School Responsibility: Academics or Ethics?

"Schools should be responsible only for teaching academic skills and not for teaching ethical and social values."

Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion expressed above. Support your point of view with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading.

Should schools take responsible for teaching ethical and social values or should they focus only on teaching academic skills? It is an interesting question to which there is no easy answer. On one hand, one may assume it to be natural for schools to teach ethical and social values as they are responsible for a holistic growth of the student. On the other hand, who is to prevent schools from becoming a tools in the hand of the Government hell-bent on pushing through its propaganda on young, impressionable minds?

One thing I can say for sure is that ethics and education go hand in hand. A good example is the examination for a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) who has to give an exam in ethics besides the regular financial subjects. If the student fails in ethics, he fails the entire exam: no matter how good his financial knowledge is. In fact, most of the industries have a code of ethics. If a student aspires to gain knowledge about a subject, he may as well be well versed with the ethics of the industry he targets so as he becomes a responsible corporate citizen.

However, when one talks about social values, there is no easy answer. In an increasingly multi-cultural society it is becoming more and more difficult to arrive at a common set of acceptable ideals. Nevertheless, it is important for schools to teach the basic social values that bind the country. For example, if US citizens take pride in their flag and their country, a great deal of credit goes to the grass-root education that inspires patriotism. As long as it is not a tool for propaganda but an honest effort to educate children about their society and imbibe values of tolerance and patriotism, it will serve its purpose. 

Finally, a student spends a lot of time of his formative years in his school. So logically it is the place that can have the most powerful effect in shaping his personality (catch them young as they say!) after his immediate family. Hence, a school needs to take the responsibility to not only educate the pupil about the world but also about how to live in this world. This is not possible without teaching social and ethical values. This would not only help in the holistic growth of the students but will also contribute to making a better world.

Concluding, I do not agree that schools should limit themselves to teaching academic skills only. In fact they bear the huge responsibility of making their students better human beings by teaching them about ethics and social values.