Character Education Walks Again!
by Kevin Ryan
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Ever since man stumbled out of the cave, we have been concerned, albeit fitfully, with improving the human condition. Our first target was conquering nature and dealing with threats, whether sabre-tooth tigers or sub-prime mortgages. Our second fight was an internal one, about improving our nature. We struggle to listen to our better angels lest we slink back to the cave, dragging Cindy Crawford by the hair, to drink beer and watch football. The lives of most of us are continuing battles to deal effectively with outside and inside challenges.
The formation of a good character has long been seen as a means to deal with these challenges, particularly the internal ones. "Character" is one of those seminal words that has been around so long that it has morphed and been twisted almost beyond recognition. Its Greek root is charassein, meaning "to engrave" or "make marks" as on a wax tablet or a metal surface. From this the meaning evolved to the conception of character as a distinctive mark or set of marks, that is, an individual's pattern of behaviour, his moral constitution.
Early on, the human race learned that good character does not just happen. Children left to themselves either die of physical neglect or develop into self-centred, often dangerous, adults. It takes time and energy to acquire the habits and dispositions that constitute good character. From caveman days to the present, parents have had the primary responsibility for assisting their children in forming the moral habits that make up a good character. Historically parents have had help engraving the behaviour patterns and moral understandings on children's quite plastic characters from older siblings, neighbours, churchmen and others. It was commonly understood that these engraved marks, such as the habit of telling the truth or settling differences peacefully, are essential to happiness or the human flourishing of both the individual child and the community. This was mother's milk wisdom captured in many adages, such as, "As the twig is bent, the tree inclines." The parents or the society that does not attend to the character formation of their young ignores it at their peril.
We invented schools when the accumulation of knowledge about how to conquer and manage the external world surpassed parents' time and abilities to pass it on to their children. Schoolmen, in response, embraced what we now call character education with vigour and passion. Nowhere was this truer than in Colonial America. In 1647, the legislature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed the Old Deluder Satan Act, thus establishing the first public schools in North America. The act empowered state government to tax families in order to establish elementary and secondary schools. The educational purpose, however, is captured in the act's title. The early settlers, living in a strange, new land, surrounded by savages and cut off from civilization, were fearful for the eternal souls of their children. Schools, then, were established for the primary task of teaching children to read and understand the Bible, the written word of God. In this manner, children would gain the strength of character to resist the influences of that Old Deluder, Satan.
In the centuries since their beginning in the West, school had character formation as a central educational goal. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in the US, character education was a strong mix of Biblical religion and training for good citizenship. However, in the 20th century the religious element was stripped away, leaving the justification for and content of character education increasingly secular. Further, the mission and justification for character education was dramatically undermined during the socially wrenching events of the late 1960s and early 70s. An unpopular war in East Asia, new sexual mores attributed to artificial birth control, widely available "recreational drugs" and the often violent strife over civil rights appeared to shatter the nation's moral consensus. This perception left many educators asking, "Whose values can we legitimately teach?"
In response to this turmoil, many teachers and administrators simply stepped back from their traditional responsibilities as educators of character and transmitters of the society's moral values. In the 1960s, those educators still convinced that they had a responsibility to address their students' moral needs found two quite different psychology-based approaches, both claiming to fill the gap: values clarification and cognitive developmental moral education.
Teachers as facilitators
Values clarification is well named. Instead of teaching particular moral concepts or values, teachers were urged to be neutral facilitators. Through games and various exercises they regularly engaged students in opportunities to clarify their own moral values. Not their parents' or their church's or their country's or the moral wisdom of the ages, but the values that came to the surface from these exercises. While in history's rearview mirror, the idea seems absurd, values clarification was wildly popular in our schools for fully 20 years. In the 1980s, educators sobered up somewhat when research studies found this approach ineffective, except for possibly promoting moral relativism.
The second approach, cognitive moral development, was essentially the theoretical creation of a psychologist housed at a great university and, as a result, it was, perhaps, taken much too seriously. The theory posits that individuals are capable of evolving "upward" through six distinct stages of moral reasoning. Further, things can be done to help us move higher and faster through these stages. Specifically, if people at a lower stage of moral reasoning are intellectually engaged in an environment where moral discourse occurs at a higher stage, the lower-stage moral thinkers will gradually gravitate to habitual thinking at the higher stage. In other words, have low-level moral thinkers spent lots of time around higher level moral thinkers and good things happen. Educators were taught to have students discuss and debate what were often very complex moral dilemmas. Over the period of the 1970s and 1980s, several dilemma-based curricula were developed for use in elementary and secondary classrooms.
Again, when the research results came in, advocates were discouraged. All of the ethical wrangling resulted in little or no movement to higher stage thinking. In addition, teachers found conducting a classroom discussion of a thorny dilemma was daunting enough. Having to identify which students were at which state and then to engineer the discussion to ensure that lower stage thinking students listened to the higher stage students was simply beyond the pale for most teachers.
The emergence of character education
The disappointing failures of these two psychologically based approaches, one the favourite of therapeutically oriented educators and the other of university professors, dampened interest in character education. However, the traditional responsibility and clear necessity for schools to attend to the moral and character needs of students would not go away. In the US, the public's awareness of the extraordinary, 40-year rise in youth pathologies (i.e., violent crime, out-of-wedlock births, drug use) continues to keep educator's feet to the fire. Nevertheless, without strong ammunition, such as provided by religious belief or compelling humanistic ideals, what has been called "the character education movement" has appeared to stall. More fundamentally, the problem appears to be that the character education movement has little relationship to human character!
By academic standards, modern, impirical psychology is a young science. And with a few exceptions (i.e., Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers), much of this discipline's attention has been concerned with mental illness and other human dysfunctions. It was not until the very end of the 20th century that a major research effort was mounted to explore what constitutes a flourishing human life. Signifying this change of direction, the new effort is called positive psychology. These psychologists are trying to uncover what contributes to happiness or human flourishing. The term they use most often is "mental wellness".
In their search to identify what constitutes mental wellness, positive psychology researchers have identified six core human traits, which contribute to human happiness. Further, they find that these six and the 24 associated character strengths to be universal. They are: wisdom and knowledge (creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, perspective); courage (bravery, persistence, integrity, vitality); humanity (love, kindness, social intelligence); justice (citizenship, fairness, leadership); temperance (forgiveness and mercy, humility, prudence, self control); transcendence (appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humour, spirituality). It is worth noting that positive psychologists reached back to the ancient philosophical words "virtue" and "character" to label their scientific findings.
Reviving virtue ethics
This movement in empirical psychology has been paralleled by the revival in philosophy of virtue ethics. With it has come a rediscovery of the traditional meaning of character. While the revival of virtue ethics can be attributed to the work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, the term has its roots in the quests of ancient philosophers and religious thinkers to identify just how humans achieve happiness or human flourishing. Aristotle, after having established that the route to human happiness is living a virtuous life, (that is, to possess qualities of character, such as justice, self-control (temperance) and courage), he examined how a person attains virtue. His answer is through establishing habits or moral virtues. We must first understand the meaning of a virtue, such as temperance or justice, and then dispose our minds toward it. That is, we must have a disposition to possess these virtues or human habits. Second, we must "act". We must practice the virtues until they become "second nature" to us. Aristotle famously said that we become virtuous by doing acts of virtue. We become courageous by doing acts of courage and we become self-controlled by acting in a self-controlled manner.
Both of these intellectual movements acknowledge the ancient idea that human beings do not come into the world and naturally develop into people of good character. That is, we need education about what it means to be a "good person" and training and opportunities to acquire the habits or virtues that mark a good person. Thus, virtue ethics, in particular, offers educators both a clear, historical mandate and a method to engage in character education. In brief, the method is to immerse students in an understanding of those virtues which constitute a good life, provide them with exemplars from our history and our literature and point out clearly the pitfalls to attaining and maintaining these virtues. Most effective, however, is educators' imbuing students with an understanding that their entire school experience, whether academic successes or failures, whether athletic victories or social disappointments, is grist for the mill of students' primary task: becoming craftsmen of their own good character.
Stirring the moral cauldrons
At the present moment, character education is hardly on the public schools' front burner. Under pressures from school boards and employers to turn out a more highly skilled and productive work force, teachers and administrators are focusing on literacy, numeracy and scientific knowledge, areas which can be measured by what are called "high-stakes test". In addition, most educators, like the populace to whom they answer, have themselves gone through "value neutral" schools, and thus, are unprepared to teach what many may perceive to be just another educational fad.
The stubborn reality, however, is that schooling a child without attending to his or her character and moral values is disabling the child and, in turn, dangerous for a democratic society. Schools, themselves, are moral cauldrons with ethical issues of cheating, bullying and fairness continually bubbling away. Thankfully, as the 21st century gets underway, the arrival and coming together of two intellectual movements, positive psychology and virtue ethics, holds the promise of lighting the way for educators toward a more grounded and robust character education.
The modern educational apostles of multiculturalism and diversity will undoubted be unnerved by what they perceive as such churchy and "dead white male" utterances as "virtue," and "character," let alone the mention of such a hoary figure as Aristotle. They might be encouraged to know, however, that one of the leading advocates for both virtue ethics and positive psychology is both Asian and a non-Christian. On the other hand, he is pre-internet, using archaic terms like "sow" and "reap," which are way out of the "lived experiences" of most Western children. Those pluses and minuses aside, 25 centuries ago, Confucius nailed the essence of how we acquire character in a four line poem. The Chinese sage wrote:
Sow a thought. Reap an action.
Sow an action. Reap a habit.
Sow a habit. Reap a character.
Sow a character. Reap a destiny.
Kevin Ryan founded the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University, where he is professor emeritus. He has written and edited 20 books. He has appeared recently on CBS's "This Morning", ABC's "Good Morning America", "The O'Reilly Factor", CNN and the Public Broadcasting System speaking on character education.
This item 8424 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
