Schools, especially in a pluralistic nation like America, should stick to teaching academic subjects and leave ethics for the home and the church, temple, or synagogue. To do otherwise is to invite trouble, as this essay will show. The most important question to be answered, if our schools are to teach values, is: whose values would they teach? After all, not all ethical values are the same. Let's consider one example; Jewish kids and fundamentalist Christians.    These two groups may live in the same town or neighborhood, and either one would be incensed to have the other group's moral teachings imposed on them. This example isn't merely fanciful. In some southern towns where prayers from the Christian Bible are still recited in public schools, Jewish families have had to go to court to protect their right to abstain without suffering ridicule. 　　Conversely, non-Jewish families in a New York town dominated by orthodox Jews have recently been protesting the fact that the local schools were presenting traditional Jewish teachings in the classroom. In instances like these, bringing ethics into the schools causes divisiveness, not harmony. The only way to avoid the inevitable conflicts that teaching ethics would bring to our schools is by allowing teachers to focus on what they're paid to do: to teach academics. 　　Given the fact that American schoolchildren lag behind most other nations in academic achievement, it would be foolish for us to divert precious classroom time to teaching morality. This is not to say that the ethical dimensions of topics in history, English, or other subjects must be banned from the classroom. Students and teachers should be free to reflect on moral themes in their own papers and in classroom discussions. But the curriculum shouldn't aim to inculcate any particular ethical point of view, and dialogues regarding morality should always be focused on the underlying educational purpose―that is, to teach history, English, or whatever. 　　Ironically, then, the most ethical thing our schools can do for our children is to avoid getting entangled in ethical issues. Stick to academics, and let families teach morality in their own way, and on their own time.