| An Ethics curriculum for the public school classroom can provide an important intervention and possibly constructive change for American teenagers, toward more cooperation with family, religious and spiritual organizations, the media and other concerned sectors of society. The need to address a moral philosophy and moral development for young people is a clear and urgent need. I propose the need for a gender-balanced and ethnically diverse curriculum for middle school based upon the values of the Bill of Rights, the Preamble to, and the United States Constitution and the amendments that serve to correct its inequities.; When we ask the question of what is missing for youth in present day United States society, one should recognize that their values instruction has primarily been a hierarchical, masculinist, and Eurocentric model. I propose to use a more egalitarian, gender-balanced, and ethnically diverse participatory model of research and instruction to address the concern for our children's moral education. My work is informed by the feminist works of Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Alice Walker and Riane Eisler, educators Paulo Freire and A. S. Neill, and moral developmentalists Lawrence Kohlberg and John Rawls, among others, speaking about this deeply important subject. This curriculum would support teenagers and their families where values are established, and more poignantly, where values are threatened. |
