College Teaching / Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College

by Paul Klapper

Ideals and tendencies in ethics teaching

Let us beware of surrendering to the common but often pernicious demand of our swift-moving America that in order to receive consideration a new idea should prove itself capable of yielding immediate dividends. There seems to be a certain hesitancy today among some in our educated classes about speaking of "ideals." Ideals connote a long look ahead. They imply a sense that there is something perfect even though the steps toward embodying or approximating it will be many and arduous, perhaps discouragingly hard. They betoken the likelihood of appearing before men as the victims of ultimately unworkable dreams. In refreshing contrast is the seeming practicability of encouraging present tendencies. Your tendency is no far-off projection of mere thought; it is something solid and "real," here and now, respected at the bank, in the newspaper office, and other meeting places of those whose heads are hard. Tendencies turn elections; ideals carry no such palpable witness of their power. "Hence let us study tendencies."

This characterization is perhaps extreme, but the danger to which it refers is all too frequent. A strike, for instance, sets most of us to discussing ways by which this particular disturbance can be ended quickly. It is only the few who are willing to hold in mind both terms of the problem, namely the procedure for tomorrow morning and the positive ideal toward which all our vocational life should set its face even if the distant tomorrow is still so far ahead. So of our conceptions of political life. A given election may indeed involve an immediate moral issue; but even the issue of next month can be faced properly only when it is related to an ideal of public life which may have to wait long years for appreciation by the majority. Nothing is more necessary in a democracy than a leadership trained in the long forward look, trained in distinguishing morally right and morally wrong from expedient, and best from merely better, trained in the courage to champion a distant ideal in the face of clamor to accept some inferior but belligerently present substitute.

In short, the student should be offered every encouragement to thinking out the ultimate obligations of his own life and of his various groups and to reaching the conviction that there is such a reality as a permanent human worth, a fundamentally right way for men and women to seek, a rightness whose authority is undiminished by the blunders of the human mind in trying to define it. An ever more earnest attempt to find that way, and to find it by practice illumined by all the knowledge that can be brought to bear, should be the leading object. Not a series of definitions and quotations, nor yet a little information about the social movements of our time, but a truer understanding of life as the result of interpreting it in terms of the obligation to create right human adjustments—such an aim saves college ethics alike from dryness and from superficial attempts to sprinkle interest over a subject of inherent and intense practical importance.

It is not essential that an introductory course in ethics should enter into the philosophy of religion. This may be left to other agencies, like the church, or to later courses, with every confidence that the outcome will be sound if mind and soul and will (to use the old formula) are first enlisted in behalf of noble conduct. Whatever thinking the student may do along these lines will be the better if its nurture is drawn first from moral thinking and moral practice.[[51]]

Course in ethics prescribed, and early in college course

From the foregoing it follows that the ethics course should be taken by all the students. The earlier it can be given the better, inasmuch as its demands upon their conduct apply to all the years of their life, and because the whole career at college is more likely to benefit from beginning early such reflections as this study particularly invites.

Sequence determined by development of the student

The sequence of courses will perhaps be best determined by remembering the need of following the natural growth of the student. Experiences come first and then the interpretations. Hence the insistence upon the practical content of the introductory courses. Theory and history should follow, not precede. Nobody is interested in the history or the theory of a thing unless he is interested in the thing itself. Furthermore, we must bear in mind the needs of those students who are not likely to care enough for the more theoretical aspects to continue the subject. If the introductory course is to be all that they take, obviously the more practical we can make it the better.