Research shows ethics education teaches kids right from wrong. Why can so few students access it?

Michael Noetel, Geetanjali Basarkod, Australian Catholic University, University of Queensland

How important is it that kids learn to tell right from wrong?

Businessman and former university chancellor David Gonski recently called for ethics classes to be rolled out in all Australian schools to boost social cohesion.

At the moment, ethics does not get dedicated time in the school curriculum.

Some might argue children don’t need school ethics classes if they already learn ethics from their parents and other adults in their lives.

But our research shows formal ethics education can make a difference. In the largest ever review on the subject, we found teaching ethics can improve students’ ability to reason through ethical issues and prioritise doing the right thing.

Ethics education in Australia

Ethics has been part of the national Australian Curriculum for more than a decade. It sits alongside literacy, numeracy and four other subjects as a “general capability”. This means it’s a cross-curriculum skill every Australian child is supposed to learn in all subjects.

So in theory, ethics education is the responsibility of all teachers, even when teaching mathematics, art or biology.

In practice, no-one is responsible for teaching these skills. Australian research has found even teachers who value general capabilities, such as ethics, struggle to teach them explicitly. This is because the focus is on what gets tested. In turn, this means “the intentions of the Australian Curriculum […] are not being realised”.

In most Australian states, the only structured ethics offering in schools is during religious instruction. But these are only optional lessons, and families who want a secular alternative are often left without it.

Our study

We synthesised 92 randomised controlled trials – the most rigorous form of evidence in education. Together, the studies involved 12,693 students from primary school through to university.

The studies covered 20 countries, including Australia, and spanned nearly five decades.

Of those 92 randomised trials, 54 compared students receiving ethics lessons to those in control groups who did not learn ethics. The other studies compared different types of ethics instruction against each other.

The studies with control groups tell us how well students currently learn ethics without dedicated classes (such as from their parents or through other generalised learning at school).

What we found

Students who received formal ethics education were better able to recognise ethical issues (also called “moral sensitivity”), gave better reasons about the right thing to do (“moral judgement”) and wanted to prioritise doing the right thing (“moral motivation”). Four in five trials showed meaningful positive effects in these areas.

Our study did not measure kids’ actual behaviour over the long run. But we know higher moral reasoning capacity is associated with being more likely to help others and resist peer pressure. It is also associated with lower levels of juvenile delinquency.

We also found how you teach ethics matters.

Programs built around student discussion worked well. Programs built around lectures and readings alone did not, like in most subjects. You learn better when you can explain your thinking, safely make mistakes, and get feedback.

This is why ethics is so good to learn in schools: you can have discussions with peers and educators in a way that’s hard for most parents to reproduce at home.

Some Australian states do this well …

New South Wales already has a model for teaching ethics.

The free Primary Ethics program runs in about 500 NSW schools and reaches roughly 40,000 students each week using trained volunteers. Its curriculum is built around small groups, working through questions such as “Is it ever okay to break a promise?”

This is the kind of structured discussion our research identified as most effective for teaching ethics.

Primary Ethics runs during the same time slot as religious instruction lessons. It was introduced because growing numbers of students were opting out of religious classes, but had nothing meaningful to do instead. The classes are free because they’re delivered by trained volunteers.

… but most don’t

Dedicated ethics classes are patchy in other states. For example, Queensland and Western Australia have class time for religious instruction but there is no secular alternative. Students just get “other instruction” during this time.

Other states would need to amend their laws to allow (not require) secular ethics as a formal alternative to religious instruction, exactly as NSW did in 2010.

No new funding or teachers would be needed. If they run at the same time as religious instruction, there is already space in the school week for these classes.

New volunteers would be needed to run the discussions, but NSW has shown there’s a willing contingent of people who can deliver the program when the lesson plans are already prepared for them.

A more ambitious approach

A more ambitious change would be to treat ethics as a core subject in its own right, as in France and Finland.

This could mean having ethics education on the timetable, right alongside maths and languages. Every student would be taught by a trained specialist teacher, instead of asking trained volunteers or other teachers to cover it.

Our review showed ethics education helps at every level of schooling.

Which model works best is still an open question; whether to make room for one arguably is not.

We make time for maths, sport and music because we think they matter for a good life. If knowing right from wrong matters at least as much, it has earned at least a little time on the timetable.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.