No matter how high, how impressive, and how perfect one’s grades are in Moral Education, it won’t change the person’s behaviour.
But that is not my point.
Although it’s impossible to be the best-behaving person on Earth, we still ought to try to be as ethical as we can. However, that is not something we gain from Moral Education.
We have to be able to show compassion, integrity, honesty, loyalty, modesty, and many other values in certain scenarios. That’s the expected outcome of
learning Moral Education.
But do we achieve that by reading every page of the Moral Education textbook, memorising every word, sitting for the exam, and in the end, defining our level of morality based on the results?
No.
No man can have every moral value. Some can be uncaring and greedy. Some can be selfish and insensitive. Some can be arrogant and jealous. Thus, it
does not make sense to learn morals as a school subject to possess every good value.
We learn Moral Education to work on our flaws and weaknesses. But flaws cannot be rectified by reading a textbook.
Let’s say there is a wounded kitten stuck in a drain, and someone helped it. Now, let’s assume that this person did not learn Moral Education. Yet, he still helped. Why? Because he felt bad. That’s compassion.
True compassion cannot be developed by reading Moral textbooks or listening to teachers harping about why we need to be compassionate. At some point in our lives, we will understand and realise the importance of compassion and will want to change our attitude towards others.
This is called self-realisation. Self-realisation works for any value, be it honesty, hard work, or modesty. Self-realisation will normally occur to someone when his idol, or someone he looks up to, does something that moves him deeply.
Or when he faces a life experience that teaches him that lesson.
The late American visual artist Andy Warhol once said: “When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they want to, you can’t stop them”.
These moral values are meant to be taught by parents from a young age. If parents rely entirely on Moral Education at school, they are running away from their responsibilities.
Instead of teaching Moral Education as a subject, teachers can spend the same time guiding and coaching students in their school life. For instance, when a student makes a mistake, the teacher should explain, to make the student understand what they did wrong.
Teachers should also explain rules and regulations, instead of just expecting the students to read from the book and understand it themselves.
Moral Education has been an official subject in Malaysia for decades. Despite that, there are still many students with low moral values in school. I don’t see how Moral Education is fixing that.
Countless adults who did not study Moral Education still turned out to be good, kind, and compassionate people. Sometimes more so than those who studied it.
Aren’t we all just wasting our time with the subject of Moral Education in schools?
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