Educating for Character: How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibility - Couverture souple

CHAPTER 1
 
 
 
The Case for Values
Education
 
To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
The core problem facing our schools is a moral one. All the other problems derive from it. Even academic reform depends on putting character first.
—WILLIAM KILPATRICK, Why
    Johnny Can’t Tell Right from
    Wrong
 
Should the schools teach values?
 
Just a few years ago, if you put that question to a group of people, it was sure to start an argument. If anyone said yes, schools should teach children values, somebody else would immediately retort, “Whose values?” In a society where people held different values, it seemed impossible to get agreement on which ones should be taught in our public schools. Pluralism produced paralysis; schools for the most part ended up trying to stay officially neutral on the subject of values.
 
With remarkable swiftness, that has changed. Escalating moral problems in society—ranging from greed and dishonesty to violent crime to self-destructive behaviors such as drug abuse and suicide—are bringing about a new consensus. Now, from all across the country, from private citizens and public organizations, from liberals and conservatives alike, comes a summons to the schools: Take up the role of moral teachers of our children.
 
Of all the moral problems that have fueled this concern, none has been more disturbing than rising youth violence. From 1978 to 1988, according to FBI statistics, rape arrests for 13- and 14-year-old males nearly doubled.2 Over a 20-year period (1968 to 1988), there was a 53 percent increase in all violent crime—murder, rape, robbery, and assault—for males and females seventeen or under.3 Moreover, juvenile crimes of violence, often carried out by kid-next-door teenagers, have of late combined new lows in brutality with a seeming total lack of conscience or remorse.
 
In Brooklyn, three teenage boys, described by neighbors as “nice kids,” were arrested for dousing sleeping homeless men with gasoline and setting fire to them. As the youths were booked at the police station, one of them said, “We just like to harass the bums.”
 
Five teenagers in affluent Glen Ridge, New Jersey—including two brothers who were cocaptains of the high school football team—were arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a 17-year-old mentally retarded girl in the basement of the brothers’ home. Eight other teenagers watched.
 
There is today a widespread, deeply unsettling sense that children are changing—in ways that tell us much about ourselves as a society. And these changes are reflected not just in the violent extremes of teenage behavior but in the everyday speech and actions of younger children as well. In New Orleans, a boy in first grade shaves chalk and passes it around the classroom, pretending it is cocaine. In a small-town school in upstate New York, a first-grade boy leans over and asks the girl in the next row, “Are you a virgin?” A Newsweek story titled “So Long Wonder Years” reports the findings of a new Carnegie Corporation study: One quarter of all junior high school students are involved in some combination of smoking, drinking, drug use, and sex; fully half are involved in at least one of these activities.
 
Children with the most glaring deficiencies in moral values almost always come, their teachers say, from troubled families. Indeed, poor parenting looms as one of the major reasons why schools now feel compelled to get involved in values education. Another part of the problem is the mass media and the prominent place it occupies in the lives of children. The typical elementary school child spends 30 hours a week in front of the television set. By age 16, the average child will have witnessed an estimated 200,000 acts of violence8 and by age 18, approximately 40,000 sexually titillating scenes. Episodes of sexualized violence are increasingly common.
 
Not surprisingly, many young people growing up in this kind of media culture are stunted in their moral judgment. Large numbers, for example, don’t even know that rape is wrong. In a 1988 survey conducted by the Rhode Island Rape Crisis Center, 1,700 sixth- to ninth-graders were asked, “Is it acceptable for a man to force a woman to have sex if he has spent money on her?” A total of 24 percent of the boys and 16 percent of the girls in grades seven through nine said yes. When asked, “Is it acceptable for a man to force a woman to have sex if they have been dating for more than six months?,” 65 percent of the boys said yes. So did 47 percent of the girls.
 
Simultaneously, a wave of greed and materialism threatens to engulf us. Money increasingly drives our society and shapes the values and goals of our youth. Making money becomes the justification for breaking rules. In a recent survey, two thirds of U.S. high school seniors said they would lie to achieve a business objective.
 
The most basic kinds of moral knowledge, moreover, seem to be disappearing from our common culture. Baltimore school official James Sarnecki says that he used to bring up the Golden Rule when he talked to students about a discipline problem. But he finally decided to drop the reference when students started to respond with blank stares.12 Educators began to speak of the “ethical illiteracy” they saw among young people.
 
To be sure, even in the face of problems like these, considerable controversy still surrounds the proposition that schools should teach morality. Values education is the hottest topic in education today. Some groups, on both the political right and left, are deeply suspicious about any kind of values teaching in the schools. But beneath the battles is a steadily growing conviction: Schools cannot be ethical bystanders at a time when our society is in deep moral trouble. Rather, schools must do what they can to contribute to the character of the young and the moral health of the nation.
 
SMART AND GOOD: THE TWO GREAT GOALS OF EDUCATION
 
Moral education is not a new idea. It is, in fact, as old as education itself. Down through history, in countries all over the world, education has had two great goals: to help young people become smart and to help them become good.
 
We know that smart and good are not the same. Not long ago, in an upstate New York community, four suburban teenagers—three girls and a boy—broke into their high school at night, emptied several jugs of gasoline, and ignited a fire that did $500,000 worth of damage before it was brought under control. The oldest member of the group was an honor student; the other three were described in press reports as “bright students.” The only discernible motive was that one member of the group was upset because he had missed a French class and had been disciplined.
 
Realizing that smart and good are not the same, wise societies since the time of Plato have made moral education a deliberate aim of schooling. They have educated for character as well as intellect, decency as well as literacy, virtue as well as knowledge. They have tried to form citizens who will use their intelligence to benefit others as well as themselves, who will try to build a better world.
 
At the beginning of our country, we had this ancient wisdom about the purposes of schooling. Let’s look at those beginnings, at the forces that drove moral education out of the schools, and at those that are bringing it back.
 
EDUCATION FOR VIRTUE: THE FOUNDATION OF DEMOCRACY
 
Moral education, the founders of our democracy asserted, is essential for the success of a democratic society.
 
Their reasoning went like this: Democracy is government by the people; the people themselves are responsible for ensuring a free and just society. That means the people must, at least in some minimal sense, be good. They must understand and be committed to the moral foundations of democracy: respect for the rights of individuals, regard for law, voluntary participation in public life, and concern for the common good. Loyalty to these democratic virtues, Thomas Jefferson argued, must be instilled at an early age.
 
Energized by that belief, schools in the early days of the republic tackled character education head on. Through discipline, the teacher’s good example, and the curriculum, schools sought to instruct children in the virtues of patriotism, hard work, honesty, thriftiness, altruism, and courage.
 
When children practiced their reading, for example, they typically did so through McGuffey Reader tales of heroism and virtue. The tales might seem corny to modern readers, but they captured the imagination of an earlier age. By 1919 the McGuffey Reader had the largest circulation of any book in the world next to the Bible. Better than anything else, McGuffey Reader stories expressed the confidence of an age that knew what it thought about virtue and how to go about instilling it in children.
 
That same age, of course, was far from perfectly virtuous. Economic exploitation and racial, ethnic, and sexual discrimination were well-entrenched parts of society—and issues not likely to be addressed in the McGuffey Reader. But moral education, however limited, was very much a part of the public school agenda.

Dr. Thomas Lickona is a developmental psychologist and professor of education emeritus at the State University of New York at Cortland, where he directs the Center for the Fourth and Fifth Rs (Respect and Responsibility). A past president of the Association for Moral Education, he serves on the Board of Directors of the Character Education Partnership and speaks around the world to teachers, parents, religious educators, and other groups concerned about the character development of young people.