Questions for class.

1.  Joseph Campbell has written of the Hero with a Thousand Faces.  Tales about great warriors overcoming impossible odds have inspired people for as long as stories have been around.  In mythology, folk tales, and ballads, the hero is celebrated as the ideal member of society.  But in our times, we cannot help but ask, what about great women?  For every hundred venerated men, there seems to be only a scant few women.  There were time periods when great women did not even seem to exist.  We can't even imagine what message this was sending to earlier society's young women.  So what might studying exclusively "hero" stories literature and film in classrooms today be saying about our attitudes to women?

2.  Dewey and Vygotsky shared the view that the mind and its formation is a communal process; the individual must be an inextricable part of her society.  In other words, society has no meaning apart from how it is realized in the lives of its individual members.  In Beowulf we see how the warriors and their families are loyal to a king who in turn offers his people protection and employment.  Describe what the relationships are in a school and how developing community in the school and classroom benefits or harms the individual.

3.  This social bond between early Anglo-Saxon warriors and their leader was part of the "heroic code" that established ethical principles.  Kohlberg, taking Piaget's developmental stages further, has determined how we grow into greater ethical awareness:

I.                 Preconventional level – the child is responsive to cultural rules and labels of good and bad, right and wrong, but interprets these labels in terms of either the physical or the hedonistic consequences of action (punishment, reward, exchange of favors), or in terms of the physical power of those who enunciate the rules and labels…Avoidance of punishment is valued in its own right but not in terms of respect for an underlying moral order.  Right action is what instrumentally satisfies one’s own needs… Reciprocity is a matter of ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’.

II.               Conventional level – (involves) maintaining the expectations of the individual’s family, group or nation (which) is perceived as valuable in its own right…The attitude is not only one of conformity to personal expectations and social order, but of loyalty to it, of actively maintaining it…Behavior is frequently judged by intention… One earns approval by being ‘nice’…  There is an orientation towards authority, fixed rules …(law and order.)

III.             Postconventional, autonomous or principled level – there is a clear effort to define moral values and principles which have validity and application apart from the authority of the groups or persons holding these principles…Right action tends to be defined in terms of general individual rights, and standards which have been critically examined and agreed upon by the whole society.  There is a clear awareness of the relativism of personal values…Right is defined by the decision of conscience in accord with self-chosen ethical principles appealing to logical comprehensiveness, universality, and consistency.  These principles are abstract and ethical (the Golden Rule, the categorical imperative); they are not concrete moral rules like the Ten Commandments.   At heart, these are universal principles of justice, of the reciprocity and equality of human rights, and of respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons. (80).

Kohlberg also believed development is driven by social interaction.   Do you believe students naturally develop morally as a result of being in the social environment of the school?