Twofish, I see what you mean about us all having some philosophical training, but I don't think that's enough to give me the right to take it upon myself to instil my moral and philosophical and cultural values into the students.
My goal isn't so much to install my own philosophical or cultural values, but to help the student create their own. Part of the interesting thing is that in teaching, you *can't* avoid instilling cultural and philosophical value. Thou shalt not install moral, philosophical, and cultural values is itself a moral, philosophical, and cultural value.
And my point of view is that the subject that I'm teaching (namely astronomy) is basically a set of moral, philosophical, and cultural values, and some training in literacy so that the student can understand and internalize those values.
The reason I agreed with the OP in this case was not because she was trying to instil moral values in the student, but because she was showing the student that there are unpleasant consequences to lying.
The trouble with that approach (and I'm not arguing that it's wrong, just pointing out a flaw) is that there are often a lot of unpleasant consequences to telling the truth.
Though I can see that this assumes lying to be 'wrong' and like acri said many posts ago there can be no agreement on this topic without agreement either that lying is wrong, or that it isn't.
It's actually curious that even though there are lots of ethical theories with different assumptions, they all come up with "the student shouldn't have done what they did."
