Ours is an era of evil prejudices, cheap bigotry, dark vengeance, and critical moral degeneration, to say the least. It is a world of ethnic, racist, regional and border violence. Churches have become entertainment centers and dating sprees, mosques- houses of masqueraders and our schools- pathetic excuses of moral centres. So who will teach the world morality? Are teachers helping at all?

Of course schooling is unavoidably a moral enterprise but topical concepts are barely enough to counter the rising evils in the world. Subjects like social or religious education should gain prominence in this area. Moral education is urgent and inevitable.

One might argue that schools naturally have moral ethos embodied in rules, rewards and punishments, dress codes, honor codes, student governments, relationships, styles of teaching, sports and extracurricular emphases, art and appearances, and in the kinds of respect accorded students and teachers. Truly, schools convey to children what is expected of them, what is normal, what is right and wrong. It is also true that values are caught rather than taught; through their ethos, schools socialise children into patterns of moral behavior.

However, let’s be realistic; is this indeed the situation on the ground?

The reality is that schools are not doing well in this area. Most teachers are busy "finishing the syllabus” and training learners to pass exams that there is essentially no time left for moral education. If properly handled, moral education should entail teaching in a manner that helps students to develop into moral, civic, good, mannered, behaved, non-bullying, healthy, critical, successful, traditional, compliant or socially acceptable beings and not merely intellectual idiots. Concepts of social and emotional learning, moral reasoning and cognitive development (not cramming), life skills education, health education, violence prevention, critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and conflict resolution and mediation must be creatively yet firmly imparted.

Moral education is mainly guided by two objectives. The first is to nurture in children those (consensus) virtues and values that make them good people. But, of course, good people can make bad judgments. The second task of moral education is to provide students with the intellectual resources that enable them to make informed and responsible judgments about difficult (and controversial) matters of moral importance. Both are proper and important tasks of schools.

Of course textbooks and courses often address moral questions and take moral positions. Literature inevitably explores moral issues and writers take positions on those issues - as do publishers who decide which literature goes in the anthologies. In teaching history we initiate students into particular cultural traditions and identities.

While economics courses and texts typically avoid overt moral language and claim to be "value-free,” their accounts of human nature, decision-making, and the economic world have moral implications.As you may have noted, even the overall shape of the curriculum is morally-loaded by virtue of what it requires, what it makes available as electives, and what it ignores. The concern however is whether you take some time to enforce such values.

If students are to be morally educated - and educated about morality - they must have some understanding of the moral framework or moral dimensions of life. After all, morality is not intellectually free-floating or just a matter of arbitrary choices. Morality is bound in our place in a community or tradition, our understanding of nature and human nature, our convictions about death and immortality, our experiences of the sacred, our assumptions about what the mind can know, and our understanding of what makes life meaningful. We make sense of what we ought to do, of what kind of a person we should be in light of all of these aspects of life - at least if we are reflective.

The writer is a lecturer at The Adventist University of Central Africa