Family, faith, media, and community are focus of Dartmouth Conference on Moral Education

Posted 11/03/98

Hollywood producers, the head of a Bosnian-based music therapy effort, and actors, activists, educators, psychologists and philosophers from throughout North America and the world are gathering at Dartmouth College from November 18-22 to ask what can be done for the ethical guidance of the world's youth.

"The litany of juvenile crime, drugs, adolescent pregnancy, the school drop-out rate, and questionable ethics in high places has rekindled the debate about what institutions can do to address the issue of moral education," says conference organizer Andrew Garrod, Associate Professor and Chair of Dartmouth's Department of Education.

Titled "Informal Influence on Moral Development: Family, Faith, Media, and Community," the conference is the annual convention of the Association for Moral Education (AME), a 22-year-old organization that views moral education as "a process to be developed rather than a content to be inculcated," in contrast to the more didactic "character education" approach favored by conservative social critic William Bennett and others, said Garrod.

Those making presentations at the conference include key note speaker Lawrence Blum, Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education, University of Massachusetts, Boston, and a specialist in multiculturalism and race studies; Eugene Skeef, a Zulu South African political activist and percussionist, who is Musical Director of the Pavarotti Musical Centre of Mostar, Bosnia Hercegovina, which uses music to help children deal with war trauma; and such leaders in moral development as John Snarey, Professor of Human Development and Ethics, Emory University and author of How Fathers Care for the Next Generation ( (Harvard University Press, 1993) and Lawrence Walker, Professor of Psychology, University of British Columbia, a leading theorist in moral psychology.

Portions of the conference that will be open to the general public are: on Wednesday, Nov. 18 at 6:45 p.m. in Hopkins Center's Spaulding Auditorium, an advanced screening of the new Pixar/Walt Disney animated feature film, "A Bug's Life," with introduction and a question-and-answer period by Richard Cook, Chairman of the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group; on Thursday, Nov. 19 at 7:30 p.m. in the Murdough Center's Cook Auditorium, a panel discussion of four noted entertainment industry specialists on the question, "Do the Entertainment Media Set the Moral Agenda For the Country?"; and on Saturday, Nov. 21 at 2 p.m. in Rockefeller Center, concurrent presentations by international peace and human rights activist the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, speaking on "Values are Better Caught than Taught"; Dartmouth Dean of Faculty Edward M. Berger, speaking on "Morality and the New Genetics: The Mind of Pooh in the 21st Century"; and Dartmouth faculty members Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, delivering a presentation titled "Holocaust Memory and Intergenerational Transmission." Admission is free to all but "A Bug's Life," which costs $5 (free with a Dartmouth Film Society pass).

Among the diverse range of topics the program will address are school sexual harassment policies; the Boston Guardian Angels as a medium for adolescent moral development; educational use of the Internet; raising children of faith in post-modern communities; adolescent moral development in rural Iceland, mainland China, Germany, Scotland and the Netherlands; the media as moral model and messenger; and the effects of family law.

Leading up to the AME conference is a one-day moral education "mini-conference" for area primary- and secondary-school teachers on Wednesday, Nov. 18. The conference is the first presentation of a six-month-old consortium of members of Dartmouth's education department and Hanover-area educators that is aimed at creating learning opportunities for both area teachers and Dartmouth education researchers. "Any education department that is severed from its area schools and their excellent teachers is impoverished," said Garrod.