Moral Education in America, B. Edward McClellan argues that most elementary schools began to abandon moral formation in the 1940s and 1950s and “by the 1960s deliberate moral education was in full-scale retreat.” He continues: “Educators who had once prided themselves on their ability to reshape character now paid more attention to the SAT scores of their students, and middle-class parents scrambled to find schools that would give their children the best chances to qualify for elite colleges and universities.”
