Ethics for schools

In about a week from now, the trial of secular ethics classes will start in about 10 NSW public schools. I'm very interested to see what the content of the course would be, but the only information I have seen is the following list of topics that was in the newspapers:

* Session One: Getting Started

The first session will be used to set up the class and involve discussion of moral dilemmas.

* Session Two: Fairness

In this session students will be given the opportunity to think about some of the reasons why things are either fair or not fair by judging specific scenarios.

* Session Three: Lying

In this session students will be asked to make relative judgments. They will look at particular cases and determine when it is acceptable to lie and why one lie is more or less acceptable than another.

* Session Four: Ethical Principles

In this session students are asked to think about principles of ethical decision-making. By focusing on principles such as ``You should always tell the truth'' and ``You should keep your promises'', students will see their limitations and the tensions that can exist between them.

* Session Five: Graffiti

This lesson deals with the topic of graffiti. Students are asked to discuss various examples of graffiti and to suggest possible measures that may help to reduce the incidence of graffiti in their local area.

* Session Six: The Use and Abuse of Animals

This session returns to relative judgment and will ask students to think about various ways in which we treat animals and to examine the acceptability of one case by comparison with another.

* Session Seven: Interfering with Nature

In this session, students are asked to decide whether various things people do are acceptable or not acceptable interventions in nature and to develop criteria for making ethical distinctions between different cases.

* Session Eight: Virtues and Vices

In this session the class will be exploring the topic of virtues and vices, in the sense of good and bad character traits. They will be asked to consider whether virtues and vices always correspond to one another.

* Session Nine: Children's Rights

This lesson asks the students to consider whether certain rights should or should not be accorded to them.

* Session Ten: The Good Life

In the final session students will talk about what they need in order to have a good life. It will allow them to apply their knowledge to the central topic in ethics.

Concerning this subject, I have started listening to a series of lectures on ethics by Peter Kreeft

A couple of interesting ideas from his first lecture are:

1) we can distinguish between "big" issues and "little" issues in ethics. The big issues are the foundations, like what is good and evil, are our actions free or determined, is there a god, is there life after death.

The small issues are like law school case studies that apply these ideas to specific examples, but don't explore the foundations, like is  war just, are the developers or environmentalists right? These are important, but not enough. I will be interested to see how much of the school ethics classes are about big or little issues.

2) C.S. Lewis compared ethics to fleet of ships setting sail. There are 3 levels of moral laws important to the fleet:

1. the laws that tell the ships how to sail so they don't bump into each other
2. laws about how to keep each of the ships in good order
3. where is the fleet going, and what is its purpose?

It is popular these days to concentrate on the first of these and ignore the other two. I am also interested to  see how these ideas relate to the content of the school ethics course.