Social education and ethics: an evaluationKaguongo Wambari
The central place that values occupy in any human society in general and in the lives of individual members of such a society in particular, cannot be overemphasized. Decline in social and moral values inevitably sets off a marked degeneration in the quality of life for the society. It is this sort of perception that prompted the National Committee on Educational Objectives and Policies (NCEOP) to recommend in 1976 the introduction of the teaching of Social Education and Ethics (SEE) in Kenya Secondary Schools.
Background to Social Education and EthicsNCEOP accurately perceived the state of crisis of social and moral values in which Kenya was then and which, I hasten to add, has become worse since. It aimed at seeing that something should happen beyond "the continually ineffective public condemnation of social problems such as corruption, nepotism, tribalism and idleness due to lack of the necessary supporting moral and civic education." (1) The Committee formed the opinion that moral and civic education would be effective in combating the crisis of values gripping Kenya to this day.The NCEOP report expressed the view that "the teaching of ethics should go into the details of the social norms underlying all aspects of human behaviour irrespective of whether one is religious, atheistic, agnostic or adheres to any other belief...." (2) Up until 1986, when Social Education and Ethics as a separate course was launched, consequent to the NCEOP recommendation, the teaching of ethics, i.e. Moral Education (ME), was entrusted to Religious Education (RE) and that of Social Education presumably to Social Studies (SS). Religious Studies was at that time firmly established mainly in the form of either Christian Religious Education (CRE) or Islamic Religious Education (IRE). The recommendation was based on the assumption that Kenya citizens, irrespective of their varied religious beliefs, could formulate a common system of values through consensus as evidenced by the constitution and the laws of the land. The idea was to disentangle the teaching of moral education from the teaching of religious education as the two were seen to have been "mixed up" (3) The point was that religion could not be used as the only basis for the teaching of social ethics. The need was therefore thus described: "to institute specifically the teaching of basic social ethics" (4) as a course on its own just as, equally, RE was to continue being taught. The argument was that social ethics cuts across the whole of society where every member, as a human being, must do everything to adhere to what is essentially "a basic code of survival," It was seen that varying degrees of adherence to religion by individual citizens made it impossible for religion to be used as the only basis for the teaching of moral education. Clearly, any given religion is partisan and as such divisive. Its values are based on its peculiar doctrines unlikely to be shared in common on the basis of consensus. In 1988, the report of the Presidential Working Party on Education and Manpower Training for the Next Decade and Beyond, otherwise called "Kamunge report", went even further and recommended that SEE be taught universally to all students at all levels of education in Kenya. That is how important the Working Party considered social and moral education to be. The purpose of the SEE course is to help the learners to consider and reflect upon their social and moral values and, if need be, modify them appropriately for the well being of the society of which they are a part. It aims at cultivating moral and social insight in the learners to provide direction as they confront the various aspects of complex human life. The general objective is to help learners endeavour to foster harmonious relationships between themselves and others. Moral and Social education is intended to help the learner understand acceptable moral and social conduct and to provide the tools for making right decisions and judgements as need arises. It is not a doctrine to adhere to but rather a process of enablement. The course endeavours to help the learners understand the need to have good reasons for opting one way or the other; to take all relevant facts into consideration; to consider the interests of the community of which one is a part; and to weigh the consequences of one's decisions. In short, the course is a means to the good life. In the view of the NCEOP report, lack of ethical foundation for such a life will "constitute a basis for the disintegration and, in the long run, degeneration of the quality of life of society and eventual social death." (5). To forestall such an eventuality, Michael Pritchard proposes certain basic virtues desirable for all children to develop: "self-discipline, compassion, honesty, courage, responsibility, the capacity for friendship, work, perseverance, loyalty, and faith in some sort of goodness." (6) Social Education and Ethics as a normative discipline attempts to identify guiding values in all areas of our existence as human beings. It can safely be taken as a given that a good percentage of Kenyan parents value some kind of moral and social education for their children. This is perhaps because parents assume responsibility for the conduct of their offspring possibly because it reflects on the kind of upbringing they have undergone. Whatever the reason, it is a common practice, for instance, to see parents (especially fathers) dropping their children at church compounds for Sunday School. They, personally, may seem to have no use for the church and may even disappear to the golf club or even to the bar only to reappear after Sunday School to take the children home. This way they ensure that their children get the dose of moral education embedded within religion. (Little do such parents appreciate that children learn values even more from adults' actions and attitudes than from what they hear.) It should surprise no one that the teaching of ME was entrusted solely to RE teachers in Kenya up to 1986 given "the traditional role of religion to provide a strict moral code for the community" as the NCEOP report has it. Without Social Education and Ethics, the education of children is rightly considered incomplete. Commenting on bringing character education to schools recently, President Clinton is cited by Pritchard to have said the following: "We disagree about a lot of things, but we ought to be able to agree that our schools should [teach] people [to] ... tell the truth, they should respect themselves and each other. They ought to be good citizens which means that we should assume responsibility for obeying the law and for helping others to develop themselves and each other. We ought to practice fairness and tolerance and trustworthiness. These things should be taught in our schools." (7) Anyone who contemplates the present state of moral decay in our society as evidenced by corruption, HIV/AIDS, greed, dishonesty, lack of patriotism, crime and insecurity will reach no other conclusion than that SEE ought to occupy a central place in our educational system.
Self-RelianceAn important distinguishing characteristic between the 8-4-4 system of education and the previous system, the 7-4-2-3 , is the emphasis, at least in intent, on self-reliance. The system promises that the learners at each exit point, i.e. at Standard VIII, Form IV, or at university, will have achieved some degree of self-reliance. In his foreword to "Social Education and Ethics Syllabus for Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education", in 1985, the then Director of Education, Mr. P.E. Kinyanjui, described the main objective of SEE as being "to prepare the learner for self-reliance" among other objectives such as self-discipline, integrity, cooperation and patriotism." That the Director of Education should have highlighted self-reliance for SEE is not at all surprising. SEE is an integral part of 8-4-4 system of education and, as such, it ought to have self-reliance as a a component. But what do we mean by self-reliance?Self-reliance is a state of being in which a person takes charge of his life and directs it in an autonomous way. A self-reliant person is therefore self or inner directed as opposed to being other- or externally-directed. He prompts and drives himself in decision- and judgement-making guided only by his perceptions and understanding, which are reasonably grounded on relevant facts, circumstances and possible consequences of the open options. Morally and socially self-reliant persons would therefore be those kind of persons who would determine moral and social values on their own. That is to say, the kind of persons who would be able to judge right and wrong without the need for any commands or prohibitions from external sources. In the realm of determining values, this is part of what it means to say that human persons were created in the image of their Maker. The degree to which we are self-reliant and therefore autonomous, is the very degree to which we approximate our Maker in this respect. Because of constant changes in human life and the complexity of human existence, self-reliance becomes even more urgent in modern life. However, we must not confuse self-reliance with self-sufficiency. Whereas the former means relying, as much as possible, on one's own powers, the latter means having the ability to supply one's own needs without any external assistance. A country which does not have to import food for its citizens is self-sufficient in that respect. One thing that points to the direction of self-reliance is reasonableness.
Reasonableness in SEEIn the words of Michael Pritchard "Whatever else a good moral education should involve, it should cultivate the reasonableness of children." (8). Reasonableness of children empowers "them to think for themselves, both now as children and later as responsible adults we hope they will become." (9).Whenever I ask my First Year university students why it is wrong to steal, their answers almost invariably reflect shallow reasoning. Students say that it is wrong to steal because of reasons such as: it is forbidden by God; society disapproves of it; one might suffer mob justice; the law is against it; one might be caught, and similar answers. It is a rare student who will venture deeper to seek more relevant and convincing reasons such as deprivation of rightful ownership, dishonesty, lack of integrity; undermining security of possessions and mutual trust, encouraging laziness, liable to become a victim of stealing. Ordinary Kenyans do not exhibit better reasoning about moral and social values. When allegations were made in the Press recently about the sale of certificates, somebody from Kenya National Examinations Council was reported to have warned those involved to stop it "as this would land them in jail." Now, while it may very well land them in jail, it may also not do so, as indeed, it has not yet! But the evil of such acts remains. What is at stake here? The reliability of the school certificates: people will lose trust in them. Worse still, the Council itself and all the people associated with it will lose their credibility as their trustworthiness is put into question. SEE must endeavour to disabuse the Kenyan society of deficient reasoning, by developing moral and social reasonableness based on what really makes wrong acts wrong and right acts right. The learners need to be helped to reason that, for instance, an act cannot be right merely because it is commanded no matter who the commander might be. Rather, acts ought to be commanded because they are right. They are right because they serve humanity to enhance its good or to minimize its harm. Our students need to know that even when acts are commanded by God, they are so commanded because they are right, not right because of being merely commanded. Students need to be helped to learn to reason from the standpoint that the wrong is what undermines, and the right is what makes human life good and worthwhile, and that even the Ten Commandments are quite consistent with this view.
Learning in SEEThe crisis in social and moral values is an immediate signal that the teaching of ME has not been effective. This may very well have to do with the way we teach since the product cannot be divorced from the process. The methodology of teaching nearly all subjects is didactic. Didactic teaching amounts to telling learners what to think and believe. The learners internalize what is passed on virtually passively, largely by rote memorization to produce it on demand, for instance, during examinations. For purposes of SEE, this will simply not do. In the teaching of values, we need to involve learners actively while we teach them, so that they can participate as inquirers, creators of knowledge and decision makers. A methodological shift is therefore called for from didactic teaching to engaged teaching, characterized by active learner-involvement in order to cultivate the relevant virtues.The idea that to educate is to pass on accumulated knowledge from one generation to the next needs to be critically re-evaluated. No knowledge can be taken for granted. All supposed knowledge needs to be interrogated and thought through to assess its basis, status and justification. Active involvement of learners in the process of learning is to make them accountable for what they learn. This is the methodology that is likely to make learners appropriate what they learn as their own, since it enhances understanding and diminishes room for memorization, mere recall or parroting. Pritchard has observed that "to deprive students of opportunities in the schools to reflect critically on moral issues is to deprive them of an educational right as basic as any other."(10) Lipman and Sharp on their part hold the opinion that: "To educate is to help children by equipping them with the procedures that will enable them most effectively to explore and understand the subject matter under discussion, to the end that they can think for themselves about the issues which the subject presupposes. Those who indoctrinate are not really interested in open public discussion, or in helping children discover their own answers; those who indoctrinate already know the answers and they want the children to believe as they do." (11). It is indoctrinators who regard social and moral education as a matter of "instilling" or "implanting" or "passing on" values. Proper teaching should be a matter of cultivating and exercising moral and social discernment that is already in the children at an early age so that they can function on their own now as children and later in life as adults. To be effective, social and moral education needs to engage students in ethical inquiry whose aim, according to Lipman and Sharp, is: "not to teach children certain particular values; it is rather an open-ended, sustained consideration of the values, standards and practices by which we live, discussed openly and publicly so as to take all points of view and all facts into account. It is the assumption of ethical inquiry that such discussion and reflection taking place in an atmosphere of trust, confidence and impartiality, can do more to foster moral responsibility and moral intelligence in children than any system which merely acquaints them with 'the rules' and then insists that they 'do their duty.' " (12) A socially and morally educated person is one who has become socially and morally reflective and judicious. He/she can judge accurately by reasoning out what is socially and morally right or wrong in an autonomous way. He/she has become transformed from being dependent into being self-directed and self-reliant.
Who Should Teach SEE?Unexpectedly, NCEOP suggested that "It may ... continue to be true that the teachers of religion are among the most competent and credible to teach social ethics." (13). One notices that the suggestion is not categorical but deliberately worded in hedging language. It does not say clearly and unambiguously who should teach SEE. That the teachers of religion might continue to be among the most credible and competent to teach SEE is curious, given the recommendation to make social ethics independent of religion The implied message was clearly not laudatory to the teachers of religion who had been criticized over their teaching of ME. Was the NCEOP trying to eat its cake and have it too? The teachers of religion, it would appear, got the message negatively and felt betrayed and undermined. They nursed hostility towards SEE: something humanly understandable, though probably not justifiable.The question "Who should teach SEE?" seems not to have been seriously and professionally contemplated at the crucial point of planning before launching the subject. Curiously, no provisions were made to train teachers specifically to teach SEE. It is not surprising that as things turned out, just about everybody in the schools "became an expert" in the teaching of SEE. Principals, as a matter of practice, assign any available teacher to teach SEE whatever else he/she teaches and his/her background in the subject notwithstanding. It is even alleged that some students "successfully" teach themselves SEE! I can recall vividly the parallel question "Who should teach RE?" being posed at the Kenya Institute of Education some years ago. It generated a heated debate, the outcome of which was a consensus among at least the Christians and Moslems, that teachers of religion (CRE and IRE) must not only be specifically trained to teach RE but more importantly they must also be committed believers. How a similar concern about who should teach SEE escaped the planners of SEE is as mysterious as it is inexcusable. The discovery of this serious omission, however, has of late triggered action to rectify the situation at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, University of Nairobi (Kikuyu Campus), and Kenyatta University. The first two institutions are actually conducting programmes for SEE teachers while Kenyatta University is planning a SEE Department in the Faculty of Education to cater for the need. Primary Teachers' colleges and other relevant institutions need to do likewise if SEE is to have the intended impact nationally. The question: "Who should teach SEE?" still lingers. Perhaps SEE can borrow a leaf from RE in this serious matter. Where the teaching of values is concerned, consistency between word and deed in the lives of the teachers themselves is vital. Where there is inconsistency, SEE stands no chance of being effective. The attitude "do what I say not what I do" is a recipe for disaster. Credibility in teaching of values has a lot to do with how the teachers model for their students in daily life. Parents and teachers cannot afford to underestimate how much children learn from observation.
ConclusionIn this article I have discussed a number of things concerning Social Education and Ethics(a fundamental programme in our educational system( because it is entrusted with the cultivation of moral and social values in our youth. Among other things, I have pointed out the following:
NOTES1. Government of Kenya. Report of the National Committee on Educational Objectives and Policies. Nairobi: Government Printers, 1976, pp. 7-8.2. Ibid., p. 7. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Pritchard, Michael S. Reasonable children: moral education and moral learning. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1996, p. 100. 7. Ibid., p. 97. 8. Pritchard, op. cit., p. 164. 9. Ibid., p. 170. 10. Ibid.. p. 96. 11. Lipman, Matthew & Sharp, Ann Margaret. Ethical inquiry: instructional manual to accompany LISA, 2nd ed. New York: University Press of America, 1985, p. iv. 12. Ibid. 13. Government of Kenya. op. cit., p. 7.
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