ABSTRACT
MORAL AND CIVIC DEVELOPMENT AS GOALS OF HIGHER EDUCATION This chapter takes up the question of what kinds of influence undergraduate education can have on students’ development as ethical, committed, and engaged human beings and citizens. The undergraduate years are just one part of a life-long developmental process but, especially if the efforts are intentionally designed with these outcomes in mind, colleges can establish some groundwork that students will later build on, shape the intellectual frameworks and habits of mind they bring to their adult experiences, change the way they understand the responsibilities that are central to their sense of self, teach them to offer and demand evidence and justification for their moral and political positions, and develop wiser judgment in approaching situations and questions that represent potential turning points in their lives. If a college education is to support the kind of learning graduates need in order to be involved and responsible citizens, its goals must go beyond the development of intellectual and technical skills and beginning mastery of a professional or scholarly domain. They should include the competence to act in the world and the judgment to do so wisely. A full account of competence, including occupational competence, must include consideration of judgment, the appreciation of ends as well as means, and the broad implications and consequences of one’s actions and choices. Education is not complete until students not only have acquired knowledge, but can use that knowledge to act responsibly in the world. The suggestion that colleges and universities ought to educate for moral and civic values, ideals, and standards raises potentially contentious questions about what those values and ideals should be. Fortunately, there are some basic values that form a common ground to guide higher education institutions’ efforts to educate their students as responsible citizens of a democracy. Prominent among these core values are intellectual integrity, concern for truth, and academic freedom. By their very nature, it is also
important for colleges to foster values such as mutual respect, open-mindedness, a willingness to listen to and take seriously the ideas of others, procedural fairness, and public discussion of contested issues. The academic enterprise would be seriously compromised if these values ceased to guide scholarship, teaching, and learning, however imperfect the guidance may be in practice. Another important source of a common core of values derives from educational institutions’ obligation to educate students for responsible democratic citizenship. Most college and university mission statements-for both private and public institutionsexplicitly refer to their responsibility to educate for leadership and contribution to society. This conception of higher education in the United States dates back to the founding of the country and implies the centrality of values that include mutual respect and tolerance, concern for both the rights and the welfare of individuals and the community, recognition that each individual is part of the larger social fabric, critical self-reflection, and a commitment to civil and rational discourse and procedural impartiality (Galston, 1991; Gutmann, 1987; Macedo, 2000). Beyond this generic set of core values that derive from the intellectual and civic purposes of higher education, some private colleges (and even a few public ones) stand for more specific moral, cultural, or religious values. These institutions’ particular missions-and the implications of these missions for the educational programs-are made clear to prospective students and faculty, thus providing the basis for informed choice in deciding whether to join a higher education community that professes particular values along with those that are inherent in the academic enterprise. The most obvious examples are religiously affiliated schools that offer faith-based education. Among public institutions, military academies are mandated to educate military officers, so their values are defined with reference to this goal. There are other public colleges that were established to serve particular populations, such as (American Indian) tribal colleges, which often explicitly acknowledge special values, such as traditional tribal values, in their curricula and programs, and private colleges that serve groups such as women, African-American women, and African-American men, drawing on their relevant histories in order to best serve these populations. If the values on which there is broad consensus within an institution are taken seriously, they constitute strong guiding principles for programs of moral and civic development in higher education. Even so, they leave open to debate which principles should be given priority when they conflict as well as the application of the principles to many particular situations. Especially in institutions that stand for a commitment to rational public discourse, as higher education must, the most difficult questions of conflicting values are left to public debate and individual discernment. Moral and civic education provides the tools for these discussions and judgments.
