a brief history of character education

If the vast and various character
education movement is unified
by anything, it is the conviction
that schools can, and must,
develop a healthy peer culture.





a brief history, by James Traub

Character education has legs. It is a reform so thoroughly in the American grain, not to mention so various and adaptable, that it cannot be dismissed as just another shiny and insubstantial bubble. Moreover, the wish for schools to somehow address the sense of drift and anomie in the larger culture is not likely to abate. And so the issue is not whether we will have character education, but instead, what kind we will have and what relationship it will bear to the ongoing campaign to improve children’s academic skills. [ed.: it's always worse than you think]

[snip]

The expression “character education” would have seemed a redundancy until quite recently in history. Virtually all elite private education, whether at prep schools or colleges, was designed to ensure that young men of the better classes were prepared for the leadership positions in government and the professions to which they were destined....Not until the age of John Dewey and the progressives was this inculcation of civic and personal virtue questioned; Dewey mocked the rigid pieties of McGuffey’s Reader and called for a pedagogy that would liberate the child’s own questioning nature, that would replace inculcation itself with a more “child-centered” form of learning. And by midcentury, as a test-driven meritocracy made deep inroads into the old world of inherited privilege, character began to take a back seat to intellect at the elite institutions.

[snip]

The modern character education movement began as a reaction to the aggressively value-neutral school culture that emerged thanks to this combination of progressivism and meritocracy. In The Closing of the American Mind, which appeared in 1987, Alan Bloom wrote that among young people “openness” had ascended to the status of supreme moral principle, just as “relativism” had become axiomatic in philosophy....At the same time, neoconservative thinkers like Gertrude Himmelfarb were extolling the much-denigrated virtues of the Victorian age. The word “virtue” itself began to take on an almost talismanic power, especially in the wake of William Bennett’s Book of Virtues, published in 1992. The very willingness to use the word meant that you accepted the principle that some things were true and some were not, as against the woolly relativism and permissiveness that pervaded the schools.

This philosophical and ideological assault on liberal, secular-minded culture put character education on the public agenda. But many parents and educators who had no interest in fighting the culture wars lamented the generalized loss of authority of traditional institutions. They felt angry that schools had succumbed to an anything-goes ethos that was harmful to both the schools and the young people passing through them. The killings at Columbine and elsewhere seemed to offer terrifying proof that the schools had somehow lost their way. Schools had left the development of values to parents at the very moment when parents were leaving it to . . . whomever.

Character education really took wing, before Columbine, in 1992, at a conference sponsored by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, in Aspen, Colorado. There a group of educators and ethicists agreed on a list of values—not virtues—that they felt transcended sectarian, partisan, or class distinctions. These were codified as “The Six Pillars of Character” (trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, citizenship). The following year, the institute established the Character Counts! program to help schools and communities incorporate the six pillars. At the same time, a group of civic and education organizations formed the Character Education Partnership, which now functions as the movement’s clearinghouse and professional organization (and promotes its own “Eleven Principles” of character). President Clinton seized on the fledgling movement as one of the cost-free, nonpartisan initiatives he was then touting. The White House began sponsoring annual conferences on “Character Building for a Civil and Democratic Society” in 1994. And in 1996 the president gave the movement the ultimate blessing when he said, in his State of the Union address, “I challenge all our schools to teach character education, to teach good values and good citizenship.” By that time, according to a survey by the National School Boards Association, 45 percent of school districts said they had instituted character education programs, while another 38 percent said they planned to do so. Thus the character education bandwagon swiftly became a juggernaut.

Education publishers now offer kits and exercises designed to teach every virtue and every value known to man. The Character Counts! folks, for example, offer a 45-minute lesson plan designed to teach caring to teens. The class begins with a moralized version of musical chairs, in which the kids form groups of three the moment the music stops. Some kids inevitably get excluded in each round. “How did it feel to be left out?” the teacher asks.

The tens of thousands of schools now obliged to institute character education programs need materials, and a world of providers stands ready to help them. A company called Integrity Matters offers “entertaining, attention-capturing character education videos” on 35 “basic moral values” (including “Virtue”). Tolerance is a mini-industry all its own, with manuals offering “proven strategies” to stamp out hate. A curriculum program called “The Seven Cs of Thinking Clearly” (Criticism, Creativity, Curiosity, Concentration, Communication, Correction, and Control) helps children identify “faulty thinking practices” by way of “The Stink’n Think’n Gang,” a gang of no-goodniks whose members include Iwannit Now, Judge B. Fore, and—well, you get the picture. The most hopeful thing one can say about most of these lessons-in-a-box is that they are so hokey and tone-deaf that it is hard to imagine a child, even one of tender years, taking them seriously. At the same time, they constitute a terrible waste of a precious commodity. Whatever time you spend revamping your faulty thinking practices or stamping out hate is time you are not spending studying history or chemistry.

[snip]

Some studies have found that character education programs do, in fact, build character, though none of these studies is rigorous enough to be remotely definitive. The largest of them is a study by researchers at South Dakota State University of 8,419 students in schools that have adopted Character Counts! The study concluded that between 1998 and 2000 the number of students who reported various acts of cheating, stealing, drinking, drug taking, class cutting, and the like decreased significantly.

source:
The Moral Imperative
by James Traub

I'll believe it when I see it.





What Works Clearinghouse

evaluations of 9 character curricula





preview of coming attractions

Traub profiles the original Hyde School in Maine. In Hyde Schools, it seems, character education trumps education education.

..the Hyde idea emerged entirely from the mind of one extremely determined and deeply dissatisfied individual. This was Joe Gauld, a math teacher and administrator at the New Hampton prep school in New Hampshire in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was the early days of the burgeoning postwar meritocracy, and Gauld felt increasingly repelled by the ethos of “giftedness” and the honors track and the rat race for college placement. The schools, he concluded—not just New Hampton but all schools—were failing children by rewarding innate ability rather than seeking to draw out each child’s “unique potential.” And so this lonely dissenter from the post-Sputnik fixation on academic achievement quit his job as assistant headmaster in order to pursue his flinty New England faith in self-improvement and transcendence. Gauld ultimately scraped together the funds to purchase the 145-acre Hyde family estate in Bath, in southern Maine, and the Hyde School opened its doors in 1966. “Instead of relying on intellect to produce good grades and high test scores,” Gauld writes in Character First: The Hyde School Difference, “students at Hyde learn to follow the dictates of their conscience so they can develop the character necessary to bring out their unique potential.”

Apparently the Hyde Schools have become a movement:

Hyde schools are now flourishing in Woodstock, Connecticut, and in the inner-city systems of New Haven, Connecticut, and Washington, D.C. The school’s founder, Joseph Gauld, Malcolm’s father, says that he hopes to have charter schools operating in New York City and Oakland, California, by 2005. In the great, ongoing laboratory project known as whole-school reform, Hyde may turn out to be the leading entry under the heading “character education.”

And a very large heading it is, too. (See sidebar.) Thomas Lickona, the head of the Center for the Fourth and Fifth Rs (the fourth and fifth being respect and responsibility) at the State University of New York at Cortland and a leading figure in the field, says that two-thirds of the states’ schools are now required either by legislative mandate or by administrative regulation to implement programs in character education. The U.S. Department of Education has been awarding grants in the field since 1995; the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 established the new Partnership in Character Education Program, which gives $25 million annually to schools. In part, perhaps, because the very term “character education” evokes such an all-American image of wholesomeness and high moral purpose, this is one bandwagon that educators are almost sure to be climbing aboard in growing numbers.

[snip]

...character education has come increasingly to be seen as an educational rather than a social reform, with measurable inputs producing measurable consequences, for both student behavior and academic performance. Indeed, if the vast and various character education movement is unified by anything, it is the conviction that schools can, and must, consciously and explicitly develop a healthy peer culture because such a culture is the indispensable foundation for successful learning.

Well, there you have it.

Peer culture is the indispensable foundation for successful learning.

I happen to believe peer culture can make or break a kid. In fact, I happen to believe, pace Laurence Steinberg, that what you're really paying for in a school district like ours is the peers.

Just this morning, Christopher was telling me he's one of the 3 best students in his social studies class. He and the 2 other boys he thinks are best "race each other to see who finishes first." Finishing first doesn't mean slacking on the answers, but getting the answers quickly because you know the material.

Peers like that are worth their weight in gold.

However, the reason peers like that are worth their weight in gold is that the school isn't providing a coherent curriculum and performing routine formative assessment to make sure kids are learning it.

I want to add that Christopher's social studies teacher, Miss Tucci, has gotten a lot of content inside Christopher's head this year. He's constantly telling me things he's learned in her class. She loves her subject, and she's done a great job.

However, our district, last year, did not use a Miss Tucci standard in tenure decisions. Affluent school districts have the luxury of relying on parents to teach and reteach content at home, or hire tutors if they haven't the time, expertise, or cooperation from their children to do the teaching themselves. During the school day affluent districts can rely on competitive peers to spark and maintain student motivation.





update: the Hyde motto

Courage, Integrity, Concern, Curiosity, and Leadership

Just to point out the obvious, I don't see Learning on this list.

Or Achievement.

Or Excellence.

Or anything else of that nature.





Also missing: loyalty.

Brother's Keeper: Requires students to hold one another accountable for achieving their best by challenging the "I-don't-rat-on-my-buddies" ethic.

I give up.







character education reading list
lots more books on character education
character education resources for parents !

The Girl Show
The Boy Show
The Other Boy Show

What Works Clearinghouse assessment character ed
Character Ed at the DOE

a brief history of character education
a first grade teacher focuses on moral decline
zero tolerance for zero tolerance
self esteem vs character ed
constructivist character ed
Michael Josephson, father of character education in U.S.

character ed in "study skills" class
character ed & shaming
Irvington character education wall calendar
Facing History and Ourselves

worsethanyouthink

-- CatherineJohnson - 02 Jun 2006

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Catherine, did you see the Bizarro comic in today's paper? To paraphrase: meet the new commandments, same as the old commandments.

-- BeckyC - 02 Jun 2006

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I didn't!

Can I find it online?

-- CatherineJohnson - 02 Jun 2006

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I just can't believe we now have a 4th and 5th "r"

It's not like anyone was doing such a bang-up job of teaching the first 3.

-- CatherineJohnson - 02 Jun 2006

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It's not online -- I checked, there's a month delay. As Moses leaves the Burning Bush, stone tablets in hand, Yahweh calls out: "And don't forget to come back every ten years for updates. Times change, you know."

-- BeckyC - 02 Jun 2006

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In Forgotten Heroes of American Education, there are selections from a variety of writers on this subject.

I don't know if you'll want to read through this before or after a glass of life-extending red wine.

William Bagley weighs in on "The School's Responsibility for Developing the Controls of Conduct"... a selection I'm fond of, though his interests in the essay are much more wide-ranging:

...I should maintain that the student of mathematics should come from his study of algebra and geometry and calculus with a highly emotionalized prejudice toward that method of close, logical thinking that mathematics, above all other disciplines, represents.

It is true that not all students derive these prejudices from the pursuit of mathematics and science. Mastery of subject-matter does not involve this as a necessary consequence. But to some students, a long acquaintance with, and contemplation of, the methods by which some of man's greatest conquests over nature have been made possible give a profound sense of the worth and value of these methods -- a feeling of respect and perhaps of reverence which (is) essential to the modification of (later) conduct...

After all, the things that appeal to us most strongly from the emotional aspect are the things that we have gained at the cost of effort and struggle; and the belief that the "tough" subjects of the curriculum have the greatest disciplinary power has a psychological basis in this fact.

I don't think he's referring to "feelings of mathematical power" that the constructivists are aiming for and that can also be felt in the use of a calculator.

De Garmo has an essay on the "Social Aspects of Moral Education", talking us through history and the European tradition...

William Harris writes on the "Relation of School Discpline to Moral Education", it's pretty stern stuff, I like it:

Having enumerated these four cardinal duties in the schoolroom -- regularity, punctuality, silence, and industry -- let us now note their higher significance reaching beyond the schoolroom into the building of character for life. The general form of all school work is that of obedience...

(These duties) constitute an elementary training in morals without which it is exceedingly difficult to build any superstructure of moral character whatever.

Moral education in the school, therefore, must begin in merely mechanical obedience, and develop gradually out of this stage towards that of individual responsibility.

Obedience! That's a real blast from the past! Nowadays, to say that a child is obedient is quite damning.

Isaac Kandel has a lovely summary, "Character Formation: A Historical Perspective" starting with the Hebrews, moving foward to this exhortation from the Tenth Yearbook of the Department of Superintendance (1932):

The present trend in theory is to place on the child the responsibility of working out his own code of conduct with some help from teachers and other adults in analyzing situations... The authority of society is not presented to the child as a guide to conduct. Reliance is placed on the experience of each individual child.

-- BeckyC - 03 Jun 2006

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Should you run out and buy your own copy? I think you have enough work to do already!

But it's nice to have it on the shelf.

The executive summary: This book will make you laugh! This book will make you cry! This book will make you realize that there is nothing new under the sun.

That there are eternal struggles between what is right and what is convenient.

-- BeckyC - 03 Jun 2006

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Becky, thanks so much for the wonderful Bagley quote. That has made my day.

-- SusanJ - 03 Jun 2006

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Susan, you are welcome!

Harris' quote is fun because it refers to a time quite in advance of our current romance of the child. Now we fetishize freedom, or the appearance of freedom, for children. Which gets to the heart of the debate:

Is freedom the means or the ends of education?

Progressivists believe that we cannot "grow" free men unless we give our children the gift of a lot of freedom in the classroom. A lot of opportunities to "practice" exercising their free will. From the earliest age. From kindergarten. So freedom is the means of education. I think with a tutor, this works... with one teacher and twenty-five children, this doesn't work.

Which reminds me of a cooperative preschool my son attended many years ago. The teacher held so strenuously to her progressive ideals, she was sure that a habitually cruel child would learn the error of his ways only after he had had sufficient opportunities to see how other young children were hurt by his freely chosen, and quite nasty, verbal provocations. She told parent volunteers who helped in the classroom that the only way to teach him kindness was to let him discover it for himself. He was to freely make the choice to be kind. Presumably he would someday feel isolated by other children avoiding him.

But it was hard for him to feel isolated from the rest of the kids by his "choices" when he had a willing sidekick, who always laughed.

But I digress.

Traditionalists believe that a liberal education is meant to liberate the individual to freely make responsible choices. He will no longer be a slave to his passions, after a time. A time in which he has submitted himself to the will of his teachers, who responsibly introduce him to the history of the human race. So freedom is the ends of education, and it is not a gift.

-- BeckyC - 04 Jun 2006

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Title:	a brief history of character education
TopicType:	WebLog
SubjectArea:	AboutCurricula, TeachersTeachingKids
LogDate:	200606021027