Moral education: The only missing link

For any nation to attain the best development heights there should be a vibrant education system. It is clear that once a nation toys with her education provision to the citizen, under any circumstances such countries faces quality human resource deficit. On that accord, it is relevant to note that everyone wants quality guarantee in their children’s education and that no parent embraces mediocrity with the educational quality of their children, meaning parents and teachers ought to cooperate in this regard. Well, quality education is an assured variable that any state must give to its citizens for sustainable development but how better can it be made of relevance? Who is this graduate? What are his ways of conducts? Can he really represents the organization and so does depict the culture of the organization and the country where he or she comes from? We must admit that our curriculum is dwelling much on (STEM) subjects - science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Well its true these are very important areas that we need to focus on as result of education internationalization and the global trends in educations as well as national priority goals but the aspect of moral education should be thought about and given the value it deserves. Moral education is a necessary ingredient that can spice up engineering graduates to perform beyond their boundaries of their promises and so does to other graduates in those preferred domain. All the regional curricula have religious studies as a core course to instill moral values among the young ones. Among other countries such Egypt, China, Finland, German, Ukraine, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Peru moral education is a core course throughout lower secondary and the proponents of this advances that, quality without acceptable moral values is useless. Ukeje-Eloagu (1998) noted that, for any citizen to have quality education he or she must be morally and emotionally sound and therefore good moral values becomes a key device for a quality education that is provided at all levels and it is important that these moral value are adequately reflected in the behaviors of any educated individual. Living in the shadow of an educated being is so regretful, if we abscond from teaching morals and wait for pastors to talk about morals in churches and televisions, how many times does a child watch a TV at school? While addressing the graduates in 1972 in Karongero technical institute in Tanzania Mwalimu Julious Nyerere was quoted “go out there and serve the people of Tanzania not only with your well earned academic knowledge in your area of study but also with uncompromising morals and integrity”. It’s true no professional teacher can teach immoral behaviors but we believe immoral behaviors and attitudes develop in people’s lives over time and if not well addressed they can have baneful reflection on the quality of education an individual receives. a morally wanting educated person’s credentials will always be a subject of discussion in the society regardless of how good he performs in his field of study because there is more to study that mastering your area of specialization. Education institutions and other education stakeholders should be able to help out in making this a reality; individual should not just go through schooling and bag lots of degrees when their moral values are wanting. We need to bear in mind as educationist that the degrees we accumulate everyday are not enough to define us as educated, it is important that we work on our moral values and therefore Moral value orientation is important in the school system, for the quality of the education provided in such schools to be assured. The moral education programmes should therefore be a shared responsibility of both the school and the community within the society and this will bring about required levels of integrity both in the school’s administrators and the students It is true that no parent on earth and neither is it any society or international community that can attach value to any school that is defined by aberrant activities such as cultism, examination malpractices, sexual harassment, lateness to the schools, lack of respect to the constituted authority and many others however in order to enhance high integrity to the school stakeholders and the educational programme in the school, there is the need to integrate moral education into the school curriculum. The writer is a PhD student of Comparative Education at Beijing Normal University pontiankbr@outlook.com