to Serve The motto of Sam Houston State University is "The measure of a life is its service." This motto is a recognition by our founders and its current leaders as well as the state legislature that education is a privilege and should require some payback and some desire to pay back on the part of the students. Strangely we do not seem to do well at integrating these values into student lives either. I asked our associate vice president of student affairs to report the number of student clubs that were engaged in regular service and the number of students who were members of those clubs. I said that he should not include clubs that had an occasional project that was small and mostly for show but just those who at least twice a semester engaged in some kind of bona fide project or whose members were required to individually engage in and report service. He reported that of the 180 student clubs, 9 involving 102 students were doing legitimate service on a regular basis (Green, 2001). I fear that in persuading our students that they must study hard and focus on academic tasks we have created a self-indulgent focus where they excuse themselves from thinking about others with the automatic statement that they have to study. Too often that time is not spent in academic endeavor but in self-indulgence of youth. The real serious problem is that this may establish patterns which perpetuate themselves throughout life. I am aware that there is some evidence that college graduates are more likely to participate in voluntary organizations than noncollege graduates. I wonder, however, if these are just organizations to promote their careers or further indulge themselves and if we were to look carefully we might find only 9 of 180 post college voluntary organizations also actually doing meaningful service. Some few colleges have made efforts to reverse this trend. For example, Northern Illinois University requires new students to give 150 hours of service and a written report on that service during their freshman year. Berry and Beria Colleges have a long history of integrating work and service into their regular curriculum. These programs have received wide acclaim but little emulation. For the most part attempting to require service is a neglected part of American higher education and the attempt to measure the degree to which there is any lasting change in students’ service attitudes and behaviors is even more rare. Final Comments What can we do, what can I do to address these four failures of American higher education and help me get a good night’s sleep and how can you who are not Americans keep yourselves from developing these problems. First, we have to agree that teaching values is an appropriate role for universities. I am aware that some of my colleagues and perhaps some of you believe that this is not so; you may believe that universities should be content with teaching facts. May I suggest that this is wrong? When we fail to select specific values and agree that they are to be taught, what we are really doing is deciding to teach the value that values are not important in our society or we don’t care about which ones are taught. We choose to allow faculty to teach their own values without announcing what they are, but simply weaving them into what they present to students as facts. I take the position that some values are central for the prosperity of society and should not be abandoned and in fact should be specifically taught. I believe that the university has the responsibility to reinforce these values in students who already have them; and where they have not been taught in the home, church, or earlier schooling, to teach them in a way that changes and improves student behavior. Second, we must get agreement on what basic values should be taught. May I suggest at least the following:
Third, we must get agreement, at least within individual institutions, about how they should be taught. We must thoughtfully as administrators and faculty gather and discuss what pedagogical practices should be employed to promote the behavioral acquisition of these values. May I offer a suggestion? We need to stop thinking that our obligation as a university is just to profess a set of facts or theories and recognize that our true duty is to change lives (Sinaiko, 1998). It is not only to transmit the substance of a discipline but also to change behavior. We must think about and build into the curriculum extensive applied techniques for producing change in each student on each of the core values. I say applied techniques because students must do something relating to each of these values in order to acquire them. Hearing a professor talk about them or even memorizing them will not of necessity produce change. I believe each of these values is inherently rewarding and when students actually engage in them, permanent behavior changes are more likely to follow than if they are simply studied or memorized. For example, service is its own reward and once it is regularly engaged in it will generate further desire for service. Next, we must define how we will measure success in changing student behavior in each of these areas. We must agree that we measure our successes by what actually happens, what behavior has occurred in the student and the graduate. Perhaps it will be necessary to extend the measures of a successful university education to long after the degree is granted. For example, what do employers of our students say about their integrity, about their desire to provide noncompensated service, and about their participation in and support of culture? What do voting records show about participation in the civic process by our graduates five and ten years after graduation? While these measures are more difficult, more costly, and more threatening to universities, they must be thoughtfully considered and designed if we are to know how well we are succeeding. At the same time that we set measures of performance we must also set goals. These goals need to be both for students—for example, what constitutes an A [5] on values acquisition and what constitutes a C [3]; and for the institution—for example, when should it consider itself a success in accomplishing the goal of transmitting honesty? Is it when 30 percent of its students are honest 50 percent of the time or when 90 percent of its students are honest all the time five years after graduation? These are difficult goals to determine and to measure and will require careful thought and analysis. We would all like to just assume that they are universally already present, but to make such an assumption is to sleep well but foolishly. Finally, we must develop feedback loops which will not only allow but also force us to examine how well we are doing and use that examination to change the procedures we employ to address these central failures of higher education. I know that this is a direction that higher education has often not taken. I know that to incorporate it would be a long and difficult process and that many, if not most, of our faculty would prefer to think of themselves as dispensers of knowledge. But knowledge can be dispensed over the Internet by technicians to millions at a time. Wisdom requires the integration of knowledge and values. It is the mark of a truly educated person, the real goal of a university education, and what the world needs. We should embark on its pursuit. References
|
Copyright ©2002-2004