by Don Berg
(Portland, OR, USA)
In this fifth installment of the illusion series we consider our sense of morality. What are our built-in standards for evaluating our own and other people's behavior?
In the following video Jonathan Haidt starts off by pointing out a common sense way that we distinguish liberal and conservative people and then goes further to explain how he and his colleague found that there are a distinct set of moral ideas that generally go along with that common sense stereotype.
The illusion exposed in this video is that our moral standards are the right or only moral standards. What we have to realize is that we have a variety of moral standards (five according to Professor Haidt's research) and those moral standards vary according to our personalities and how they are activated in the situations in which we find ourselves. The question that is important in education is how to address all of those moral standards as we embed children in educational situations that we create.
This is the question that this series has ultimately been leading up to:
What moral responsibility do we have for the creation of educational situations for children?
(I will have one final installment in this series on Illusions About Our Global Society to broaden the question to include the even bigger questions of taking responsibility for the educational situations we are creating for each other as adults, too.)
Illusion Series:
2: Illusions of Knowing The World
3: The Illusion of Knowing Our Own Minds
5: Illusions of Good