THE CULTURE WAR, MODERN ECONOMICS, AND ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES

Teaching ethics in public schools in the United States has been made almost impossible because of the Culture War and Modern Economics. When Catholics began to migrate to the United States in the early nineteenth century, they found that Protestant religion and ethics were taught in public schools and they created their own parochial schools. This controversy has continued for two hundred years. To encourage the Catholics to send their children to the public schools, by 1860 religion and ethics had been removed from the public schools. Concern about the teaching of ethics spread to other religious and non-religious groups. These groups attack the teaching of ethics as the indoctrination of the personal values of teachers, and when teachers include alternative ethical views to avoid indoctrination they are accused of relativism. According to Modern Economics, value terms are meaningless unless they have been translated into economic terms based on willingness to pay. This approach overlooks the social values that make up the cultural heritage of a society. Although children acquire these social values tacitly, since they are not taught these values as a common heritage, they come to believe that they invented them ahistorically and that they are just how they feel (ethical emotivism). By teaching children social values as a common heritage, the charges of indoctrination and relativism and the replacement of these values with economic terms can be avoided, later permitting a more objective role for ethics in public affairs among adults.