During Bill's "Tip of the Day" segment, during which he advised parents on how to "build character in children," he made a claim that, as Senator Al Franken used to say about Bill's claims, seemed to have been pulled out of his ass. After introducing his topic, "building character in children," Bill said this: "As you know, the public school system does not do that anymore. Used to be that civics classes even ethics classes; but few public schools offer them now." Recently, Bill said that he's rarely wrong. But his Factor fact, that schools don't teach civics and ethics, isn't entirely correct.
So the public school system doesn't teach ethics. Really?
From The National Alliance on Civics Education:
"Today, 29 states require high school students to take a course in government or civics. Five states (Alabama, Arizona,California,Idaho and New York) require students to take a senior year "capstone" civics or government course. Civic education advocates such as the Center for Civic Education see such capstone courses as a positive way to synthesize and strengthen students' civic lessons.
Nearly every state and the District of Columbia have also instituted standards that in some way incorporate civics content. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia present their civics standards as explicit standards within their social studies standards and three states (Arkansas,Colorado and Vermont) have separate civics standards. Another 18 states integrate civics topics into their social studies or other subject standards."
Regarding ethics classes, there don't seem to be any state requirements. I also couldn't find any examples of public schools that teach ethics.
So given that Bill was wrong about the civics and right about the ethics, he gets only two loofahs as opposed to loofahs on fire!
The Foxies can’t seem to grok that agnostics and atheists are just as ethical as fundamentalist Christians but they want public school teachers to offer instruction in ethics? Would these teachers need a certain amount of college courses in “ethics” to teach the class? (I can’t imagine that any college offers a major—or even a minor—in “ethics” which is, typically, the requirement for any school teacher, especially in high schools, to teach a specific class.)
Wouldn’t it actually be better for parents to be teaching their children what is and what isn’t proper ethics? (As well as “situational ethics”—like, if a starving man takes a loaf of bread without paying for it to feed himself and his starving family, is that “stealing?” According to the Old Testament, it isn’t. But US law doesn’t take that into consideration when such a man is arrested; theft is theft. A judge may take the situation into account but if the owner of that loaf of bread wants to press charges, it has to go to court—and the man is in jail, unless he can get bail. And, for some reason, I’m thinking FoxNoise wouldn’t take the man’s starving into account.)
