I do not know why the educators of youth have not long since made use of this propensity of reason to enter with pleasure upon the most subtle examination of practical questions put to them, and, why after laying the foundation in a purely moral catechism, they have not searched through biographies of ancient and modern times with the purpose of having examples at hand of the duties they lay down, so that, by comparing similar actions under various circumstances, they could begin to exercise the moral judgment of their pupils in marking the greater or less moral significance of the actions. They would find that even very young people, who are not yet ready for speculation of other kinds, would soon become very acute and not a little interested, since they would feel the progress of their power of judgment. . . . By the mere habit of frequently looking upon actions as praiseworthy or blameworthy, a good foundation would be laid for righteousness in the future course of life.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason.

(Trans. Lewis White Beck)¹

In approaching cultural inheritance, social change and moral education as the challenge of the 21st century for Venezuela and Latin America, it is important first to reflect on how we view this challenge and, consequently, on how we propose to meet it. Following this, I will offer a further critique and some practical proposals respecting both the problem and the sources of solution that are implicit in this structure. It should go virtually without saying, of course, that I can bring no solution with which to enlighten you. The sun, I realize, does not rise in the North. I can bring only a sense of sharing in the challenge (a challenge not only to Latin America but to civilization itself) and a deep sense of that Socratic ignorance which allows us both to share not our wisdom, but our mutual (and largely unsuccessful) experience. As in post-Periclear Athens, we need honest inquiry not sophistry, whatever its source.

THE PROBLEM AS A PROBLEM

Rapidly accelerating "social change", it is asserted commonly, has produced what can only be considered a "crisis" at a deep socio-cultural level, the implications of which directly affect the development of character and the moral formation of the young. The sources of the crisis can be seen to be: first, in an internal migration, essentially a process of chaotic urbanization which has eroded the solidarity of the family; second, in an "explosive immigration" introducing conflicting cultural traditions and histories; third, in the impact of the media (especially television), which, because their aim is to sell, build their content on what can at the most optimistically be called "hedonism"; and fourth and finally, in the turbulent shifts in the economy, linked to international politics, which have frustrated natural goals and expectations.

The crisis induced by these factors has produced a number of symptoms: corruption, violence, widespread drug-abuse. As a consequence, it is argued, we cannot expect -- even hope -- simply to reassert the way of life or the core values of previous times, because, so to speak, the times have changed and the core -- if ever it existed -- has disintegrated into a complex of factors often not only contradictory, but destructive.

Meeting this challenge for our youth will entail: (1) a re-examination and reapplication in contemporary terms of the foundational values drawn from the cultural inheritance, and (2) a clearer understanding of the process of moral formation in "children" and "adolescents" in order to effect the desired change. The first task lies in the province of philosophy, the second in contemporary social and behavioral science. Hence, some propose a three-pronged attack: a philosophical program, a psychological program, a socio-cultural analysis, along with an educational process through which the results of this three-fold inquiry can be realized in practice.

In this customarily adopted general structure I find an important message, the reflection upon which has led me into what promises to be a rather radical reorientation of my own thought. As a consequence, what I have to say is unfinished. Furthermore, none of what follows is advanced as the solution to your problem; the problem is ours together. A recent survey of beginning college students in the United States showed that 76 percent of them think that being "well off financially" is either essential or very important. Only 39 percent believe it very important to develop a "meaningful philosophy of life". Twenty years ago the percentages were almost the reverse, 44 percent and 83 percent respectively -- suggesting a "very profound (change) in the society", according to the survey's director.² If you yourselves see the problem of moral formation as more starkly revealed in the past and present Venezuelan experience, that fact (quite apart from the pain) can mean that you will face it, not hide it as we are inclined to do under the appearance of success. In this way, as well as from the power of your own long historical reflection, there may arise guidance for those of us who can be more conveniently dishonest.

METHOD AS A PROBLEM

The provisional argument that I want to advance runs in two parts, roughly as follows: First, unquestionably, there is a philosophical problem and a critical inquiry attached to it. So, too, is there a psychological problem with its appropriate inquiry. Insofar as it is genuinely moral, moral development is a question that must be addressed through the method of philosophy. We must understand what is good and right and continually examine that understanding. We must also understand the dynamics of human development, of action and change in both youth and adults. The question of why human beings do what they do, or don't do what they don't do, clearly involves a subtle structure of behavior and the still mysterious relation of mind and body. But, while both philosophy and psychology are necessary, neither (I want to insist) is in fact sufficient for our practical and pedagogical purposes. Nor, even, are the two together. Our aim is not merely theoretical. It is to learn how to foster good character and conduct as we live in the world. It is not to think correctly alone, nor to act effectively alone. Intellect and affect meet for our purposes in life, in experience, in history -- however vague or theoretically untidy these terms are. Just as there is no question that philosophy and psychology have a place in our considerations, there is no question that moral action is both called for, and takes place in, the concrete world of ordinary experience, which is also set in a complex social and cultural system. Hence, we need also to examine the matrix of present social and cultural conditions -- which have a history deeply embedded in them, a continuity among the changes. Social-scientific analysis can help us here, but it also will be necessary rather than sufficient. As with psychology (and even much of philosophy, perhaps), social-scientific method is abstract, analytical and often reductionist as well, furnishing an important and entirely legitimate perspective in itself but taking us away from the phenomenon we must deal with as educators and citizens. Our aim is to help persons become good and do what is right, not to make either little moral philosophers or little social and behavioral scientists.

The question for a realistic pedagogy, then, I want to argue, is not only how moral action can be analyzed and understood, but how it can be envisioned in the real settings of moral life and development such that it makes possible better moral response and, in time, a deeper, more stable moral character. I say "envisioned" because I am arguing that intellect and affect, dissolved and separated by an exclusive reliance on philosophical and scientific method, can best be united under life conditions by a vision of the situation and of the self acting morally, and that guidance for this is furnished neither by definitions or rules alone (from the philosophical side) nor some content-free sense of autonomous activity no matter how energetic (from the psychological side). To think without feeling is, to revise Kant's famous dictum, ineffective, to feel or act without thinking is surely blind. Neither, of course, is even really possible -- they are abstractions whose realm is mind, not life. Our problem as educators -- that is to say, for all of us in this case -- is rarely ignorance of defensible principles and definitions of the good. It is what it means for us to be good and to act rightly in an historic time and place, and how to enable persons to see that meaning for themselves and, we hope, to choose to pursue it.

We Are Our Children's Culture

The second element in my argument has to do with the "cultural inheritance" that has attracted so much attention. It is, we seem convinced, in some sense both the source of the problem and the source of its solution. But consider the following: The crucial content of moral development is, we have all agreed, contained in our culture -- as its vehicle at least, thought not necessarily as its fundamental source. That culture, however, while indeed radically determining our young, is not in fact constructed or even controlled by them. It is, as our very terms suggest, an inheritance, i.e., something given to them, bestowed on them by their elders. Hence, in its first instance, the moral development of the young is a problem of the adult community, the problematic nature of which is indeed manifest in the young, but in no sense owes its origin to them. "Their" behavior, so to speak, is in fact a symptom of "our" condition. As a corollary, attempts to change them apart from changing ourselves -- a matter over which, I suppose, we do have some power -- are in principle not only fruitless, but radically dishonest. Our predisposition to think that our primary task is to correct the young without relation to ourselves may even be yet one more serious symptom of the moral degeneration of us all.

Furthermore, respecting the educational implications of this argument, I doubt whether this process is, or ever can be, reduced to a technique. Indeed, the notion that the "challenge" we are addressing will be met by finding a technique is a testimonial of how captive we are to one of the most seriously morally debilitating element in our cultural inheritance -- the notion that the good can be "engineered" from without, apart from involving our own being and character -- a being and character which unites in us, before it does so in our children, society and culture, intellect and affect, past and future.

Before undertaking some further reflections on what the proposed analytical structure and justification have to say to us as moral educators, let me briefly recapitulate the argument. In sum, I am saying that valuable and legitimate as they are in their own right, neither (1) abstract philosophical approaches -- i.e., approaches I will later call "juridical" because they focus on defining and justifying principles or rules for guiding behavior, nor (2) abstract empirical generalizations about human action and its development, i.e., theoretical analyses of "human" behavior will suffice. Even when seen as coming together in "life," if (3) that setting is itself apprehended in the similarly abstract categories of social-cultural science, the prescriptions of conventional moral philosophy and the generalizations of behavioral science are not sufficient as the foundation for an educational program of moral development. Furthermore, I have argued that (4) our justification of the needed project as a task to be performed on the young raises its own serious questions.

I would now add (5) that to see our task as a problem that is a consequence of largely outside forces (from the control of which we absolve ourselves as adults), fatally masks the nature of a cultural inheritance and further flaws any process of transmission. Clearly, we meet in this study as a consequence of a national and regional history that can be described as tragic in the classical sense. For now nearly five centuries, Venezuela and Latin America in general have been exploited by corona, caudillo, comerciante, and catedratico. The first two are obvious and have traditionally been useful for the purpose of self-exculpation. Corona and caudillo both represented an "externally" imposed power that it is difficult to fault our forefathers and mothers from falling under. It is less easy to absolve them or ourselves from exploitation by the comerciante, since he was welcomed rather more voluntarily as a refuge from the former. And, increasingly, and still more embarrassingly, the catedratico -- a figure first appearing in an Enlightenment that illuminated only an elite, and who now reappears as the technocrat -- the expert whose arcane knowledge controls, but cannot be shared with, those whose lives it determines. Finally, it has to be said that much of this was done con clericia, the Church as a political power exercising a shadowy influence over the centuries, not always or everywhere on the side of injustice, to be sure, but sufficiently frequently to prompt, or at least appear to justify, a widespread cynicism regarding the fruitfulness of theological solutions to our social and moral problems.

Now, I do not wish to appear an ungracious guest. I could construct an equally cynical and conspiratorial account of our past in the United States. Indeed, the radical historians have already saved me the trouble. But, the point is that whatever partial validity such a "history" may have, it is dangerous to invoke it too conveniently, to let it become in its own perverse way the conventional moral wisdom. What is now important, and has been at each stage in our social and cultural development, is how we respond to what we take to be our history, the choices we make in its presence. When used to explain why we are what we are and why we "can't help" being this way, invoking such a history comes dangerously close to what the Freudians call "attribution" -- the location of our difficulties outside ourselves as the cheapest form of absolution and self-protection.

But we need not look only to a remembered past to find a debilitating moral posture in our culture. Reflection quite appropriately points to the present as well, though perhaps not sharply enough. We must be clear, however, that here again they have pointed to our problems, not just those of the young. We do indeed wrestle, to paraphrase St. Paul, against economic and political principalities and powers, which can be seen to account for corruption and moral retreat. But they are not outside us. To pretend so is, to use your own delicious idiom, "to blot out the sun with your thumb." We choose to cooperate in these institutions and processes, to be willing citizens, daily thereby furnishing (in our willingness to conform) powerful "moral" images to the young. If we need to confirm the proposition that our problems are not simply the products of an "ancient" history which we cannot escape, nor simply thrust upon us from the outside, we need only look at our current "mores", our present institutions and our roles in them.

Example: A now secularized compadrazgo, emptied of its erstwhile spiritual meaning and sense of moral responsibility. In the United States it is, we say, "the old boy network" or (even less flatteringly) "cronyism." It is doing favors for self-advantage under cover of what was once a sacred relationship. Like "Semana Sancta" and "Carnaval," it is nothing more than secularized self-indulgence.

Example: A judicial apparatus in which justice is sufficiently deferred and circumscribed as usually to turn into injustice -- at least for the powerless. Its only "virtue" appears to be garnering large revenues for the legal "profession" and an endless procession of bureaucrats.

Example: An even cruder self-indulgence born not of the bad (old) times but the good (recent) times in which relatively fewer and fewer have had more and more. The flights to Miami and New York (not to mention, London, Paris, and Madrid) to buy the good life and carry it back. Some stagger under burdens at the viasa gates in JFK and Miami International. "Ta barato; dame dos" is a moral maxim so plain that it could be a subtitle for this paper.

My purpose, however, is not a moral diatribe. The point is that social and cultural "conditions" do not, except under the canons of an extreme social and behavioral determinism, destroy the possibility of genuinely moral action, or ever weaken it. They do in fact call for it. Indeed, if we are to blame "the times" for our moral difficulties, it was perhaps the "good" times, not the "bad" times that began the process of decline. "Conditions" do set the terms of moral response, but they neither create it nor negate its possibility, let alone its content. And, particularly in the absence of more powerful and shared images, it is our day-to-day choices that embody what is "moral" for our young.

FINDING A NEW PERSPECTIVE

I am indebted to Robert Coles not only for some of the most important elements in the analysis I have just been making, but for prompting me to reconsider much in our traditional approach to moral education. In particular, his recent book, The Moral Life of Children, has lead me to look at many of the things about which I have just been talking. Coles "confesses" that, as a good and loyal Freudian behavioral scientist, he had always been inclined to subsume what children and adults thought and did under the standard psychological categories. When he began to look at the moral response people actually made to crises like racial conflict and the most demeaning poverty (not only in the United States, but in Latin America) these categories not only did not work, they obscured the process. He found that "these same children [who were in the grip of crisis] forged a moral life -- an outlook that often followed, rather than preceded, a series of events." He began to ask, "What sources give them the moral purpose they develop in the life they live?"³ He gives no easy, finished answers. But there is something there in these people, something shared with family and others, that allows these persons to interpret the difficulties they have encountered and transcend them rather than simply becoming victims. Much of it is a religious content -- a content scrupulously avoided by orthodox behavioral scientists, or reduced to some mechanism that is at least faintly pathological. What these children carried was some interpretative images that sprang to life in the face of pain and conflict. They had come to possess in some mysterious way that eludes us (if only because our categories have kept us from looking for it) what can be called a "moral imagination." Through this imagination they could see meaning and value to their lives and apprehend what a moral response would be. Through these images, so to speak, they could see what things meant and what they should do.

It is important to caution, however, that the argument I am trying to give relies on neo-romantic fiction. Whatever the shortcomings of what we might call, adapting Whitehead, the fallacy of mis-placed responsibility -- the notion that the moral problematic of our time lies largely with the young -- there can be no doubt that we must do something together with the young. While they have not made the conditions that demand moral response, nor are they the bearers of the culture out of which all of us must draw relevant moral content, the young are neither neutral nor automatically morally wise. No more than we, are they merely helpless pawns in a social-cultural game manipulated by powers "off the board." When they are confronted with occasions demanding moral understanding and choice, they must be able to see these situations in moral terms and have something to respond with. The moral educator's question is, then, a deceptively simple one: What do those in moral crisis need in order not just to think differently, but to respond differently, and how do they get it?

In the United States two of our most popular answers to effective moral development -- answers that are, unfortunately, widely exported -- are the cognitive-developmental approaches made popular by the work of the late Lawrence Kohlberg and the crudely psychological approaches disseminated by Simon and Raths under the rubric of "values clarification." The difficulty with the latter is that, while it may leave the individual "clear" about his "real" desires (descriptively seen as "values") and their potential empirical effects, he or she is left without guidance precisely at the point required by what we have traditionally defined as moral choice. Although, for example, I may come to see that I very much desire wealth (and hence it is a "value" to me), the question of whether I ought to pursue wealth (desired or not) in any particular case cannot be answered within this framework. Paradoxically, values clarification has been popular because it is thought to be "value neutral" -- though it is not, of course -- and hence socially and educationally less controversial.

Kohlberg's approaches, under a number of variant forms, do not evade the moral-philosophical foundations necessary for any scheme of moral choice or moral development. The problems arise over their form. Dykstra subsumes these approaches under the category of "juridical" ethics -- an ethic focusing on the form of the rules necessary for moral judgment.⁴ As you no doubt know, this is an approach drawing heavily upon Kant and Piaget for its substance and method. The purpose of this paper is not a full-scale critique of either Kohlberg or any other particular method. Nonetheless, I want to examine some criticisms of the juridical approach that point, I believe, to a pedagogically better solution.

The juridical school focuses on models of rational moral choice as leading to, and shaping action seen as a kind of dilemma. In the now classic example, "Heinz," whose "wife" is dying, must decide whether or not to steal a potentially life-saving drug from a "druggist" who refuses to give it to him without full price. The moral development question is at what formal level of principle will the person confronted with Heinz's moral dilemma choose to see and resolve the problem of choice. Clearly, this is all meant to point us to life, but it does not, if I may put it this way, appear to be enmeshed in any life we could recognize. It sets some parameters of choice as admittedly a necessary condition for acting, but tells us nothing about the carrying out of that action in ongoing experience -- and that seems to be as much a part of what we need to become moral as the results of a particular Kantian deduction.

There is in these approaches an attitude that is characteristic of much contemporary moral philosophy and moral educational theory as well. Its source is, I suppose, in the Kantian tradition, in spite of the fact that it manifests itself variously as in both analytical and situational ethics. It is perhaps not too strong to call it a kind of arrogance, stemming from the notion that we can first think, and then will, virtually by ourselves, not only our own perfection but that of the world around us. In order to become good, we need others only in the sense that they need to think and will the same thing. Our lives have no other necessary interrelationship.

The Kohlberg method thus sems abstract, essentially private, non-historical, and culturally empty. (That Kohlberg recognized the inadequacy of the private may be inferred from his later work with the "just community," but that seems to me to be only a group effort at a still essentially private activity -- and it has not enjoyed marked success). Note that, in the dilemma, only Heinz has a name -- though the name is strictly speaking meaningless. Assuming he is a person, he meets moral choice only in formal objects who are abstract functions and conditions: "wife" and "druggist." Earlier, I suggested that principle and desire, the cognitive and the affective, are brought into unity in life. How do we understand life? In a narrative mode, I believe; as a story, peopled, full of history, and culturally conditioned -- never in the mode of naked intellectual deduction alone. Our moral life is lived in a world not of abstract functions and relations, but of persons and things, concrete times and places, feelings, longings, hopes, fears -- the characteristics, in other words, of our visions not our thoughts, and still less our internal mechanisms and drives.

It is customary to accuse Aristotle of "circularity" when he finally resolves the problem of moral choice in terms of what "the good man does." It seems to me, however, that in the shorthand style of the Nicomachean Ethics, we have in this appeal an important move, a stepping into moral life, into living, in the sense that I am trying to get at here. And, as you may have noted from the heading of this paper, even Kant himself, the supreme abstractionist, father to so much of contemporary moral and educational theory, insists that educationally it is not only rules for definition, but examples of action that must be considered.

NURTURING THE MORAL IMAGINATION

The problem, it sems to me, is that it is not simply moral rules but moral vision that is our concern. That is to say, images of what it means to be good, to do what is right, held in amoral imagination that gives a full account not merely of problems and principles, but of the rich context within which human beings always act. These images to which I refer are the moral images embedded in our culture, and our history. Because these images are embedded in a culture that transcends individuals and ages, they not only can be, but by nature are, transgenerational, linking us together rather than privatizing us as is so often the case in contemporary life. They are set in shared stories, enabling us to see our lives as stories -- stories that intersect and overlap with others' stories. They unite not only thought and emotion but the adult and the child. They are not images of moral principle, but of moral living -- though that does not mean that questions of principle are irrelevant to them.

In some further important respects moral images, set in social, cultural, and historical narratives, are potentially more fruitful than principles and definitions alone. Not only do they address life as it is or can be lived, they initiate moral reflection as a process. Perhaps even more importantly, they do not terminate it. Needless to say, conclusions must be drawn if human beings are to act, and the juridical mode reaches conclusions efficiently. Images of moral action, however, persist after the point of decision, continuing to draw us on and shape us. Our immediate thoughts and actions do not exhaust them.

By this point, I am sure you are saying, considering some examples of these "images," with all their mysterious power, is long overdue. They are, it seems to me, essentially of two kinds: real and fictional. They are mediated through history and biography and through literature, respectively. They rely upon art as the mode of appropriation -- but by art I do not mean some necessarily non- or contra-rational process. To be satisfactory for our purposes, they cannot be private, mere day dreams which we invent to please ourselves. They are communal. They are located in the culture and the history that we all both share and transmit, the latter not simply in the sense of "passing on", but continuously responding to and creating through our own speaking and actions.

Consider first two images, both in this case drawn from the Christian tradition. (The fact that they are drawn from the Christian tradition does not mean that no good moral images can be found outside it, nor that these images are unintelligible to others. Nor, conversely, does it means that images from outside this tradition are unintelligible within it -- crucial matters in a "pluralistic" society.) The images are Mother Theresa and the Good Samaritan in the biblical parable. One is contemporary, historical, "real." The other fictional, and (as is frequently the case) invented for a moral purpose.

The setting of the "Good Samaritan" is crucial. In this narrative, a lawyer interrogates Jesus, demanding a definition of the supreme moral-religious law. Jesus provides the orthodox formula: unqualified love of God and your neighbor. But the lawyer, wanting to "justify" or "vindicate" himself, poses a further problem: Who is my neighbor? How am I to recognize, to see him? The reply is a story, not a definition or a principle: A man, robbed and beaten and lying beside the road, is ignored by priest and Levite (both experts in making fine, principled judgments). An outcast Samaritan, taking pity (an affective response), washes him, bandages his wounds, carries him to an inn, pays his bill in advance, and promises to return. "Which," Jesus then asks, was "neighbor?" "The one who showed kindness," the lawyer responds. "Go and do as he did," Jesus concludes.

There is, of course, a complex of elements brought together in these few words, personal, political, theological. That is to say, there is an insight into life in a real world, and (thanks to the masterful art that forms and conveys the story to us) a world that is still real. We have no difficulty peopling it in contemporary terms. When you pass a derelict, a drunk or an accident victim on your comfortable way home, this story will haunt you, because you can't escape from it by invoking historical or cultural relativism. You can try to put it out of your mind, but you cannot really forget it, once you have heard it. There is emotion, thought, risk, sacrifice, continued responsibility -- all that and more. It was easy, as the lawyer knew, to give the principle; the question was what the principle meant in the sense of how it was carried out in living -- in a life that, because it is dynamic and personal and ongoing, cannot be captured in the most meticulous definition. Morality, character, virtue, is a doing, not merely a caring or thinking, and a doing requires a vision of action in context, not a formula. As Iris Murdoch insists, we must see the world rightly first, without "fantasy," as a part of seeing what is moral.⁵ Finally, it is because it is a story, a narrative answer, that we can (indeed must) continue to puzzle over it, growing in our appreciation of it, as we continue living. It not only proposes a decision, it continues to judge us as we carry it out and long after that.

In the case of Mother Theresa, of course, we have a story still in process -- a story, it is worth noting, that continues the story we have just considered: When she found herself in India, she saw the poor lying in the streets, showed pity, carried them away, and paid their bill, for as long as it took. This was the simplest of acts: to enable human beings who have enjoyed no dignity in life at least to die with dignity. As a "real" story, and a contemporary one, we can actually see her acts -- watch her hands and eyes, see her body as it expresses a consuming love totally without self-aggrandizement. We can hear her explanation of her acts -- her motives, principles, interpretations, and even her recommendations for us. And, we can go out tomorrow -- today, in fact -- and see right here in Venezuela those who, transformed by her story, are at work continuing her story. That is, we can do so if we dare. We probably won't, because that story is potentially revolutionary, socially (economically and politically), culturally, and personally. But the story won't go away -- if, that is, we choose to tell it and risk the vision it can bring about.

Finally, my original intent was to consider a third kind of image, one that might, broadly speaking, be called "secular" and, if possible, one that was Venezuelan in origin and context. Though admittedly I have had to search from afar, I have had difficulty finding any such story. When I first visited Caracas, my attention was drawn immediately to the three or four times daily playing of the national anthem on Venevisión, accompanied by illustrations from the life of Simón Bolivar. If it is still a custom, or if you remember it, I leave it to you to sort out the moral story in the jumble of nationalistic, militaristic and machismo images. It seemed to me nothing but a cartoon of an important life, crudely drawn and failing to manifest the richness of its subject. But it was, of course, an important moral image.

There are, I am told, for the very young the stories about "Uncle Rabbit and Uncle Tiger" (Tio Conejo and Tio Tigre), in which wiliness defeats threatening outside forces -- a domestic version of the Fables of La Fontaine, I presume, something like our Uncle Remus stories in the United States. Again, a significant "moral" image, especially in the absence of any others, but perhaps not the one we most want to communicate. There must be others, and better, but I must leave that to you.

We have, in the United States, a number of potential sources for the moral images I am talking about, though it is important to note that they are often considered old-fashioned and consequently not widely used in our schools. At the secondary level, for example, there is much that fills this function in the 19th and early 20th century fiction -- e.g., Melville's Billy Budd -- and a number of recent works by Walker Percy, James Agee, and Flannery O'Connor, to name only a few. Among the most powerful potential sources is Robert Bolt's splendid play, A Man for All Seasons, on the life of Thomas More (also available on film). The difficulty is that, when such works are included in the "literature" curriculum they are often looked at therapeutically rather than morally. They are, along with everything else, turned into psychological exercises designed to help us feel "normal" and "accepted," the exact opposite of the coming under judgment from outside our private lives that is characteristic of moral development. Sometimes they are included, but made the occasion simply for analysis, their plots examined for examples not of moral content, but of literary genres, or even the scientific "laws" of cause and effect! Not long ago, I saw a second grade class categorizing myths and fairy tales without once being asked to pay any attention to what they are trying to say. None of that will do, of course.

Among others, Coles singles out Harper Lee's brilliant novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, to show how the story (again, as a text or in its excellent screen version) can provoke the critical moral imagination of young and old. It is the story of Atticus Finch, a southern lawyer whose lot is to defend (unsuccessfully) a black man, Tom Robinson, on a charge of raping a "poor white" southern girl, Mayella Ewell. The main plot is seen through the eyes of Finch's two children, six-year-old "Scout" and her ten-year-old brother, Jem. There is also a sub-plot involving a mysterious neighbor, Boo Radley, a mentally handicapped boy who comes to the defense of the children when the community vents its wrath on them because it cannot understand the father's willingness to do the simple, decent thing that his profession demands. Coles shows us how powerful these images are in stimulating moral reflection, in a concrete and personal way, by children and adults.

What does this mean for the content and program of moral education? It seems to me that Coles offers testimony that supports the ethic of vision held in the imagination about which I have been talking, though he does not propose to explain the process in the conventional sense. Coles draws few conclusions at all about the process in general. He finds it at bottom a kind of "mystery," which he addresses with remarks that are brief, open and tentative. Though couched in softly Freudian terms, they are designed rather to move us to a new kind of inquiry than to map authoritatively (let alone doctrinairly) the territory of moral development.

As Coles sees it, the process may go something like this: The child moves from the warm world of care for needs (the "garden," in Freud's terminology) and exclusive attention, innocent and self-satisfying to the experience of another form of concern. This concern involves a "No!" momentarily appearing to qualify love. The child struggles with self and others, give and take, limitation, a new sense of self and ideals, and a subjection to others' ideals -- the moral content of groups and institutions larger than the family. In this passage "east of Eden" there enter images that interpret and order conflict, shame, and confusion. Sometimes these are manifest in personal roles, the living witness of Martin Luther King, for example. Very often, he finds, they are Biblical. What does appear clear is that they are called for by events in which the persons find themselves. "A beckoning history," he says, "offers, uncannily, a blend of memory [of the goodness of the past] and desire; a chance of struggle for a new situation that holds a large promise, while earning along the way the approval of one's parents, neighbors, friends, and, not least, oneself." In short, "an ego ideal given a new lease on life and reality," the "moral life gets a wonderful charge of energy: an old dream has become newly sanctioned by a fateful turn of history." But, throughout, it is communicated and worked out in a vast array of images as the stuff of a moral imagination that sems vital to moral response.⁶

It is important to note, however, that these moral images need not be highly complex or philosophically contrived. Nor should they be, says even Kant, superheroic:

But I wish they would spare them examples of so-called noble (super-meritorious) actions, which so fill our sentimental writings, and would refer everything to duty only and the worth which a man can and must give himself in his own eyes through the consciousness of not having transgressed his duty, since whatever runs up into empty wishes and longings for unattainable perfection produces mere heroes of romance, who, while priding themselves on their feeling of transcendent greatness, release themselves from observing the common and everyday responsibility, as petty and insignificant.⁷

We do not need Superman, of course, because he represents not a resolution of our problems but an escape from them by the intervention of a figure from outside. This, it seems to me, is not only a particularly important point in Venezuela -- consider, if you will, pre-election political scenes -- but also in the United States where secular (or not so secular) messiahs are becoming increasingly attractive as well. Yet, to make the simple task, the unsung responsibility, not merely "petty and insignificant" is a very difficult thing, especially after an age in which we have permitted ourselves to believe, as one United States school leader used to put it, that "every child can be a winner." My work takes me frequently into diaries and other biographical accounts of very ordinary nineteenth century people. What often impresses me is just the way in which they see themselves as participating in an important, on-going history no matter how humble their roles. And it is just this quality that seems to separate us from these people and to measure in some sense our moral decline.

What, If Anything, Can We Do?

I will conclude with a few, very modest practical reflections. We cannot, I have been saying, simply transliterate philosophical or psychological talk into educational terms and have a regimen for moral education and character development. Philosophy, psychology and social science can contribute to a radically new regimen if, and only if, they are merged in a life of imagination and vision through which we do not "cure" the young or "set them straight," but in which we join together in the shared process of becoming good. Furthermore, I have been saying that the process is neither outside us nor forced upon us by some intractable social-cultural reality. Our ongoing history does call us, it does not coerce us. "Attribution" is not merely a defective psychological mechanism; it is at least an evil; it may indeed be a sin.

Whether my argument is accepted and, if so, what should follow from it, are questions that should properly be left to dialogue. What is most important, I have really been arguing, is for us to see the question in different terms as touching not only content and method, but cultural context as well. If "the culture" is both the source and the problem, what are we to do? How are we to build new (or revive old) images and narratives so that we can have a genuine moral story, a genuine moral history as a prelude to a "dreamed" future? There is, of course, no one culture anymore, a fact to which I have paid insufficient attention in spite of the fact that it has carefully been pointed out. And, to wait to transform all our societies and all our culture as a whole, is a counsel of perfection that immediately becomes a counsel of despair. We can, however, move to transform the institutions in which we choose to participate and for which we have genuine responsibility. The family (defective or not), the Church community and perhaps even our schools, are still open to our efforts in some sense. Business and politics, the conventional professions -- perhaps less certainly. What is certain, however, is that any change will involve us, not some target group -- our youth, transnational corporations, foreign militarists, or even a Medellin-type Cartel.

It would appear that only where there still remains some genuine pool of shared values can any of this reformation begin. And it is perhaps yet one more example of our modern hubris that we often prefer to think in grand, total terms. In the words of Stanley Hauerwas: "The development of men of truthful vision and virtue, however, will not come from wider society. Rather such men will come from the communities that have had the confidence in the truth of their images and symbols to use and embody them seriously and without embarrassment."⁸

Finally, I am really saying little more than many of your own leading thinkers and social critics have said, from Bolivar to Betancourt, not to mention a number of contemporary voices. The hope, the long dream, of a better world, a better nation, with more democracy and more justice, less poverty and less oppression for all, rests on the possibility of a shared moral vision. Nothing less. Without it, we shall be left condemned, in those poignant words of Bolivar, "to plow the seas."

School of Education

The Pennsylvania State University, PA

1. Immanuel Kant. Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, trans. and ed., Lewis White Beck (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1949), Part II, "Methodology of Pure Practical Reason," pp. 251f.

As will be evident in the paper that follows, I do not attach this quotation because I think Kant provides us with the answers for moral education. Quite the reverse. However right he was about principles and rules, isolated as they are from history and human community, they furnish us with little understanding of our moral life. In this passage Kant means, of course, only to illustrate rules, not to find what is good and right by considering examples. When, however, he makes this concession to the problem of teaching persons to understand the good and the right, even seeing it as a kind of universal and natural phenomenon, he passes over something of great importance that his system cannot take account of. At the same time I do not want to suggest that Kant has nothing to say to us. That would be an equally egregious error.

2. Alexander Astin, in the 1987 Annual ACE-UCLA Study of the values of college students in the United States.

3. Robert Coles, The Moral Life of Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), pp. 12, 13.

4. Craig R. Dykstra. Vision and Character-A Christian Educator's Alternative to Kohlberg (New York, Paulist Press, 1981).

5. Iris Murdoch, as discussed in Stanley Hauerwas. Vision and Virtue-Essays in Christian Ethical Reflection (Notre Dame, Indiana: Fides Publishers, 1974).

6. Coles, pp. 30-35, the quotation is at p. 35.

7. Kant, op. cit., p. 252.

8. Hauerwas, op. cit., p. 8.

Erikson, Erik H. (ed.). Youth: Change and Challenge. New York: Basic Books, 1963.

Gustafson, James M., Theology and Christian Ethics. Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1974.

Knowles, Richard, ed. Psychological Foundations for Moral Education and Character Development: An Integrated Theory of Moral Development. Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1992.

Lynch, William F. Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless. Baltimore: Helicon, 1965.

McLean, George, et al. (eds), Act and Agent. Philosophical Foundations for Moral Education and Character Development. Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1992. See esp. "Affectivity: the Power Base of Moral Behavior" by Sebastian A. Samay, pp. 71-114.

McLean, George and F. Ellrod, eds. Philosophical Foundations for Moral Education and Character Development: Act and Agent. Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1992.

Meyer, John R. (ed.). Reflections on Value Education. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1976.

Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of the Good. New York: Schocken Books, 1971.

"The Sublime and the Good." Chicago Review, 13 (1959), pp. 37-58.

"Against Dryness: A Polemical Sketch." Encounter, 16 (1961)

"The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited." Yale Review, 49 (1959).

Niebuhr, Helmut Richard. The Responsible Self; An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy. James M. Gustafson (ed). New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

Pears, David Francis (ed.). The Nature of Metaphysics. New York: St. Martins Press, 1957.

Ramsey, Ian T. (ed). Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy. New York: Macmillan, 1966.

Ryan, Kevin and Thomas Lickona, ed. Character Development in Schools and Beyond. Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1992.

Warnock, Mary. Imagination. London: Faber and Faber, 1976.