A few weeks ago, a reader wrote to Ann Landers about an Escondido, CA, English class where the students were required to write a paper on the “Worst Case Final Disaster.” The students were given the first part of the story and instructed to complete it.
The story was as follows: “Sixteen people were in a bomb shelter that could support only ten. Survival on the outside was impossible. The student had to choose which ten people should be allowed to remain. Six people had to be turned out to certain death.”
One student refused to complete the paper because it violated her religious principles to decide that some lives are less valuable than others, and because the lesson taught that disposal of the less worthy is the only acceptable answer. Ann Landers defended the assignment because, she said, “it is unrealistic to assume that all human beings are equally valuable … and young people should learn how to make informed, intelligent choices.”
This bomb shelter case is one of several variations of the “Lifeboat Game,” which tells schoolchildren that ten persons are in a sinking lifeboat, and requires the student to select which five of the ten must be thrown out to drown. Shall it be the pregnant woman, or the senior citizen, or the handicapped person, or the scientist, or the minister, or the coed, or the policeman? Whom shall we save and whom shall we eliminate?
“None of the above” is not an acceptable answer.
Most public school children of the last decade have been subjected to some variation of this “disaster” lesson at least once. One newspaper reporter told me that she had the exercise in almost every level of elementary and secondary school.
These macabre “games” come from a book called “Values Clarification” by Sidney Simon. A 1972 book, surprisingly, it still is in print and available in bookstores. It is a collection of 79 strategies which force the child into moral dilemmas or privacy-invading situations which exclude a religious or moral point of view.
The term “values clarification” was originated in the mid-1960s, but it is essentially the same technique known to orators and debaters for centuries as the “false alternative.” Force your audience to choose between the alternatives you select while excluding other alternatives that don’t suit your purposes.
Thus, in one school recently, a child answered the lifeboat question by saying “Jesus brought another boat so no one had to drown.” Her innovative response was deemed unacceptable by the teacher, and the child received an “F.”
Over the past decade, many scholarly criticisms of values clarification have been published which corroborate parental objections. For example, Professor Richard A. Baer of Cornell University has written that values clarification indoctrinates children with “radical ethical relativism.”
That means that it teaches the particular value position that all values are subjective and matters of individual choice, and that personal pleasure is the highest good in life. Values clarification is a form of psychotherapy which teaches a profound bias against authority, traditional morality, and duty.
Another typical values clarification exercise asks, “How do you feel about premarital sex?” The student is required to position himself somewhere between Virginal Virginia (sometimes called Gloves Gladys) and Mattress Millie. Virginal Virginia “wears white gloves on every date,” and Mattress Millie “wears a mattress strapped to her back.”
Baer and other critics ask whether it is reasonable to expect students, especially the shy or insecure ones, to take anything other than a middle-of-the-road position in the face of such extremes presented by the authority figure in the classroom combined with peer pressure from classmates.
Baer points out that, when values clarification presents the individual as the final arbiter of truth and moral choice, it infringes on religion. Thus, he says, if the statement that “God is the final arbiter of truth in the realm of values” is a religious statement and barred from public schools, then the contrary, “God is NOT the final arbiter of truth in the realm of values” is also a religious statement and should likewise be banned. Yet, this latter statement is the basic dogma of values clarification.
Baer concludes that “it is intolerable in a society such as ours to have the authors press it on a semicaptive audience of students in a public school setting as THE truth about values and human beings. This represents a gross violation of the doctrine of the separation of church and state.”
