It's delightful to read such articles and discussions in the middle of August. I look forward to read Asaf's remarks.

There's no conceptual problem with teaching youngsters how to read and write, or how to ride a bike, or eat with a fork and knife. This is just knowledge, something you can train youngsters in doing and then examine their skills.

Yizhar asserts that it's impossible to teach someone in which values to believe. You can't train someone to believe in your preferred set of values, nor could you examine his true belief in those values. Of course you can always blame the youngsters for being corrupt and lack of values, but you can never teach them your own values like you teach them aritmethics or gym.

It's an inherently impossible task, even if you are totally confident of the consistency of your own moral set of values. In addition, your moral set of values might be inconsistent, or incapable of giving explicit predictions as to how one should behave given a certain moral conflict. These are two distinct problems - being incapable of teaching values, and holding an unsatisfactory set of values.

Of course this is only part of Yizhar's theorm, while my own opinion is a bit different, but that's enough for this hazy hour. Allow me to direct you to a couple of references:

Please contribute your questions and thoughts at
http://lgolgher.home.cern.ch/lgolgher/htm/faithless....

Nighty Night.