An Ethical Responsibility Essay -- Essays Papers

An Ethical Responsibility Ethics and morals, two of the most important traits in an educated human being, are interestingly not taught by schools. Ethics is defined, in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, as the discipline dealing with what is good and what is bad. Morals are defined in the same dicitonary as those principles of right and wrong in behavior. For Jonathan Kozol, in The Night Is Dark And I Am Far From Home, ethics and morals have similar meanings but extend to include a sense of compassion for others. I agree with his argument that the purpose of schooling is to educate an ethical human being: a person who not only lives his life by facts and knowledge but also by ethics and morals. The need for schools to address ethics and morals is important in the 1990s, due to the emergence of the single-parent family. This new type of family, along with the family with two working parents, has caused the "latch key" child to become commonplace in many schools today. Since their parents are still working by the time they are dismissed from school, these young, elementary school children have a key to get into their homes everyday after school. Without parental supervision, they begin to believe that the decisions and actions in surreal comic books, popular, (at times pornographic), magazines, and violent television programs are acceptable. Such a situation results in children with a warped sense of reality, ethics, and moral, allowing them to easily become susceptible to delinquency. Proponents against the inclusion of ethics in schools argue that since ethics and morals are personal they should be taught in the home. However, for many of these children, an academic environ ment is the only place where they interac... ...e which do not. A child will be able to identify not only with his own mother's dying of cancer but also with another child's mother dying from cancer. The need for ethics and morality in education is more important now than ever before. The "latch key" child and single parent family have led schools to consider an ethical dilemma: are they responsible for the ethical and moral education of children. To see an end to teenage pregnancy, violence, and death, schools must teach their students what is ethical and moral and what is not. To secure our future as a provacative, risk taking, concerned society schools must not consider an ethical dilemma but rather accept their ethical responsibility. Works Cited Carballo, Jose. Personal Interview. 20 Sept. 1997. Kozol, Jonathan. The Night is Dark and I am Far From Home. New York: Simon and Schuster Inc., 1975.