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Educating For Character: A Comprehensive Approach
Dr. Thomas Lickona, Professor, SUNY Cortland, Cortland, NY
Founder, Center for the 4th & 5th Rs
INTRODUCTION: Dr. Robert Browning: We are indeed privileged to have Dr. Thomas Lickona with us today. He is a professor at the State University of New York at Cortland and he has developed the Center for the 4th & 5th Rs. He is well known in the field of character education serving on the boards of other organizations such as Character Education Partnership and the Character Education Coalition. He is the author of Educating for Character which is the “Bible” of the character education movement. He is working on a new book of suggestions for how to make character education come alive in various schools and communities. He likes the idea of the total community being involved.
We are delighted that he is going to be with us today to help open our minds to the exciting field of character education. He is an internationally known person who has lectured not only in this country but has lectured in Canada, Japan, Switzerland, Ireland and Latin America which tells you that character education is becoming an international field of great interest. We are delighted to have you, Dr. Lickona.
Dr. Lickona: Thanks, Bob. I wish my mother had been here for that introduction. I was taking notes so I will tell her when I get back home. Well, you have had a character education feast already but lots more on the menu. I’m just going to add a little bit of the dessert. It is a privilege to be on the program with people like my friends and colleagues, Mary Aranha, Rudy Bernardo and so many others who are playing such a significant role in promoting character education. I think it is the most important educational reform movement in the country today.
You have two handouts, one is a packet entitled: What is Character Education and the other is an article next to it entitled: The Neglected Heart. I’ll make reference to both of those. I’m going to use this handout as a point of reference so it will be easier for you to keep it in front of you in order to keep up with me while I’m flapping my jaws.
My 11th grade high school English teacher, Miss Jean Walker, one of my all time favorite teachers, taught me always to begin with a clear definition of terms. So I like to start out with a simple definition of character education which I define as the deliberate effort to develop good character based on core virtues that are good for the individual and good for the whole society.
What are virtues? What do we mean by virtues? Point four in your handbook elaborates on that virtues are objectively good human qualities. This is an important philosophical starting point. Virtues are objectively good human qualities. They are good for us whether we know it or not. Virtues transcend religion; they transcend culture; they express our common humanity. You can find basic virtues like kindness, forgiveness, justice, love, loyalty and honesty in cultures around the world. Virtues, unlike values, don’t change. Justice, honesty, generosity, kindness and forgiveness always have been virtues and always will be virtues. Virtues transcend time and culture. They are objectively good human qualities and that gives us the philosophical ground for the character education movement. We can argue that in the absence of these virtues no person can lead a fulfilling life. My wife remembers, when she went to Catholic school, learning the principle that you can teach in any school: “You can’t be happy unless you are good.” You can’t lead a fulfilling life if it is not a life of virtue and no society can hope to function effectively unless these virtues flourish in that society. So they are essential for the well-being of the individual. They are essential for the well-being of the whole society.
If you flip the page, you will see a brief ethical lexicon. The potential for trouble with language is greater in character education and with any aspect of education that touches on the moral domain, than in other fields of education. So it is really crucial that we speak the same language. It is very important that we get our terms straight. This is a simple set of definitions. Drop down to the bottom, which responds to the question: “What do we mean by good character?” One way of defining it is to say that character is the constellation of virtues¾the group of virtues possessed by a person. So our virtues taken together make up our good character.
Now what are the essential virtues? Different schools focus on different virtues. One of the first tasks we have in society is what are going to be the target virtues that our character education initiative will look at. I encourage schools not to get that set in stone but to keep re-visiting that question. Keep re-examining the range of virtues that you want to be sure to pay attention to, and in the course of doing that, to make sure not to ignore the fundamental four identified by the ancient Greeks¾Aristotle and Plato. They gave us the four you see on page three beginning with prudence.
Now the Greeks argued that prudence is the master virtue. It is the steering virtue, the directing virtue. It sits in the driver’s seat. Prudence is practical wisdom. It tells us when to act; it tells us how to act; it tells us how to integrate competing virtues. When there is a tension between charity and truthfulness, for example, prudence or practical wisdom tells us how to be faithful to both. If, for example, my great aunt gave me this tie for Christmas and I’m not really crazy about it, and she calls up and says: “How did you like the tie?” Charity requires me not to hurt her feelings but truthfulness requires me not to lie if I really do not care for the tie. So I have to find a way to do both. I might say: “I don’t have anything like this in my entire collection,” or “It’s a really striking pattern.” I would find a way to be both truthful and charitable. Prudence allows us to do this so it is the master virtue and tells us how to put the other virtues into practice; how to be fair in particular situations; how to show courage without getting killed, although sometimes it may require that. So prudence is the master steering virtue in the eyes of the Greeks. It also allows us to make the essential distinctions in life: right from wrong; truth from falsehood; fact from opinion; reason from emotion; the transitory from the eternal.
Justice is the second of the fundamental four virtues. Schools tend to center on this particular virtue. They tend to do an especially good job because this covers the interpersonal virtues¾how we treat each other. Justice encompasses civility, honesty, respect, responsibility, kindness, compassion, and forgiveness. All of these are part of justice¾treating others as they deserve to be treated. The golden rule is a classic expression of the virtue of justice. I think schools typically do a good job but it is only one of the fundamental four. We do not want to narrow in on justice to the exclusion of the other crucial virtues named by the Greeks.
The third virtue is fortitude and I think this sometimes gets neglected. Fortitude is described by the educator James Jensen as the inner toughness. It is the inner toughness that enables us to endure suffering, to overcome misfortune, to handle adversity. I think we need to think hard about how we help young people develop this particular virtue. It also has several aspects. Patience is an aspect of fortitude. Perseverance is an aspect of fortitude. Moral courage is an aspect of fortitude. All the virtues that enable us to do what’s right in the face of difficulty are part of fortitude. The opposite of fortitude is escapism. In the last 25 years teenage suicide has tripled in the United States. Now why is that true? There are lots of reasons. Family breakdown is one. Premature sexual activity is another. One is (that) kids are missing this virtue. They can’t deal with disappointment. They don’t get the part in the class play; they don’t make the basketball team; their boyfriend dumps them. They are not ready to handle that adversity. There is softness of character. Character has to be capable of being tested and to survive those tests¾to be strong in the face of life’s inevitable sufferings. There is an excellent resource in this regard that I would highly recommend to you. It will be released from Boyd’s Mills Press in a week or so. It is by a fourth grade teacher called Marty Kaminsky. The title is Uncommon Champions: Fifteen Athletes Who Battled Back. I followed the work of Marty Kaminsky¾he’s been a teacher of fourth graders for more than twenty- five years in Ithaca, New York, and he said that in his experience as a teacher he has noticed that the kids have trouble handling hardship. He said when the going gets tough, they tend to sink into depression, get involved in eating disorders, turn to alcohol and drug abuse. He said he also noticed that sports figures are very attractive to young people so he selected fifteen athletes¾the subtitle of the book is Fifteen Athletes Who Battled Back¾who faced illness; who faced cancer; who faced physical handicaps such as blindness and other handicaps; who faced personal tragedies, accidents in their families and personal accidents; who went through eating disorders themselves; who struggled with alcohol addiction and the like, but managed to overcome those adversities.
I was reading on my way here the story of Michelle Akers and I didn’t realize that she struggles with chronic fatigue syndrome and it virtually ended her soccer career. She has had to make radical changes in her diet. She has had to become much more sensitive to her body, to stay in bed sometimes for a day at a time in order to ride out the waves of the illness. The story goes on to say that in the midst of learning to live with a lifelong illness, she says it is like having the flu forever. You don’t get over it. She’s rediscovered her faith:���� “My illness has brought me back to God. Everything in life happens for a purpose. I realize that I can’t control everything that happens but I’ve learned I can handle whatever comes my way.”
The Supreme Court in 1963,when it banned school prayer, said something else that the whole country neglected to pay attention to, and that is: The schools have a positive obligation to teach kids about religion. They can’t promote religion through school prayer, they can’t tell kids they ought to believe in God, or pray, or go to church, temple or mosque. But the courts said that students must not be religiously illiterate. They must understand the role that religion has played in our origins. The Declaration of Independence, for example, says that the reason we have inalienable human rights is the government didn’t hand them out. Those rights are endowed by our creator. That’s why no government can take them away. That’s in the Declaration of Independence which is the moral framework for our constitution. Religion provides the moral energy, the galvanizing force in all of our social reform movements from the abolition of slavery to the present. They were all equal in the sight of God. We have a common creator. Life is sacred and so on. This energized the major social reform movements. You can’t understand American history, for example, if you don’t understand the role religion has played. You can’t understand the civil rights movement of the sixties if you don’t know it was led by a Baptist minister; that it came out of a black southern church; that the marches in the cities were preceded by a prayer to the holy spirit; that the songs were religious hymns. You can’t understand that movement if you don’t understand its religious wellsprings. So we have an obligation in the school to get the court’s ruling straight. We can teach kids about religion and that includes the role that religion has played in the lives of individuals.
I received a book of heroes for middle school kids that included three pages on Mother Theresa without a single mention of her faith in God. They tried to portray her as a super social worker¾somebody who went out and surveyed Calcutta and found that the other agencies weren’t delivering the services. It reminded me of a film about Mother Theresa that I show my graduate students on character education produced by two Canadian women who happen to be Sisters. They wanted to make a film of Mother Theresa which wouldn’t bring religion into the picture because they thought that might be controversial. Well they found they couldn’t go for two minutes and deal with Mother Theresa without dealing with her faith. She and her Sisters of Charity spend three hours a day in prayer. Mother Theresa, of course, is gone from us now. Three hours a day in prayer are spent every single day by the Sisters of Charity. And Mother Theresa left high school geography teaching to minister to the world’s poor because she felt a personal call from Christ to do so. So you can’t make sense out of an individual biography or understand many of these heroes; you can’t understand our cultural movements without understanding the role that religion has played so often. That’s not proselytizing. It is perfectly constitutional and legitimate. I think we cheat our children if we try to launder that out from our character education.
Temperance is the fourth virtue that the Greeks talked about. By temperance the Greeks meant something profound. Temperance is sort of an old fashioned word. They meant self-mastery¾the ability to master our appetites, to control our impulses, to delay gratification, to resist temptation, to be able to do all of these things that are so crucial in the character development of an individual person. Now the importance of temperance is highlighted by a wonderful study that is discussed in Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence. When I speak to faculties about getting serious about character education¾avoiding the trap of superficiality¾I say one of the things that you ought to do as a faculty is have a common book project. Every year choose a book that you all read. And there are lots of wonderful choices. Hal Urban’s book, Life’s Greatest Lessons is a terrific read for a faculty. Goleman’s book on Emotional Intelligence would be an excellent choice for a common book project. Everybody reads it so you spend part of the faculty meeting¾maybe the first five or ten minutes¾talking about what you have read and how it is speaking to your life and so on.
In Goleman’s book he discusses the marshmallow study. If you have read it, you may remember the study. It was carried out by the psychologist, Walter Mischel, about twenty-five years ago. Mischel brought four-year-old kids into the laboratory. He sat the four-year-olds down and said: Here is a delicious marshmallow fresh out of the bag. You can have the marshmallow right now but if you can wait until I come back in fifteen minutes¾I have some errands to run¾you can have a second marshmallow. But if you eat this marshmallow while I am gone, it is the only marshmallow you get. Then Mischel left the laboratory. Unbeknown to the four-year-olds the cameras were whirring away capturing their every move as they respond to this temptation. About a third of the kids were instant grabbers. The marshmallow was gone in a matter of seconds. About a third of the kids struggled with temptation. They lasted for several minutes but eventually gave in. A full third of the children, however, even at age four were able to go the full fifteen minutes and wait for that second marshmallow.
Now the camera captured the self-control strategies that these four-year-olds engaged in. What did they do? Some would try to go to sleep. Others turned their backs so they wouldn’t see the marshmallow. In moral theology we used to call that the avoiding the moral proximate of sin – create a little distance from the temptation. Other kids used self-talk that the cameras captured. “If I just wait a few more minutes, I’ll get that other marshmallow. I really want that other marshmallow. It’s going to be good.” They were able to govern their impulses in this way. Now the most fascinating part of the study is they were able to track these kids until they were seniors in high school. They compared the third of the kids who were the instant grabbers with the third of the kids who waited the fifteen minutes for that second marshmallow. They were dramatically different as high school seniors. There was an average difference in SAT college board scores of a hundred points. The kids who were able to wait for that second marshmallow were still able to delay gratification; they won more scholarships to college; they were student leaders; they were less likely to have discipline problems in school and on and on¾the whole range of significant life outcomes predictable from behavior at age four to determine whether or not these kids possessed the virtue of self-mastery or self-discipline or temperance. When all these virtues are taken together, it is said that you have strong personal character and you can derive all the other important virtues from these fundamental four. So I think this is the moral map we want to start with in our work as character educators. We can’t do better than to return to the ancient Greeks.
The next page speaks to the seven E’s of teaching a character trait. My good friend and colleague, Kevin Ryan, has six E’s that include some different ones like excellence, environment, and so on. I haven’t reviewed Kevin’s recently but the other day on the plane there were the seven E’s that came across my mind, because I was thinking: If you want to work out a scheme for teaching any character trait or virtue, what would be essential? I think these seven E’s would be part of that scheme. First of all you would want to explain it. An example comes from Jan Gorman, a first grade teacher in an inner city school in Syracuse, New York. She teaches a virtue a week and she actually began this even before her school had a character education program. She starts with the virtue, caring. In explaining caring she calls the children to the front of the room and poses a series of questions. A wise teacher will do this¾get the kids thinking and contributing right from the outset. What is caring, she asks? Who can show caring? Where does caring take place? How can each of us show caring in our classroom, our school, our neighborhood, our family? She writes the children’s responses on a chart that remains posted. She honors their contributions this way. That remains in the front of the room as an official reference point for the rest of the week. Then she moves on to examine caring and uses the children’s literature as her means of doing that. You could use history or current events, but she has selected five children’s books that are strong in this particular theme of caring. In one book, for example, the book, Teammates, which is the story of Jackie Robinson and PeeWee Reese. Now I always knew the story of Jackie Robinson¾the racism he faced and breaking the color lines in the major leagues¾but I didn’t know the story of PewWee Reese. I saw both of them play. My father used to take me down to New York City when I was a kid. We lived in Poughkeepsie, about seventy-five miles up the Hudson River. We used to go down on a hot summer night to see the Giants and the Dodgers. I was a Giants’ fan and my hero was Willie Mays. I loved watching those two teams battle it out. So I saw a recent Robinson play and the story of Teammates, the story of how Reese put down racism in the ranks of the Dodgers themselves. There were a lot of players who circulated a petition that would send Jackie back to what were then called the Negro leagues. It was PeeWee Reese who put the kibosh on the petition and got the Dodgers to rally behind Jackie. And the rest is history. As you know it is a very touching story¾a very effective story at any developmental level. So she uses that. At the end of the story she asks additional questions of the class: Who in the story showed caring? Who did not? Then she challenges the children to act in a caring way for the rest of the day; to look for opportunities to demonstrate caring in their interactions for the rest of the school day. Then when a child does show caring, she compliments that child. Sometimes she calls it to the attention of the class. She is expecting it. Now the kids are having an experience of caring in their relationships. If a child behaves in an unkind way, she takes the youngster to the side and says: “Did that behavior show caring? Remember our discussion, remember our story.” So she encourages it in this way and then she increases the intensity of the experience by repeating this for four more days. So there are another four stories spread over the week followed by discussion, followed by the challenge to show caring, followed by complimenting the children and correcting them when necessary. She says by the end of the week caring has been established as an expectation in my room. Children have been saturated in this virtue, become immersed in it. It has become part of the classroom culture. So I think that Jan Gorman and how she approaches teaching the virtue of the week exhibits these seven E’s. The next week she starts with another virtue, respect, and follows the same process¾ five children’s books on respect followed by a discussion each day.
I think that the challenge in doing character education well is to involve four crucial constituencies. Bob mentioned the importance of the community. I’m going to talk briefly about what I see as the four key constituencies because in a sense character education is really about process¾about how well you reach out to the critical stakeholders. The first involved is the school staff. Now how do we do that? A lot of people have had the frustration of saying: We’ve got a leadership team; we’ve gone to the Summer Institute; we get back home; we’re all on fire. But for the staff, it is sort of ho hum, or they give us sort of polite attention. We put things in their mailboxes. But we don’t have the sense that other people are really on board. How do we get everybody on board? Well you need to begin by asking people first of all for their thoughts and perceptions. This is a simple survey that we cooked up at our Center. You may have some already. You can adapt it or enlarge it. You are basically asking people: Are you satisfied with how the way things are? What is the level of respect in the building, the level of responsibility? Besides these two, what other character qualities should our school try to model and teach? Then, number four, let’s list things we already do. If people see the field of Character Education as something that is on top of everything that is already piled high on their plate, then it’s going to be a burden, something negative that will make life more difficult. But as someone in the movement has said: Character Education is not the something else on your plate, it is the plate. We have to think of it as the broadest foundation for everything we do.
It calls to mind the ways we are trying to teach character. Every faculty, if you put people in small groups and give them a sheet of paper, will quickly be able to fill it with a dozen things that they already do to try to teach good character, such as being a good role model and correcting kid’s misbehavior, etc. So it is important to bring that into sharp focus. So then they ask what other things can we do better, or what other things can we add to our efforts. On the back of that I would ask staff to identify what they see are the priority issues that we ought to focus on in our building for the year to come. Is it lack of respect for teachers, lack of respect for students, peer cruelty, bad language in the building, etc. Collect some data on that and ask people for their reasons, for their choices. Then have a group compile the data, feed it back to the faculty and take a look at it. This involves all staff, not just instructional staff. This gives you a starting point for making some real decisions. If you follow this process, and people who have done it have found this to be true, you will get a higher level of commitment. Now people will feel they have been consulted. They have identified what we were doing, what else we can do. They have also identified the key issues. You have a much better starting point than if you simply come back from a training program and start to beat the drums.
Another way to be involved is to ask the staff how should we focus our program. A lot of schools start out with a virtue a month. And that’s not a bad way to begin. Some start out with a character quality a week and try to relate that to a monthly theme. Some schools find it more productive to have a cycle, a three year cycle or four year cycle, where you are taking four to six virtues one year, four to six different virtues the next year, and so on. So the program retains a freshness and you get a chance to do the virtues in greater depth. I was recently working with a K8 school that does something different; they select a particular virtue and match it to a grade level. Now they have a common set of virtues that everybody works on all the time but each grade level has a particular focus virtue so the kindergartners, for example, have two: orderliness (keeping things in order) and obedience (following legitimate directions). First graders focus on industriousness, which basically means working hard, or, do your best work. Fourth graders focus on perseverance, fifth graders on citizenship, seventh graders on responsibility, and eighth graders on respect. That insures that at some point there is going to be an in-depth treatment and teachers don’t feel they are in the character ed hundred yard dash. They get a chance at their grade level to really plumb the virtue in depth and to meet with other grade level colleagues to talk about how they are doing in perseverance, and have the time to really integrate it into their curriculum. I think this wise. The danger in character education is that we don’t spend enough time with the virtues to allow them to become habit. Remember Aristotle said they are not thoughts, they are habits that we develop by performing virtuous action. So kids need many, many opportunities to practice.
In connection with this, I’d like to recommend a resource only a few months old called Core Virtues, a literature-based program on character education by Mary Beth Klee. This takes virtues in different clusters and it recycles them through the elementary grades. For example, the fifth grade focuses on intellectual virtues in October, on gratitude, one on appreciation in November, on beauty and goodness in December. This particular curriculum integrates not only literature but also American civilization, world civilization, fine arts and music, and great works of art. Kids are exposed to such sleazy popular culture that I think our character education programs have to be sure to expose them to high culture, to the best in music, to the best of art so they are inspired by beauty as well as goodness. So that should be part of the character efforts. This is one of the most sophisticated resources I’ve had a chance to take a look at¾just out a few months.
We also want to try to involve staff by emphasizing that character education involves a comprehensive approach. The wheel that we use to frame our own work in character education, which basically says, as Mary Aranha points out, “character education is a way of life.” It is everything that happens in school from the moment the kids step on the school bus through the Friday night football game. It’s all character education. Everything affects character for good or for bad. So our task is to be intentional and deliberate in making sure that we capitalize on those opportunities, then to divide the moral life of the school into discernable segments and to talk about the concrete opportunities for making the most of those segments. The inner part of this wheel offers nine strategies for the classroom. The outer part offers three for the whole school. Just a few examples¾most basic is the teacher who has cared or mentored a teacher who has a sphere of interest with the kids. This starts with something as simple as a handshake.
We know that the kids who shot up their schools in the last three years in our nation were different in many ways. They came from different kinds of families, they had different personality issues, different problems they were struggling with. But they had one thing in common. They didn’t feel connected to their school. They didn’t feel a strong sense of belonging. The National Study of Adolescent Health found that two factors protected kids against violence, premature sexual activity, drug use, suicide, etc.¾eight different kinds of self-destructive behavior. Two factors, based on 12,000 interviews in communities all across the country, protected adolescents against becoming involved in those self-injurious behaviors. One was what they call family connectedness. Somebody at home loves me, cares about me, is involved in my life. The second factor they call school connectedness. Somebody in school knows me as an individual person, is involved with me, cares about my life. Those two factors tended to keep kids out of destructive behavior, out of self-destructive conduct that can be solved with something as simple as a handshake at the door. It’s not rocket science but it builds the box. Coming around the wheel, every teacher has a chance to build a caring classroom community, to pay attention to the peer relationships, to make sure those are kind and respectful, not abusive and cruel. Every teacher has the opportunity to use discipline in a thoughtful way¾not simply as crowd control but as an opportunity to help kids develop self-discipline. What are the reasons for rules¾talk about the Golden Rule. Tell kids to make a personal commitment, tell them to make restitution when they do something wrong. Lots of kids experience simple punishment as the consequence of wrongdoing and they are not learning one of the most basic moral lessons in life. When you do something wrong, you do something right to make up for it. Kids should always be challenged. What can you do to make up for this? Think of something that would heal the hurt, that would make it better, that would set things right.
Every teacher has the opportunity to involve kids in democratic decision-making appropriate to their level. We have a problem lining up for lunch. How can we line up for lunch that doesn’t create bedlam? Ask kids to suggest solutions to those everyday problems. Every teacher has a chance to teach values through the content of curriculum and there are wonderful published resources out there for doing this at all developmental levels. An excellent resource at middle high school level is the holocaust curriculum titled Facing History and Ourselves which is a wonderful interdisciplinary resource that uses English class, social studies, and arts class to help kids explore the horror of the holocaust and to personalize that, and to look within at the prejudice and the capacity for unjust discrimination that lurks in the human heart.
Every teacher has the opportunity for cooperative learning, for developing conscience of craft which is the voice of conscience that says: “do your work well.” Here we need to think about obviously high expectations as the key part. When Mark, our oldest son, was in sixth grade, his sixth grade teacher, Mr. Purnell, did not do the usual, “ Hello, I’m Mark’s teacher, Mark is a lovely boy, glad to meet you.” Rather, he said, “I want you to sit down. I’m going to talk to you for forty minutes. I’m going to conduct a class, only I’m going to talk about my philosophy as a sixth grade teacher, what I expect of your children in sixth grade, and why I expect that.” Among the expectations, he said, were that he expected two pieces of writing every week¾a book report that was due on Monday. It could be non-fiction, fiction, long book, short book, but a book report was due every single Monday. On Thursday, he said, I expect a piece of creative writing. It can be a short story, a poem, but a piece of creative writing every Thursday. Well Mark had never had anything like that standard of expectations in writing. Mr. Purnell said, “I believe that writing is very important at this developmental level.” Mark’s writing took off as a sixth grader. I’m sure it did for a lot of kids.
High expectations are part, as we know, of developing a strong sense of conscience of craft. Do your best work¾strong work ethic. Every teacher has a chance to foster ethical reflection. And the key part of this which we sometimes neglect is having kids systematically set personal goals and assess whether they are reaching them. The Chicago psychologist, Patricia Cronin, for example, has developed a nice middle school program that challenges kids each day to choose a particular virtue to work on. It might be patience. It might be courage in defending somebody against negative gossip. It might be helpfulness at home¾not waiting for your parent to ask you to take out the trash but doing it before you are asked. Work on a particular virtue, set a goal for that day, and then write in your journal at the end of the day whether you achieved that goal. She said it’s this consistent daily goal setting, small in acts carried out, the self-assessment that furthers the progress in character.
Every teacher has the opportunity to teach conflict resolution. And that’s something that is not important just for peer mediators to do, but for all kids to experience. The research is showing that. Every kid needs training in solving conflict. One first grade teacher in our program, for example, had a solution circle. She marked out a circle in the classroom with red electrical tape. If two kids had a dispute, they had to sit in the solution circle and work it out. Nobody else could enter the solution circle. Now if they couldn’t do it, they could ask an adult to consult on the problem, but usually they were able to work it out. She found that tattling went down in her first grade classroom. Showing a sense of responsibility for solving and avoiding conflict rose.
Now just a couple of comments about creating a positive moral culture in the school. This is the sort of thing that Mary spoke about this morning. I think the single most important task here is to strengthen the sense of community¾to strengthen the sense that the school is a big family. Good schools are like good families. That’s what the research shows. Think of really concrete, simple ways to do that. I remember a middle school principal in St. Louis, who said, “When I came to my building, the morale was very low. I did something very simple. Everybody got an envelope on their door. It was marked Appreciation Notes. I sent out a communication to staff, students and parents encouraging them to leave a note of appreciation in that envelope at any time of their choosing. It could be a single sentence¾something you appreciate a colleague for, something as a parent that you appreciate your child’s teacher for, something you appreciate the school custodian for, etc.” Pretty soon the envelopes began to fill up. The faculty said this is the most important thing we have done in a decade. It had a terrific impact on staff morale. Very simple, but something like that can make a profound difference.
Flip the page to Educate Head, Heart and Hand. This is a snapshot of an award winning school in Binghamton, NY, that we had the privilege of working with. Lindsey Macon, who was principal at Broadside, did several things that made her character education program work well. She involved her librarian in a central role. Marge Day, for example, was instrumental. In a given week when they were focusing on a particular virtue, Marge’s job was to collect all the books that related to that virtue in a plastic tub in the faculty room so the staff did not have to go to the library to dig them out. They were right there at their feet for easy use.
She also sent a team to the Summer Institute every summer so the whole building, every single staff member, had a training. There was also release time. Everybody had a half day in the fall and another half day in the spring to be with colleagues to develop their character education curriculum. She used the Safe and Drug Free School money to pay for the subs. Staff development has to be a critical piece. She involved the support staff, for example, the bus drivers. She instituted bus meetings¾three a year. One took place at the beginning of the year. How many schools struggle with bus problems¾virtually all. Some of the worst behavior occurs on a school bus which can be like a traveling moral jungle. (Somebody said that is really an insult to the jungle. Jungle animals treat each other better than kids do on a school bus.) I talked to countless parents who are saying, “My six year old is afraid to get on the bus. He starts worrying at one o’clock in the afternoon about getting back on the bus because the big kids pick on the little kids.” Well the bus drivers sat down with the kids who shared the bus ride and two faculty who would help facilitate the discussion. Actually the bus drivers didn’t want to do it. They didn’t think they would have anything to say. But they posed two questions. What does a safe and respectful bus ride look like? What does a safe and respectful bus ride sound like? Three questions actually. How can each of us contribute to a safe and respectful ride? They did two follow-up meetings and they were going to get together in a six weeks, so that held their feet to the fire. It built in accountability. They dropped their bus behavior problems by being proactive in instituting this simple system of three meetings a year.
What does a school of character look like? I think one of the ways to get faculty on board is to share success stories¾snapshots of successful efforts. Pages 8 and 9 share stories at the elementary, middle and high school levels. They cite data showing that suspensions dropped and discipline referral problems stopped. Other kinds of indicators show positive changes in the school environment at all developmental levels when there is an effective character program. So faculty begin to see that this will make our lives better if we do this kind of character effort. Pages ten and eleven give a snapshot of a school in Wisconsin. If you take a look at page eleven, you see their overall theme is first class behavior and that the logo that they use and the system recognizing first class behavior is part of their effort. They also did staff development for everybody from the secretaries to the custodians to the administration. Once a month the school board handed out little wallet size cards that had the logo on one side and on the back side a piece of first class behavior that someone had demonstrated. For example, the debating team came in second in the state competition from this high school. When the team that won and came in first went to the stage to get their award, Hartford’s team rose and gave them a standing ovation. That’s first class behavior. So the school board recognized them for that. I think we need to keep our rewards universally accessible and not make them artificially scarce. Anybody doing first class behavior is eligible for recognition. If we have something that is just the citizen of the month, it becomes an artificially scarce reward. We want to make sure that our recognition forums are universally accessible.
How to involve students is a challenge, particularly figuring out how to mobilize the peer culture. When our younger son, Matthew, was in student government, I said to him, “If you don’t do anything else, try to get some doors on the stalls in the bathroom down the hall from the auditorium because if you went to a school event and nature called, you were faced with the indignity of using these stalls without any doors.” And of course the students all day long face that particular privation of privacy. Matthew said, “Dad, we’re never going to get doors on those stalls. The administration has replaced them in the past. Students swing on the doors and pop them out of their joints. They are tired of paying for replacement doors.” He said, “We are just twenty kids sitting around. We don’t have any influence over the whole student body.” And there’s the problem with student government. A contrasting approach is described under what you see entitled High School Congress. I visited a high school north of New York City where they had a high school student congress with elected students, elected members of the faculty, elected members of the administration, and elected parents. All four groups made up a high school congress. They met every Wednesday over lunch. You could raise an issue at the Congress, or immediately after lunch at what they called Seminar, which is like homeroom. I said “What are you proud of in your two year tenure as a high school congress?” They described two problems of student vandalism they had solved. One was the problem of student artwork that hung in the hallways and people writing graffiti or taking a knife to it. The administration found they couldn’t solve that acting alone. When the high school congress was in place, it was brought up and taken back to the seminar home room with discussion back and forth on how to solve this as everybody’s responsibility, etc. And the vandalism stopped. Why did it stop? Because the feeling becomes widespread and immediately clear that it’s not cool to do this to your fellow students’ artwork. That peer influence, that direct peer feedback can change the moral environment in ways that adults acting alone cannot. So we need to mobilize students. There are lots of ways but student government is vastly underused as a character education strategy.
The next page describes a whole series of parent involvement strategies. I think there are nine that are important, from setting high expectations of parents and sending a message loud and clear that you, the parent, are the child’s first and most important moral educator. The schools are not taking over. One school has its mission statement read very clear: The school’s job is to assist parents in helping their children become intellectually competent, helping to develop interpersonal skills, helping them to become persons of character who contribute to the world. And that’s the way the mission statement reads. Our job is to assist parents so the relationship is absolutely clear. Parents lay the foundation. Schools build on that base.
I think we especially need an alliance against the mass media. If there is any area where we are in competition with society, it’s the influence of the mass media¾the music, the internet, TV, the movies, advertising, the whole nine yards. The media are the world’s worst moral mis-educator let loose in the land. Now media can contribute positively to the education effort, but generally the impact is not positive. We need to be very thoughtful about how to do that. Sometimes it doesn’t require a lot. One elementary school principal, for example, sent a letter home to parents that said: If your child is third grade or younger, we ask you to set a limit of no more than a half hour a day of TV viewing. If your child is fourth grade or older, a maximum of one hour a day of television. We find that kids are better rested when they watch less TV, more likely to do their homework, fewer put-downs in the class room, and so on. Parents were very grateful to get this letter from the principal. That gave them leverage in talking to the kids¾Mrs. Jones wants everybody to follow these guidelines and so on. We can put something in the hands of parents.
The last of these thoughts is about a family resource center. This is something that a school system outside of Buffalo, New York has done. They decided that there were so many families that were struggling that, if they really wanted to be effective, they needed to make more of a priority of helping families. So they hired two full time professionals. They are in the middle school where they have a family resource center right down the hall from the main office. Parents can go there for family counseling. They can go there for referral to other agencies in society that can help them with problems whether it is finances, or medical need, or any particular issues they are struggling with. Families have found this to be a tremendously helpful resource.
One of the things that a family resource center can do is to help families stay together. Divorce is a sensitive subject. It is still difficult in our culture to speak about divorce because so many people have experienced its pain. But we know as educators that many, many problems can be traced to broken families. As a culture I think we have dropped the ball. We need to help families work out problems, help parents stick it out, help parents get through the inevitable suffering that marriage involves, provide a support system for that. If you haven’t seen the latest issue of Time magazine on what divorce does to kids, I encourage you to pick it up. It reports the latest book by the California therapist and researcher, Judith Wallerstein. Her book has tracked 131 families who have experienced divorce. She has followed the kids over time into adulthood and she has documented the fact that the most severe effects do not even show up in childhood and adolescence but show up in adulthood.
Kids who have a great fear of making commitments, who get into relationships, and then wonder when it will end, who have problems in making good judgments about who to have a relationship with have very difficult problems. Time heals some of these wounds but not all of them. So as a culture we owe it to our children to revisit this whole issue and as a society to provide support systems. As one mother said, “The most important thing we can do for our children is to love each other and stay together.” It doesn’t mean it is easy but we need to face that responsibility squarely. I didn’t get to the community piece but there are some snapshots of community wide efforts and you are welcome to examine those at your leisure.
Let me finish with a couple comments about sex education. This opens up an issue that could take us the rest of the afternoon but I simply want to flag it for your attention. If we are going to be doing character education well, we absolutely must integrate sex education under our approach to character education. These can’t be two separate areas where we say to kids in effect: don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t steal, don’t be a racist, (where) we guide them towards morally correct conclusions that serve their welfare in the whole of society, but when we get to sex education, it is a cafeteria. Here are your choices: you can be perfect and abstain but if you don’t want to do that, you can, “be responsible” and use a condom. That’s not a character message. We have to set the same kind of high expectations. Character-based sex education is a commitment to teaching the truth about this crucial, vulnerable area of kids’ lives, that abstinence is the only medically safe and morally responsible choice. It defines abstinence in a full and meaningful sense that condoms don’t make sex physically safe, they don’t make it emotionally safe; therefore, they don’t make it ethically loving. Can you claim to love somebody if you are gambling with their health, happiness, and perhaps even their life? It is the best preparation for marriage. When I talk to young people about this issue, I ask, “How many of you want to be married someday?” Most kids still have that dream. How many people want to find the right person so it is a lasting marriage? They want that as well. How many want a sexually fulfilling relationship within marriage? That also is a goal. How do you maximize your chances of reaching those goals? I say to the young people there, “Is it by sleeping around or by saving the ultimate intimacy for the ultimate commitment so that you join your bodies when you join your lives?” Kids need to have somebody speak to them about this in a reasonable way and there are a lot of good curricula.
We can’t be deterred by our own personal histories. A lot of educators don’t want to touch this issue because, as one book I have seen said, it is “teaching your kids to say no in the nineties when you said yes in the sixties.” Well, we have to put our children’s welfare first and this inhibits a lot of parents because they are afraid. What if my kid asks, “Did you? Did you wait?” And the answer to that is a parent doesn’t have to go to confession to his child. You don’t have to disclose all the bad things you ever did in your whole life. It is enough to say, “I made a lot of mistakes growing up like every kid and you don’t need to know the particulars. My job as a parent is to help you make the right decisions that will help you avoid hurting yourself now and in the future.” And we need to frame this in positive ways. There is a wonderful resource by Kristine Napier entitled, The Power of Abstinence. She has a whole chapter on the rewards of waiting. Kids have to know what they are waiting for, why wait, what is the relationship? Sometimes they will ask, “What is the right age to have sex?” Wrong question. There’s not a magic age. There is a right relationship. There is a relationship within which this special empathy makes sense. It’s truly safe. It’s most meaningful and fulfilling. What is that right relationship? There are lots of programs that help them. You have in your packet an article entitled, Neglected Heart: Emotional Dangers. You are welcome to copy this and any of the materials I have shared with you. A lot of teachers have found them helpful. These are real stories of the human heart. Kids are tired of hearing about disease, they don’t want to hear about pregnancy, but they listen to stories about the human heart because every kid has been hurt and these are true stories that speak to that need.