| This study is an empirical exploration into the normative confusion in American schools in the early twenty-first century. Such confusion has many different sources. For one, external and internal demands create tensions between competing interests, resulting in an evasion of an overall moral concern to harmonize them. Externally, different groups have been fighting over the schools in mutually exclusive ways, making it impossible to find any approach that pleases all. This is one reason we commonly focus on intellectual growth in schools, whereas we tend to neglect the moral implications of schooling. Internally, a certain amount of blindness to the values and feelings of others allows students, teachers, and administrators to duck moral issues.; Employing findings from forty-four interviews of students, teachers, and administrators this study focuses on the moral order of one public high school. Through inquiry and personal accounts, there is an exploration into the school's continuity and cohesion when students, teachers, administrators are engaged in the social relationships in the practices of learning, teaching, and leading. The research and analysis focus on situations when these same people had difficulty working together because they had different beliefs, a different understanding of the relative norms, or no understanding of what each understands and values.; This study helps characterize the current status of one school's moral order and facilitates speculation as to why this moral order persists. Highlighted is the value of adopting a situated and pragmatic approach to moral or ethical problems in school. By focusing on a single school and the different views of moral or ethical concerns held by its participants, this dissertation attempts to reveal a more complex and empirically grounded sense of contemporary ethical issues in school than would be gained by adopting any single ethical principle. The relationships in the school, with all of their flaws and unresolved difficulties, teach moral lessons every bit as much as the explicit or intended moral lessons that those in the school seek to teach. Until we recognize this and broaden our understanding of moral education, it will remain an afterthought or, worse yet, unimportant. |
