Directions

Abstract

Moral education as often practiced is ineffective and sometimes even offensive to young people. We need to realize that moral growth, guided or not, can occur and our task is to nourish it, not try to regulate it. Actual ethical thinking is emotional, intense, and often not a good source of ready answers. Morality is something for an individual to discover and develop through imagination and social activity, rather than rules to be prescribed. Although rules, principles and laws reflecting social consensus have great value in society, we need to remember their source, in discovery and experience, including the vicarious but substantive and meaningful experience given us by art.

As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.

—John Dewey