Can ‘character education’ save the public schools? Our local junior high school displays huge hallway banners reading, “Respect and Responsibility — We Can Do It Together.” Respect, this year’s theme, is meant to pervade the multiethnic school. (Last year compassion and caring took the lead.)
At the annual back-to-school night, our principal took a few minutes to explain the theme to us parents, then turned the program over to the cheerleaders. They illustrated respect by lip-synching a bump-and-grind rendition of Aretha Franklin’s song of the same name. At the final beat, they turned around, bent over, flipped up their cheerleader skirts, and displayed the word RESPECT, spelled out on pieces of paper pinned to their bottoms. I nudged my wife: “I don’t think they’ve completely grasped the concept.” Which is roughly what I thought when I learned of the existence of a movement in the public schools to teach children virtuous character. Are educators, I wondered, really ready for this? [used 7/7/96]
Still, the very existence of the character-education movement catches your attention. For some time, public schools have been saying that values are not part of their curriculum. It is news when a substantial group in public education says, “Yes, they are.”
I have on my desk a brochure from the Character Development Foundation in Manchester, New Hampshire. Intended to attract teachers to a one-day seminar, it proclaims boldly, “You can teach kids to be smart & Good!” Good is defined (in language typical of the character-education movement) by the traits of self-control, respect, responsibility, honesty, courage, caring, courtesy, and friendship. Character education claims to teach old-fashioned values to kids who are not getting them at home.
It would be hard to be against such an undertaking. Surely it is part of a school’s job to help parents turn their children into decent, responsible, moderately polite human beings. Yet it is also hard to entrust character confidently to the same people who embraced the values education of Planned Parenthood.
RIGHT AND WRONG REVISITED
In Washington, D.C., I attended a national conference put on by a coalition of organizations called the Character Education Partnership. Most of the several hundred people in attendance were schoolteachers or school administrators, cheerful and energetic people who were launching character-education programs in local schools all over the country, or thinking about it. Some very large school systems, such as those from Baltimore and Saint Louis, were represented, as were many smaller places. Vocal supporters ranged from a Democratic White House aide to a conservative Republican senator, and organizations running the gamut — from the Rainbow Coalition to the National Association of Evangelicals.
By all the signs, character education is a grassroots movement, springing up in a hundred different places. There is, so far, no “right” way to do it. Its popularity is perhaps best shown by the fact that educational entrepreneurs are jumping in, looking for a profit. At my first seminar, I met Robert Barden, a friendly, long-haired representative of the Cumberland County Schools in North Carolina. He told me of all kinds of gimmicky presentations people had brought to his school system, including a high-energy performance from a salesman dressed — for reasons unclear to Barden — in a NASA jumpsuit.
I hadn’t gone to many seminars before I realized that character education is not the same thing as the “discipline” parents often want in school. Character education is much more upbeat and optimistic than that. As one principal told me, “Some parents want regimentation, and this is the very opposite.”
Character education does emphasize clearly defined and enforced rules, but that is just one part of it. Character education tries to form the kind of person who does what is right without his being told and when he is not being watched. Strict rules and harsh punishments may prompt compliance, these educators say, but the behavior will not necessarily carry over to another environment. As Thomas Lickona, a professor of education at the State University of New York, writes in his book “Educating for Character,” “Good character consists of knowing the good, desiring the good, and doing the good — habits of the mind, habits of the heart, and habits of action.”
Character education is not shy about using the terms right and wrong. Lickona notes that just a few years ago, the question “Should the schools teach values?” would be answered by the retort “Whose values?” “With remarkable swiftness,” he writes, “that has changed. Escalating moral problems in society … are bringing about a new consensus.” The “rights” and “wrongs” character educators want to bring back are consensus values, those that everybody can agree on. They ardently avoid including issues like abortion or homosexuality, putting the emphasis on teaching values that are, they claim, timeless and invariable across cultures. They talk about teaching “civic” virtues, those foundations of citizenship assumed in the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Character-education advocates are not very philosophical about it, though. They want to teach the agreed-on values of the community they live in. And they assert that we agree on a lot more than we realize.
For example, Robert Barden helped launch Fayetteville, North Carolina’s program. One rainy night 700 interested people gathered in a school gym to decide on a list of values to teach. Every strand of the community was represented, from fundamentalists to feminists, Barden says, and he was not overly confident about reaching consensus. But to his and everyone’s surprise, the meeting unanimously agreed on seven core values. Now, he says, the community is solidly behind the program.
People launching character-education programs often express surprise at the level of unanimity they achieve. The Saint Louis PREP program (Personal Responsibility Education Process) incorporates 23 different school districts, each of which chooses its own character traits to teach. Almost 50 different terms appear on their various lists: Respect and responsibility were chosen by nearly all districts. Honesty, cooperation, self-esteem, and perseverance were claimed by more than half. Traits like abstinence, reliability, and self-control were chosen by a few. What is remarkable is not the values, but the fact that schools are excitedly talking about values at all.
The “New York Times,” in an article published in January of this year, estimates that one out of every five public schools has some kind of character-education program in place. Most character-education programs are in elementary schools; some are in middle schools; and a few are in high schools. The programs vary widely. Many include schoolwide recognition for kids who behave well, a virtue-of-the-month program (usually underlined by posters in the halls), literature-based lessons that emphasize moral themes (much like William Bennett’s best-selling “Book of Virtues”), training for students in conflict resolution, cooperative-learning strategies like “buddy- learning,” and programs to improve behavior in the cafeteria, on the playground, and on school buses.
Any of these programs can be added on individually to a school’s program, but character-education leaders emphasize that a comprehensive program is best so that the various facets complement one another. Ideally, they like to offer training to the school’s teachers and staff. Behind it all is an idea of what a school should be: a community of people rather than a building, a place where one generation transmits its knowledge and its morals to the next. That, obviously, is what church schools have been trying to do from the beginning. The idea that public schools can have much the same purpose and meaning is a new, invigorating one to many educators.
BEYOND VALUES CLARIFICATION
David Brooks, head of the Jefferson Center for Character Education, described overhearing a student asking his teacher whether a certain action was wrong. “That’s for you to decide for yourself,” the teacher said.
“I wanted to strangle that teacher,” commented Brooks.
His response is typical of people involved with character education. They are weary of teaching kids that the center of the moral universe is in their heads. The notion that schools should be value neutral irritates them. Not teaching right and wrong is a value in itself, they say.
Character education often gets confused with “values clarification,” a program of the sixties that explicitly rejected teaching right and wrong. The very mention of values clarification makes character-education advocates wince. Many educators see it as emblematic of a certain style of education, emphasizing the likelihood that kids, properly stimulated to reflect, will naturally choose to become caring, respectful individuals. Values clarification usually emphasized “hard case” predicaments and theoretical situations, asking kids to assign seats on an overcrowded lifeboat rather than to deal with cheating, fighting, stealing, and name calling.
Better, but still inadequate, were moral-education programs built on Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning. “Their focus was still on ‘process’ — thinking skills — rather than moral content,” writes Lickona. “Teachers still didn’t see it as their role to teach or foster particular values.”
That, in a nutshell, is what gives energy to character-education programs: they are rejecting relativism, returning to old-fashioned virtues, teaching right and wrong. The means are prosaic. Nobody, surely, gets excited about putting up foil stars in the office and nominating admirable students, staff, and parents for “Shining Star” awards. Yet people do get excited about character education that majors on just such programs. The character- education conference seemed overrun with idealistic men and women who love kids and want them to become decent human beings. A good number volunteered to me that they are Christians.
One seminar I attended was led by Michael Loren, a physician who had profited from a moral improvement program he found in Ben Franklin’s writings. Loren had adapted the program for school children, but as he explained, had felt it necessary to change some of Franklin’s 13 virtues. “I thought, ‘Chastity — how am I going to sell this to the schools?'” He had replaced chastity with friendship, and changed temperance to alertness. But Loren, it seemed, had misjudged his audience. Someone raised a hand and suggested that he could have stayed with the original words, and others muttered agreement.
White House aide William Galston came to talk to the conference. “We’re winning,” he said. “We’re winning this battle. The need for this work can no longer be denied.” He said that a great social experiment had been tried in America, “based on personal freedom checked only by law,” and the evidence was in: “No government and no society has enough courts to get people to do the right thing. The issue is knowing the good, loving the good, and, I would add, having a settled habit of doing the good.”
Regarding teen pregnancies, Galston said, “Ten years ago, the conventional wisdom was that it was a problem without a solution.” But now, he said, they had winnowed half a dozen successful programs out of hundreds and found one common component: they treated teenage pregnancy as a psychological and moral problem, not as a technological or medical problem. He called for a “clear moral message of personal responsibility, resisting temptation and, in many cases, resisting intimidation.” The audience responded positively to the mention of abstinence-based programs, though some attendees told me they had avoided adding any sex education to their curriculum for fear of controversy.
After attending the Washington conference I had no doubt that character education was a real grassroots movement, appealing to a broad range of educators. What I could not figure out was how seriously to take it. Was it like those congressional resolutions to favor a balanced budget: all sensibility, no teeth? Does it do anything for children?
[see also #3630-31]