what elephant attribute should be measured?
if it’s the whole elephant and we believe benjamin franklin that the measure of man is what he does with power, then the measure of elephant is what he does with…
peanuts?
his schnorkel (thanks zube)?
his memory?
big ears?
or this (borrowed):
The Blind Men and the Elephant
The parable of the blind men and the elephant attributes the blind men’s failure to accurately describe the entirety of the elephant to their physical handicap of a lack of sight. Would that the reasons for social scientists’ and educators’ failures to describe the entirety of the moral person were so obvious and guiltless. Rather it appears that the theoretical parochialism and arrogance of many of them are the root causes of the problem. The typical scenario is for various factions to propose diverse competing theories of moral development and moral education which are intended often as solutions to the problems of youth and society. Unfortunately, too much emphasis is placed on the “competing” and not enough on the “solutions”. What results is a professional dialogue laden with antagonism, “cheap shots”, and rather close-minded competition for the status as the “right answer”.
William Perry (1970) demonstrated that such a search for the ultimate single right answer reflects a rather immature sense of knowledge. Such a “dualistic” epistemology should be more representative of early adolescent thinking than of high level academic discourse. Yet the field is rife with such perspectives (e.g., Bennett, 1991; Kohlberg & Mayer, 1972; Piaget, 1965; Wynne & Ryan, 1993). Asking which theory is right is simply asking the wrong question. Rarely is there simply a choice between a single right theory and a set of wrong theories. Rather, the question should be how best to explain and influence moral growth given all the available knowledge and theoretical perspectives. Such a more dialectical approach makes optimal use of knowledge from all the diverse “camps”.
Certainly there are incompatible aspects of some approaches, but that simply makes the task more difficult, not impossible. The challenge is to sift through what each approach has to offer, find the commonalties and adjudicate between the discrepancies. This is a decidedly more productive course of action than the wholesale rejection of seemingly opposing theories, an approach that has unfortunately been so typical of the field.
It is important to note that there are attempts to be more integrative. For example, the single most impressive and successful program in moral education, the Child Development Project in San Ramon, California (Watson, Solomon, Battistich, Schaps, & Solomon, 1989), is a quite eclectic and wide-ranging approach to child moral development. James Rest (1985) was one of the first theorists to attempt a bridging of domains and Lickona (1983, 1991a) is the single most successful writer in the field while integrating Kohlbergian structuralism with character education and a variety of other perspectives, although his rather strident stances on specific cultural issues often precludes some readers from noticing how successfully he has integrated such perspectives (Rosenblatt, 1995).
One way out of this morass is to look for a grand theory that can encompass the major aspects of moral growth and moral education under one conceptual umbrella. Unfortunately such a grand theory is no where to be seen. Teachers tend to ignore theory and focus on the technical aspects of practice (Carr, 1986). Theorists, as already noted, tend to fall into one or another of various warring camps. To make matters even more difficult, this field actually spans a number of disciplines, most notably psychology, education, philosophy, and theology, and has its roots in quite contrasting philosophical models (Carr, 1991). Grand theory is important in part because so many of the failures in the field are due to the failure to build upon sound justifications derived from sound theory. Models instead ignore the fundamental nature of child development or rely upon an unexamined or misguided ethical theory (such as relativism), or fail to distinguish between morality and other social domains, etc.
Until we systematically reflect on the theoretical groundings of our educational work and on the ways in which we can benefit from the (even seemingly incompatible) work of others, we suffer the problems of the blind men and the elephant. Not only do we describe only a piece of the phenomenon we intend to understand in full, but we desperately refuse to listen to others who are privy to a different perspective on the broader issue, thereby impoverishing ourselves but more importantly our children and our society.
