ABSTRACT
Moral and character educators working from different philosophical perspectives have generally acknowledged a major role in students’ moral development of the “hidden curriculum” manifested in the interpersonal environment of schools and classrooms. Dewey (1909/1975), for example, argued that the mode of social life and the nature of the school community were far more important factors in students’ moral growth than direct moral instruction. Ryan (1986), from a quite different theoretical perspective, argues that “very little of the moral education that inevitably occurs in the schools is formally recorded in lesson plans, curriculum guides, or behavioral objectives.” Rather, students develop their “conceptions of what being a good person entails” from such aspects of schooling as the rules that are or are not enforced, the rituals and procedures of daily classroom life, the expectations for and consequences of their behavior, and their teachers’ warnings, advice, and manner (p. 228). During the first half of the twentieth century, classroom instruction in American schools focused on civic and moral virtues as well as academic competencies (Brophy, 2006). However, by the 1970s, Americans lost interest in instruction in virtues and morals in public education and good classroom management was about efficient control of students to optimize academic learning. The earlier view that classroom management and discipline might also serve to support students’ social and moral development had retreated so far into the background that Walter Doyle’s chapter on classroom organization and management for the 1986 Handbook of Research on Teaching didn’t even mention potential social or moral outcomes. Facing increased pressure for higher levels of academic learning, teachers felt the need for easy and efficient classroom control. Efficient and sometimes elaborate control systems, generally guided by behaviorism’s view of children as self-interested and needing to be shaped by extrinsic reinforcers, spread to schools across the country. Lee Cantor’s Assertive Discipline (1976) is probably the best known and most influential of these approaches. By 1980, the predominant approach to classroom
management and discipline in American public schools focused on control of students’ behavior by rewards and punishments and traditional citizenship goals had been largely abandoned.
