BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR
The Moral Intelligence of Children by Robert Coles. Still relevant today.
By refusing to face history, we are forced to live it again.
How do children learn right from wrong?
How do we teach values in a world that prizes profit over all else?
It may just come down to a “questioning spirit” as Coles describes it:
It’s our effort in this planet as creatures who have a mind and use language to ask questions and answer them through speculation, through story-telling, to explore the universe and answer those fundamental questions: Where do we come from? What are we? And where, if any place, are we going? And those fundamental questions inform religious life and inform the lives of children as children, and that merger is a beautiful thing to behold when you’re with children.
How does this apply to the Wicked7?
One can view the failings of our leaders—political, social, and religious— as failures of the moral imagination, as I feel Robert Coles did, when he taught an ethics class at Harvard Business School. And yes, there was a text in the class.
Other important books by Robert Coles:
By the way, Coles also wrote a book on Bruce Springsteen, and one on Walker Percy.