Teaching Morals and Values in the Public Education System

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Teaching Morals and Values in the Public Education System

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe

free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless,

tempest-tost, to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"1 These words are,

of course, inscribed in bronze at the base of the greatest symbol of American

freedom, the Statue if Liberty. These words were also a call to the entire world,

exclaiming how our nation of freedom wants to take in all of the earth’s

downtrodden and oppressed people so they may live a life of liberty, and follow

any beliefs they choose without persecution. Obviously, the world consists of a

vast amount of varying people and societies, each with their own religions,

values, and ways of life. In the United States, the “melting pot of the world,” we

preach the fact that everyone is safe to live these ways of life any way they

would like. With the lieutenant-governor of Maryland, Kathleen Kennedy

Townsend’s essay, Not Just Read and Write, but Right and Wrong, she makes a

proposal to force a universal set of a values upon all public school children, which

could be conflicting with the very ideas that this nation was founded upon.

By citing her conversation with a “crowded” classroom, her daughter’s

experience on an all male soccer team, and on obscure survey which samples

a mere one-thousand people to represent all those aged fifteen to

twenty-four in the entire U.S, Kathleen Townsend draws the conclusion that

the children of this generation are very immoral and have few values. Before

making such a bold generalization, she should have gathered a little more

evidence than what she did to prove her accusation. It is not accurate

enough to use little more than one-thousand people to judge several million.

The most accurate surveys, like the A.C. Neislon Company for example,

surveys several thousand people in each region of the whole country to

gather television ratings2. To say the least, television ratings are trivial

compared to the importance of morals and values of today’s youth.

Therefore, this matter should have been researched much more extensively,

or at least just as well as some frivolous television ratings.

The way she decides who is responsible for this problem is almost as

unconvincing as the reasons believes this problem even exists. She quickly

points to public education as the major factor for the poor values and morals

of the current generation, and states that it is also the only thing that can

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