Christina Sommer Teaching The Virtues Summary

Summary of Christina Sommer’s Teaching the Virtues
In Christina Sommer’s piece entitled Teaching the Virtues, she quickly states her position in thinking that ethics education in contemporary school’s need reform. Christina Sommer believes that in ethics classrooms in schools there is too much of a focus on social morality and not enough focus on private morality, and these students can benefit from a more balanced approach. Social morality refers to issues such as the death penalty, abortion, and physician assisted suicide. Private morality is focused on personal values such as honesty and helping others. In her experience, she thinks many students are moral relativists, which are people with an ambiguous philosophy.
Moral relativists tend
She compares this to allowing a child to go into a chemistry lab and letting them fend for their self. However, an alternative to this would be to follow a directive moral policy. A directive moral policy rewards students for positive or good moral behaviors, such as helping fellow students. Yet, opponents of this strategy believe this could open room for abuse and would be akin to brain washing. Christina Sommer’s says that position is misleading and that brainwashing is to weaken an individual’s ability to reason and states good principled practices strengthens an individual’s ability to reason. In general, she trusts that teachers or professors could be doing a better job in ethics training.
Christina Sommer’s insists that a more balanced approach to ethics education, one that includes equal parts of social and private morality, would benefit students in becoming more rounded individual with an increased ability to reason. Christina Sommer’s states that virtues can be taught and students are receptive to developing consciously developing virtuous