Teaching reasoning skills, rather than the virtues, is considered the means to a moral education; values clarification, not character, is regarded as the goal. These educators think that moral education is like teaching children reading or arithmetic. But even that is not quite accurate, because in the case of moral education children are supposed to be permitted to discover and clarify for themselves their own values and personal moral stance in the world. Yet we do not permit children to invent their own math; rather, we teach them the multiplication tables. Nor do we encourage children to
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