Research shows ethics education teaches kids right from wrong. Why can so few students access it?

Ethics education can help teach children right from wrong, a claim supported by recent research. David Gonski, a businessman and former university chancellor, has called for ethics classes to be implemented in all Australian schools to promote social cohesion. Currently, ethics education does not receive dedicated time in the school curriculum.

While some argue that children already learn ethics from their parents and other adults, research suggests that formal ethics education can improve students' ability to reason through ethical issues and prioritize doing the right thing.

In Australia, ethics has been part of the national curriculum for over a decade, alongside literacy, numeracy, and other subjects. However, no single teacher is responsible for teaching ethics. Instead, this responsibility falls on all teachers, even when teaching subjects like mathematics, art, or biology. The focus on what gets tested means that teachers who value general capabilities such as ethics struggle to teach them explicitly.

The only structured ethics offering in schools is during religious instruction, which is only optional and leaves families without a secular alternative. Our study synthesized 92 randomized controlled trials involving 12,693 students from primary school through to university, spanning nearly five decades across 20 countries, including Australia.

Of those 92 trials, 54 compared students receiving ethics lessons to control groups who did not learn ethics, while the others compared different types of ethics instruction against each other.

Students who received formal ethics education were better at recognizing ethical issues (moral sensitivity), giving better reasons about the right thing to do (moral judgment), and wanting to prioritize doing the right thing (moral motivation). Four in five trials showed meaningful positive effects in these areas. Although the study did not measure kids' actual behavior over the long run, higher moral reasoning capacity is associated with being more likely to help others, resist peer pressure, and having lower levels of juvenile delinquency.

The effectiveness of ethics education depends on how it is taught. Programs built around student discussion work well, while lecture and reading-based programs do not, as found in our research. Ethics is a valuable subject to learn in schools because students can have discussions with peers and educators, which is harder for most parents to replicate at home.

In New South Wales, the Primary Ethics program runs in about 500 schools and reaches roughly 40,000 students weekly using trained volunteers. New South Wales' model could be replicated in other states by allocating dedicated class time for ethics, much like religious instruction, without requiring new funding or teachers.