Schools Should Teach 'Virtues,' Professor Says

The Supreme Court's school prayer decision "in no way relieves the American public school of its responsibility for developing the religious feeling and morality of its students, "Robert Ulich, James Bryant Conant Professor of Education, Emeritus, said Thursday night.

Delivering the School of Education's Inglis Lecture before an audience of 200 in Longfellow Hall, Ulich emphasized that religion and education cannot be "squeezed into watertight departments, even by a legal decision." He warned that the schools' freedom from the task of religious indoctrination may become an excuse for "laziness with respect to teaching the spiritual tradition of humanity."

Teach Values

Ulich recommended that schools, although forbidden to teach any "denominational tenets,"redouble their efforts to relate to their students the "values and virtues implicit in relgion" in a historical framework. Teachers should not be paid merely to relate a "number of skills and knowledges and then leave the inner life of their charges to the chance of the environment."

Courses in the history of religion and the Bible, however, are inappropriate in the public schools, Ulich said. High school students, "to whom nothing is as attractive as negative rationality," would react skeptically to such courses and "be likely to interpret religion merely as human invention."

Schools in Error

Ulich charged that schools of education err in failing to discuss the broad values of education with their graduate students, "who are incapable of reaching beyond the immediate utility of this or that branch of learning."

Ulich suggested that other schools of education emulate Harvard in inventing a special sequence of courses to "explain the teaching of values." Social sciences and humanities courses should be integrated with the material taught in the traditional "how-to-teach" graduate school of education curriculum.