An exploration of the significance of language as an unplanned element in the school environment for students' moral development. Propositional classroom discourse and evaluation direct thought processes so as to impair students' ability to resolve social and environmental problems. Moral sense is defined in terms of contextual relationships that prevent isolation of the individual and linear unidirectional moral action. Classroom communication is characterized by assertive and descriptive purpose, low-context setting, linear organization, and objective assumptions. It is argued that this language format reinforces students' sense of individual autonomy and the separation of the knowing subject from knowable objects, thus limiting students' concept of interconnected reality and relationship crucial to moral sensibility. It is suggested that schools could offset this problem by supplementing objectivizing discourse with non-propositional representations, e.g., metaphor. (Copyright 1997, Sociological Abstracts, Inc., all rights reserved.) (L. Lucht in LLBA 1997, vol. 31, n. 3)