MORALITY AFTER MYTH

Traditional approaches to education presume that the child acquires mo ral maturity from contacts with established religions, plus an injecti on of religious ideas via parents and schools. Homo sapiens, for his/h er part, has been thought to become moral through the acquisition of v alues, representing the will of God, via the teachings of inspired pro phets. In this scenario, myth and truth were interwoven and confused. We now see things differently: social/moral values appear, rather, to have been generated as the inescapable foundations for communal life. These values were often sustained by myth but were not the outcome of the mythical explanations. In our era the myths are fading overall, in spite of bursts of regeneration, thereby weakening the hold of tradit ional religions, so that we now need to rum, as the secure basis for m oral education, mainly to nourishing social/moral values through the e xperiences and relationships we offer to children and young adults. Th is greatly extends the role of home and school as assured sources of m oral development, which have now to be secured, not by abstract inculc ation, but through communal values, experienced within patterns of soc ial action and interaction, reinforced by general curriculum content.