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Thought these articles may be of interest:

1. FALLACIES OF NONDIRECTIVE EDUCATION: Dr. William R. Coulson, Guest and Contributing Psychologist to Culture Shock

In schools across America, time is taken from academics to provide children with drug education, suicide education, and sex education courses; the promise is to reduce or eliminate personal experimentation with drugs, sex and suicide. That promise is false. Follow up research shows increased drug use and sexual activity after the typical classroom exercises; and from the popular "death and dying courses," there are preliminary indications that this kind of education also leads to a greater likelihood of violence against the self. The education is called "nondirective" or "affective." Teachers are instructed to withdraw to the position of "facilitator," offering students "reflective listening" and nonjudgmental acceptance instead of confident instruction. Gradually the most undisciplined children begin to take over: parked in what one commercial curriculum purveyor proudly calls "conversation circles" (a kind of enforced friendship), the experimenters among the student body begin to teach the inexperienced how to become more experimental. It's like persuading the class there's no need to take the problems of drugs, violence and premarital sex very seriously: what's needed instead is principally to uncover feelings-this instead of being instructed.
W. R. Coulson was one of the initiators of the 1960s-styled contemporary movement away from classroom academics. But he long ago turned away and recanted....

2. Experiments in Moral Education, by William Kilpatrick, Boston College

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Where did this experimental approach come from?
The most important thing to know about the origin of the decision-making approach, is to understand that it's essentially a transplant from the world of therapy. It was an attempt to take ideas and techniques that had proved useful in counseling and to put them to work in the classroom. In the 1940's and 50's Carl Rogers and others had pioneered a method of counseling that was non-directive, non-judgmental, and client-centered. Have you heard this name, Carl Rogers? Along with Abraham Maslow, he was one of the founding fathers of what became known as humanistic psychology or human potential psychology. Rogers is not the best known of psychologists but I don't think any other psychologist has had as much influence on our culture and ways of thinking. In the 60's and 70's these counseling techniques which Rogers had developed were introduced into schools with the result that teachers began to take a non-directive, non-judgmental attitude toward values. Each person would have to discover his own values, and no one could say that one value was superior to another.
The emphasis- As it was in the therapy - was on feeling good about yourself and feeling comfortable with your choices. It was an approach which cast the teacher in the role of amateur psychologist and which turned the values education classroom into something resembling an encounter group.
It is interesting to note, by the way, that Carl Rogers did not use this non-directive approach with his own children or grandchildren. Dr. William Coulson, who knew Rogers well, tells the story of visiting the Rogers household one hot summer day when the family was gathered around the outdoor swimming pool. It was as inground pool with a concrete border, and two of Rogers' granddaughters were there. One of these girls took a coke bottle and made as though she was going to throw it against the side of the pool (This was in the days when coke bottles were made of glass - I'm sure none of you can remember that far back).
Well Dr. Coulson is sitting in his lounge chair, observing all this, and thinking to himself "Hmm, I wonder how Rogers is going to handle this in a non-directive way? Is he going to say 'Un-huh, un-huh, I guess you're wondering, 'Gee! What would it be like to throw the bottle"? But that's not what Rogers said. What he actually said was "Put that down! That's dangerous! Someone could get hurt!" So much for the non-directive approach when it comes to your own grandchildren......

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Americans failed experiments in moral education - values clarification, decision-making, moral reasoning - are examples of individualism taken to the extreme. In these approaches each individual child is encouraged to make up his own values with very little guidance from adult society.
We thought that if parents and teachers refrained from teaching values, youngsters would be free to think for themselves. But that is not what happened. Instead youngsters were left to the mercy of the peer group and the media. And, of course, the Media had no hesitation about imposing its own values on children....