In a recent interview with Dr. Gardner, we discussed a number of the moral break-downs in our education system, including the problem of cheating (The Global Search for Education: What Is Good?).
According to letters, the conflict came to a head in Tahiti, when Barbara had what Helen called a "moral break down" and "turned against" her mother; perhaps related to an unchaperoned trip taken with Captain Andrew Burt, during which Barbara wrote she "picked up a new and glorious acquaintance the devil".
I wondered how the theories and views expressed in Dr. Howard Gardner's book, Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues in the Age of Truthiness and Twitter, might apply to some of the egregious moral break-downs such as the sexual abuse, invasion of privacy, standardized test cheating and plagiarism scandals which have haunted some of our most respected institutions recently.
"If this moral shield breaks down, do you want the Federal Trade Commission to tell you how to raise your kids?
After all, when moral language breaks down, the values on which it rests collapse as well.
The question is how far can he push that compromise until his moral code breaks all together?
The temperance movement blamed booze for crime, "moral degeneracy", broken families and business failure.
And, in doing so, they allowed their inhabitants to enact a kind of modernist utopia in which gender restrictions were challenged, sexual norms transgressed, moral codes broken, aesthetic principles overturned, and intellectual affiliations reinvented.
"The novel is really interested in a moment of ambiguity," says Colla. "Noir is where the clarity of moral divisions break down, the black and whites turn into greys".
If you start out life with parts of your moral machinery broken, how likely are you to have a psychotic destiny?
