Educating Different Types of Citizens: Identity, Tradition, and Moral Education

Abstract

Different institutional identities have implications for how colleges and universities approach moral education. When higher education institutions support more comprehensive forms of moral education, they do so by fostering commitment to a set of particular identities and traditions. As a result, students are asked to acquire and demonstrate knowledge, virtues, and dispositions relevant to these particular commitments. Our paper reports how the Christian identity and tradition shaped moral education in a select group of institutions we studied and compares our findings with another recent study that examined how select institutions fostered commitment to civic identity and the democratic tradition. ______________________________________________________________________________ uring much of early American history, moral education in colleges or universities moved from being grounded in appeals to special revelation to universal appeals to human nature, natural law, or reason (Reuben, 1996; Sloan, 1980). In other words, teachers and textbook writers attempted to locate moral agreement in something common to all humanity. Recent approaches, however, have largely attempted to find a common basis for moral education by appeals to a commitment to a particular professional identity (e.g., goods internal to a professional practice) or appeals premised on a commitment to a nonprofessional identity and its associated moral tradition (e.g., political, national, religious, and ethnic). The appeals to particular identities provide a necessary moral framework or orientation. In The Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor (1989) noted that issues of identity (and we would add that this includes institutional identity) and the good or morality are "inextricably intertwined themes" (p. 3). The reason is: People may see their identity as defined partly by some moral or spiritual commitment, say as a Catholic or anarchist. Or they may define it in part by the nation or tradition they belong to, as an Armenian, say, or a Québecois. What they are saying by this is not just that they are strongly attached to this spiritual view or background; rather it is that this provides the frame within which they can determine where they stand on questions of what is good, or worthwhile, or admirable, or of value. (p. 27) D