The impact of the family crisis on the ethical foundations of upbringing and education
The human being is, first of all, a being that develops and records this development, so written histories of the human race emerge. From them it is clear that homo sapiens sapiens changes and takes over the historical experience of preceding generations. We are thinking beings; we are capable of self-reflection. We survive by creating artificial nature, by making and self-making. We create an educated and educating society, a community subject to the principles of evolution. Education—the process of teaching and upbringing—is the primary causal link in the historical development of human culture. Human nature is dependent on education.
To be an educator or an educatee is natural to the human being. We tried to connect to this dimension of humanity by approaching education and upbringing from the viewpoint of pupils, adolescents, and adolescents. For reasons of specifying the researched topic, we chose self-description of adolescents, and specifically in the ethical and moral sphere. With our research on morality, ethics, and value orientation of adolescents, we want to contribute to a holistic, integral view of the young person within the educational process.
From the beginnings of modern pedagogy to its postmodern inspirations, pedagogy was concerned with criticizing and correcting human society, for example Richard Rorty, who, although he denies the natural essence of the human species itself, requires his philosophy to initiate a new kind of thinking to which contemporary science could be universally translated, thinking that should be led by educators in order to raise future generations so that a solidaristic society of liberal ironists can emerge. This goal is not unrelated to that of the father of pedagogy J. A. Komenský, whose aim was nothing less than social reform through general education, which would provide as large a portion of the population as possible with pansophy.
Let us now focus our attention, in the pattern of contemporary philosophy and pedagogy, on the subjects of the educational process: the educator and the educatee. Following the account by Naděžda Pelcová, we are forced to agree with her model of human self-description, the anthropological constants homo educans and homo educandus—the educating person and the educated person.
Education is the most essential thing that characterizes a person as a person, so the concept of the human as homo educans and homo educandus is not a further reductionist starting point of pedagogical anthropology. It is not an anthropological constant as a theory, but, phenomenologically speaking, a human invariant. A person can be understood only on the basis of education and through education and schooling: “A person can be understood only as a being that educates and is educated” (Pelcová, 2001, s. 146).
The educator must be, also according to Pelcová, professionally competent, professional, emotionally stable, and restrained, but also empathetic, and his relationship to the person being educated must be infused with solidarity and humanity. “Education moves within dilemmas: the apparent self-evidence of the educational relation concealing spiritual and emotional tension; objective educational demands versus subjective assumptions and conditions of education; education as acceptance of what is given and as openness to the new” (Pelcová, 2001, s. 147).
The purpose of education is not to convey positive knowledge and facts, a guidebook for overcoming life’s difficulties. “In education the task is to create understanding and self-understanding, which are manifested precisely in asking a question ... Only the one who asks knows what is being discussed. Only the one who asks is involved. ... Education is characterized by the courage to ask a question. ... Education is an ontological problem—what is at stake is the essence of one’s own being. In the incompleteness and openness of the human person lies the premise of education; through education the human being gains support, form, and law” (Pelcová, 2001, s. 148-149).
A human being is not the ultimate measure of all things, we argue together with Karl-Heinz Peschke: we are merely a part of creation, a “part of a broader reality whose needs and claims we cannot ignore without damaging ourselves” (Peschke, 1995, s. 665). We must know how to place ourselves correctly in the coordinates of creation; the measure of all things is not the human being but the pattern of life of future generations. Something fundamental in the human person, however, must change, namely love for the neighbor and for the world, because before the human being stands more than ever the question: will our species survive the 21st century? The basis of a turn of the human being toward a new humanity, enabling the survival of future generations, is a well-performed educational process, education leading to liberation from the ecological and social crisis of the present. Educators should reflect on the possibility of finally starting a dialogue about setting human affairs right. May our work be the first step in this common mission.
Postmodern education and upbringing must move school reality from systematic routine based on accepting and memorizing facts to a modern pedagogical principle that leads the educational process toward the overall progress of humanity and simultaneously toward ethics and morality of new generations and responsibility for the life of the community and global problems of the world.
Ethics is a philosophical discipline that likely belongs to the oldest fields of knowledge at all, because it was born in the period of the emergence of philosophy as such. It is the science dealing with morality and virtue in both the individual and society. It concerns what is good and how good is expressed in our world. The never-finished questioning of human morality and principles of morally good action opens with the ancient world of human knowledge and its description. Aristotle already knew that the language of morality is tied to the subject of which it speaks, that is, ethical utterances are relative to the object of their interest, since good is expressed in many ways, as he claims at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics.
For the needs of education and teaching, however, morality has to be grounded. We align, following Fred Ricken’s distinction, with the insight that ethics can be divided into “normative ethics” and “metaethics,” with the first justifying and explaining normative judgments and “metaethics” examining the meaning of the language of morality (Ricken, 1995, s. 14-15). Analytical philosophy, as well as its post-analytic branch, limits itself to metaethics as general ethics as a whole. Yet we hold that it is precisely “normative ethics” that is the foundation of education and therefore the part we intend to address here.
The great ethicist of our time, Hans Jonas, in his Principle of Responsibility (according to Floss, 1998, s. 178-190), newly formulates I. Kant’s categorical imperative by applying it to the overcoming of the ecological crisis of the present, in an effort to abolish the subject-object paradigmatic model of thought, namely a reversal of humanity’s obligation toward being as such, that is, toward nature. We should act so that the consequences of our actions are compatible with the existence of future generations, that is, with humanity’s claim to survive for indefinitely long periods.
To this, education should help us, people. Likewise, I. Kant states that “A human being is human through education,” (Pelcová, 2000, s. 12), so he stands at the foundations not only of modern ethics, but also of behaviorist psychology, philosophy, and pedagogy, which today finds a response in American neopragmatism, for example the aforementioned R. Rorty. According to N. Pelcová, education has this “ontological dimension” above all, as “education takes place in the world, is work for the future and at the same time always happens today; education means a certain understanding of the whole world, a claim to the unity of the world, delimiting how we belong to the world, what we seek in it, how we co-create it.” Education is also the basic human interaction in society; it is “a never-finished process of the fullness of determining the human as a being that educates and is educated” (Pelcová, 2000, s. 12).
In philosophy, moral aspects of a given culture and its value principles are often summarized under the term “ethos”; while its cognitive and existential traits are called “éthos.” (The conflict between ethos and éthos in human history is discussed most recently, for example, by Arthur Rich in his Ethics of the Political Economy [Rich, 1994; Floss, 1998, s. 240-241]. This conflict can be traced historically from the case of Socrates, through Jesus Christ, Jan Hus, and Giordano Bruno, among others.) “Éthos” is thus a kind of the conscience of society, where its moral principles are held. Likewise, “ethos” is the morality of the individual, the morality guided by conscience. For example, according to Pavel Floss, “only at the level of ethos is the human confirmed and completed as a human” (Floss, 1998, s. 230-250). In contrast, “ethos” is morality of society and individual—an axiological-attitudinal orientation through which we judge moral or immoral actions of ourselves and others.
Morality, that is ethos, however always subject to the pressure of éthos, and personal freedom and democracy are three basic pillars of Euro-American civilization, which, although we criticize it in many areas, is the summit of historical processes on this planet (at least so far). Arnold Gehlen already expected religion to help in overcoming the disorientation, helplessness, and powerlessness of modern humans in relation to the technical-economic structures of contemporary life. Although, for example, N. Luhmann claims that ethics, that is practical ethos, is a “lost paradigm,” philosophers such as P. Floss and O. Höffe, relying on the aforementioned three principles of Western society, claim that challenging morality would also challenge the principles of our civilization as a whole, including personal freedom and democracy. Hans Jonas thinks similarly: although man is a being who has brought nature to the brink of ecological catastrophe, he is also the only being that can save it and whom one can bind to this act by the “principle of responsibility.” (This is based, among other things, on the characterization of the human as a product of nature, living from it but also always somehow against it, building its own environment, according to A. Gehlen.) It is also Jonas who argues for the renewal of religiously grounded values such as respect and piety. And according to Floss, regarding the most religious of them—holiness—he judges that “the question is whether ethics can be founded at all without it” (Floss, 1998, s. 188; see also there, s. 173-191).
Ethos, as a form of worldview, reflects how things actually are for a particular human community, its understanding of nature, society, and the role of the individual in it. According to Clifford Geertz, it represents the most comprehensive ideas of the community about order. “Religious belief and ritual confront and confirm each other: intellectual intelligibility of ethos is achieved insofar as it is shown as if it represented a way of life implied by the actual state of affairs, which is described by the worldview; ...” Geertz believes that “a religious system is formed by a set of sacred symbols, interwoven into a kind of ordered whole. For those devoted to it, such a religious system seems to mediate genuine knowledge—the knowledge of basic conditions in whose framework life must necessarily be lived.” (Geertz, 2000, s. 103 and following).
Theory speaks of a historical process in which humanity is now passing through a stage of “alienation,” characterized by insufficient support of morality by moral life (P. Floss). From pragmatic-structuralist positions, we can understand “alienation” as the state of a person who violently severs ties with others, with social relations, and denies his or her function in society. From this state arise certain pathological phenomena in society, such as increased criminality, drug dependence, racial conflicts, but also increased indiscipline among contemporary youth and their uncontrollable behavior, which in combination with growing generational misunderstanding between pedagogue and student leads in many cases to failures in the educational process. The human being, the adolescent, no longer sees himself as a functional part of the whole, the system, the order—thus culture and society—which appear foreign to him, and therefore he distances himself from them. Loss of individual rootedness in society and culture, loss of the transcendent component of human life—faith or ideology that would mediate a total explanation of his and the world’s existence—may be a partial cause of psychological imbalance in the individual, and therefore of his failures in the educational process.
Studies of the value preferences of current adolescents are key for improving the educational process in our secondary schools. From a macro-social perspective, this project is particularly needed because the age between 15 and 20 years (i.e., the age of Czech secondary students) represents, from developmental psychological perspective, a crucial period for the development of moral and character traits of personality. These later tend toward stability, and further development consists of elaborating attitudes and convictions already acquired. The results of this and similar empirical evaluations can therefore also be understood as a certain prediction of value attitudes, and therefore also of the behavior and conduct of the shaping generation.
In 2005, the latest research on value orientation of youth focusing on the influence of family and family religiosity on the values and attitudes of adolescents in the Czech Republic was conducted (results of the research available in: Preissová Krejčí, Čadová, I/2006, s. 57-70). Respondents to the survey were pupils of secondary schools and vocational academies in the Zlín and Olomouc regions in the 2004/2005 school year. Women predominated among respondents, comprising two-thirds of the sample. This means 577 women and 278 men completed the questionnaires. The higher proportion of women is due to the fact that at the selected secondary schools more girls study than boys.
In the sample, students of technical secondary schools (SOŠ) (304) and gymnasium students (296) were most represented. 213 respondents chose lower secondary schools without final exams (SOU without maturity), and only just under 5% (41 respondents) attend SOU with maturity.
The age composition of the representative sample of current youth was appropriate for secondary school students and apprentices from vocational schools. In the sample there are two strong age groups: respondents who are 16 (306) and respondents who were 17 (278). 169 respondents in our sample are those who had already reached adulthood.
The ranking of youth values in the Czech Republic on a value ladder can be summarized in the following descending order: 1. health, 2. friendship, 3. family, 4. love and partnership, 5. education, 6–7. being useful to others and success at school, 8. leisure activities, 9. money and property, 10. looking good, 11. religion.
Our research on the value-attitudinal orientation of youth also addressed differentiation in the value orientation of secondary-school youth based on family background. While parents’ education does not play a decisive role in relation to the value orientations of their children, family background does. Proportionally with family incompleteness (living with one or no parent), respondents showed reduced importance not only of education and religion but also of property. This is related to a sharpened understanding of the importance of family as the basic starting point for a quality life, whose absence cannot be easily replaced by different assets.
Besides values, the second traditional means of analyzing attitudinal orientation is surveying life goals. Unlike values, respondents did not rank life goals according to importance. Therefore, in the analysis of life goals we can see what the actual value preferences of our respondents were.
Respondents placed having a functioning family in the top three positions. This correlates with the value of family, which 95% identified as important; then at a wide margin and almost equally, they selected having many friends (also correlating with the value of friendship—97% marked it as important) and the goal of being financially secure in life. Money and property was ranked ninth-to-eleventh in the declared value hierarchy, yet in questions about life goals, good financial security was the third most important thing in life for these same respondents. Thus they attribute far greater importance to financial security than they declared in the value ranking. Conversely, the least chosen life goal became the development of one’s mental and spiritual abilities through faith and meditation. This does not surprise us because in correlation with the value of religion (usually least important, last, eleventh place), this confirms the complete marginality of religiosity in adolescents’ lives. Helping others was placed in the top three among respondents’ life goals by only just under 20% of respondents. Yet the value of being useful to others is considered important by 71% of them. In this case respondents “ethically polished” their life-goal responses when compared with reality. What sounds positive is that only a relatively small portion of respondents has the life goal of getting in life what they want regardless of others.
The results that map respondents’ life-goal preferences by their family arrangement are revealing. The first three most common with slight differences in percentages are as follows. Respondents living in households with both parents most strongly of all declared a functioning family as their single greatest life goal. In second place, but with quite a large gap, they wanted to have many friends; in third place they wanted to be financially secure. Respondents who live in families with one parent also wanted a functioning family, in second place financial security, and in third, friends. Respondents who did not live with either parent again wanted a functioning family. On second place in their ranking there is a change compared to previous cases, because these respondents preferred doing in life only what they enjoy, regardless of others. In third place they wanted to be financially secure. At the same time, the fewest respondents from incomplete families want to have many friends. Overall, respondents least frequently selected the life goals of “developing spiritual abilities through faith and meditation” and “getting in life what I want, regardless of other people.” In the latter, the share of those who were more egoistic rises as the number of parents in the common household declines. See the last line in the table and also the line “doing in life only what I like.” We can conclude that children from incomplete, disordered families have strained relationships with other people and behave as egoists more often than children from complete, ordered families.
Life-goal priorities differ not only according to family arrangement but also according to the type of school the respondent attends. Gymnasium students want from life more than mere financial security. They want success in their future occupations, they want to travel, and they want to keep many friends. Also, more than all others, they would like to develop their spiritual abilities. They do not resist deepening the spiritual dimension of their existence. One could generalize that their life goal is further knowing. Traveling is a life goal also for a significant number of SOŠ students. Students of SOU without maturity would most like of all to be well financially secure, which is somewhat paradoxical given that as people with low formal education they lack prospects of high earnings. They want maximum from life, and that even at the expense of others. Their egoism therefore appears more pronounced than, for example, among gymnasium students. They are not interested in personal growth, and their spiritual dimension does not interest them. They do not need friends for happiness either. Incomplete family background should, based on respondents’ answers, lead to higher preferences for egoistic action (“doing only what I like” and “getting what I want regardless of others”). Generalizing the research results, we can claim that people from a socio-culturally less developed environment tend more strongly toward endorsing egoistic values, as well as toward forbidden conduct (drug use, alcohol, smoking, or criminality).
Values and value orientation are built by every person based on acquired experience, adopted attitudes and opinions of previous generations, upbringing, and education. Values are the foundation of our morality and virtue. Our morality is based on identifying our views and convictions about what is right, good, and true with those of society; our virtue is based on the stability of personal convictions about good, evil, and other qualitative judgments. Regular and fair assessment of a pupil’s performance by a teacher leads the pupil to the creation of values that later become fixed in value orientation, steering the pupil in a certain direction. (Conversely, too.) Knowledge linked with the evaluation of what we know and what we believe creates our convictions. A person’s convictions may not correspond to true knowledge, yet they are always closely linked with a person’s feelings and emotions. Conviction is the basis of an individual’s psychological stability; from it follow the individual’s, including the educatee’s, attitudes and activities, and it is closely connected to personality character. If a person is willing to act in accordance with knowledge they regard as correct, then they have acquired a certain conviction, a worldview, and are devoted to certain ideas they have internally accepted and recognized as correct and necessary. Conviction has an undeniable impact on human understanding, knowing, and judging. “A person judges differently when convinced of something” (Horák, 1997, s. 33).
Conviction becomes fulfilled; it objectifies in life attitudes and actions. Education and schooling, founded not only on cognitive but also emotional education, must serve the healthy development of society, its morality and ethics today, whose goal is to serve society so that generations of the human species survive for indefinitely long periods.
The current Czech younger generation, in light of this and other studies carried out, represents a kind of mirror of society as a whole. Sixteen years of building a capitalist neoliberal system created the basic layout of adolescents’ value convictions, centered on the autonomous individual for whom the satisfaction of personal interests is decisive. Overreaching to other people plays an ever smaller role, unless they are friends, who in return contribute to fulfilling the individual’s social needs. We cannot, however, see this process as a tendency toward destructive atomization of society, because the most important goal of young people is, despite probable delay to a later age, establishing a functioning family. Material goods do play an important role, but obtaining them makes sense precisely in relation to securing all needs of the basic societal unit—the family.
The educational process is like an “endless story”; as educators, we never find ourselves at the end of the game. There is always room for improvement, and we can always set new goals. And yet this “story” is fulfilled when we live for others, when we pass on the best of ourselves. We fill it with the tension between teacher and pupil, which Wilhelm Dilthey already describes as “a means for the birth of the new.” This tension pushes us forward, even against currents of misunderstanding and the hardships that come with living through the young generation; our “story” is fulfilled by the very course of the cognitive process itself.
The results of our work warn that something is wrong in the educational process, especially in Christian education and the general mission. Teachers may very well lack the ability to listen and to self-reflect—feedback is generally insufficient among educators. If we serve only social order—a social moral paradigm—and ourselves, then we cannot expect anything different from our students. As a teacher, I cannot expect more from a student than I transmit: personal involvement, commitment, effort, and interest. Motivation. Honesty. Truthfulness. Responsibility. The treatment we propose for the chronically sick Czech educational environment may sound simplistic, but it is offered with a clear sense of obligation. What we want from others, we should first expect from ourselves. If we work with dedication, aware of our own responsibility and seeking personal honesty and truthfulness, we will achieve similar in our students. All else in educational relationships is irrelevant or secondary.
Author: Mgr. Andrea Preissová Krejčí, Ph.D.Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, Filozofická fakulta
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______The lecture was presented at the international scientific conference Applied Ethics in Social Work and Other Helping Professions, which was held on 20–21 October 2010 in Piešťany and was published in the proceedings of this conference: MÁTEL, A. – SCHAVEL, M. – MÜHLPACHR, P. – ROMAN, T. 2010. Aplikovaná etika v sociálne práci a ďalších pomáhajúcich profesiách. Zborník z medzinárodnej vedeckej konferencie. Bratislava : VŠZaSP sv. Alžbety. 413 s. ISBN 978-80-89271-89-4.
