In my latest reading of It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good,
Rick Santorum continued to talk about how the entertainment media's
focus on illicit sex and violence could harm kids. He commended
companies (such as Wal-Mart) that try to clean up the culture for kids,
lamented that piracy enables children to see rotten movies, presented
public policy proposals for dealing with the culture (which sometimes
entailed censorship of such things as pornography, since Santorum
believes that the First Amendment is primarily about protecting
political speech and not smut, but his proposals mostly related to the
government making it easier for private interests to clean up the
entertainment media for children, without necessarily banning mature
movies for adults), exhorted families to monitor what their kids watched
and to turn off the TV and tell their kids stories, and affirmed that
schools should teach values.
What I want to highlight here, however, is something that Santorum says on pages 357-358:
"In
addition to the usual checklist of learning skills, sciences, and
humanities, the orientation of education toward truth should include moral
truth as well. I know this will strike some readers as either
dangerous or impossible for a public school system in a pluralistic
democracy, but that's because we all tend to focus on a few highly
contentious areas of morality in our culture, mostly revolving around
human life and sexuality. But what about honesty and loyalty? What
about self-control and self-sacrifice? Aren't these true values that we
can agree to teach our children as being part of an objective moral
reality?"
I appreciate Santorum's willingness here to search for
common moral ground rather than obsessing over controversial issues. I
guess my question is this: Don't schools teach morality already? Good
behavior in the classroom is necessary for the class to run smoothly,
after all! There are right-wingers who have criticized
situational-ethics exercises in the classroom as an attack on morality
being absolute, but, heck, acknowledging that there are gray areas and
difficult dilemmas does not nullify morality as a whole, or the truth
that it is wrong to be inconsiderate of others and to hurt them.
Santorum will be criticizing "value-free" education that promotes
tolerance, for he mentions that on page 358, but I have not yet read his
specific criticisms. But I don't think that the current educational
system is completely "value-free". Tolerance, after all, is a value, as
long as we're not tolerating acts that directly hurt others.
UPDATE: On pages 388-389, Santorum acknowledges that liberals are
committed to certain correct values (i.e., equality) and states that
"tolerance, properly understood" should be taught.