Harold, I love your blog, but I'm not so sure I buy your point here. I thought that perhaps some context for the quotations would help, but after reading William and Julie's posts over at Nine Shift, I think I must be either missing their argument, or they--and you--are missing some evidence.

What makes you say that "we moved from morality to responsibility one hundred years ago?" I'm no expert in the history of education, but my understanding of the terms makes this statement seems pretty questionable.

First, in what ways did schools change when they started "teaching responsibility?" For that matter, what do William and Julie (and you) mean by "teaching responsibility" anyway? The Nine Shift posts seem to mean enforcing deadlines; I certainly could be ill informed, but I thought that 19th-Century schools did this as well?

And how about the other direction: did 20th-Century schools really abandon moral education? A little time with Google Scholar leads me to suspect otherwise; seems that most authors see the first half of the decade as chock full o' morality ed. (See here, for instance. I've not read McClellan's book (which seems widely cited), but a brief skim suggest that he sees the collapse in moral ed holding off until the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s. Indeed, the topic would seem to remain relevant, at least to scholars, today: Google Scholar returns 20k hits for " schools AND 'moral education' " published since the turn of the millennium. We can suspect that this scholarly interest probably reflects certain amount of moral education on the ground, as well. I certainly know that moral education was stressed in the middle and elementary schools where I've taught and volunteered. My point is that this argument which seeks to draw an analogy from history seems less-than-ideally aware of the history from which it draws.

And while I certainly agree that creativity is an absolutely essential part of an good education, and in increasingly important qualification for many jobs,I think I'd stop well short of saying that responsibility will be less important. I think that people will always prefer to to business with folks that honor their commitments, return correspondence, and meet deadlines.

Now, I do think that in some fields our notion of what constitutes a hard day's work may change...many jobs will (and do) require a lot of what a line worker might call sitting around doing nothing. But I think that's very different from responsibility. And I think it's got very little to do with a supposed Big Shift from morality to responsibility ed in schools.