Character Education

Character Education: An Overview
Before 1900,1 early attempts were made to involve students in the discussion of values and the application of these to their behavior. From Plato, in the 4th century B.C.E. to John Locke in the 17th century C.E., a commonly held belief was that learning was secondary to virtue. Locke said, “I imagine you would think him a very foolish fellow that should not value a virtuous or a wise man infinitely before a great scholar.” 2 The McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers, which consisted of collections of stories used to educate and transmit moral lessons, were the most widely read books in 19th century America. The readers were used in public and private education to instill both biblical values and responsibility in workers. After World War II, common “American” values were deeply imbedded within the public school curriculum supporting civic pride and patriotic nationalism.
The sixties, a time of questioning these values—and a time of rebellion—gave way to ethical relativism in the seventies. Rather than prescribing a set of common values to be taught, popular programs at this time, such as values clarification,3 would contributed to the development of the student in six areas of human interaction: communicating, empathizing, problem-solving, assenting and dissenting, decision-making, and personal consistency. The values clarification movement was one of the first formal attempts to discuss values in the public school classroom, a movement which gave no visible support to any particular values—moral or otherwise—and instead challenged students to evaluate or clarify the values that they held. In values clarification programs, teachers served as facilitators with a mandate not to impose their values on students. Although remaining values neutral, values clarification provided a positive voice for the development of critical thinking and encouraged students to try to understand the values and beliefs by which they were living. In 1980, Sidney B. Simon coined the term “Values Realization” to summarize this first major movement in values education. A primary goal of values clarification was to establish respect, tolerance, and objectivity into evaluating one’s values. A secondary goal of this program was seeking tolerance and understanding of the values that others held, especially those that differed from one’s own values. According to Howard Kirschenbaum, “It encompasses all those approaches that help individuals determine, recognize, implement, act upon, and achieve their values in life. It is the process of moving toward a life that is personally satisfying—one of the goals of values education and moral education.”4
Often ignored in recounting the history of the character education movement are the unconscious value implications of programs like values clarification. For example, although values clarification claims values neutrality, the student for whom the program is designed is required to enter into dialogue with teachers and other students, use reason (logic, problem-solving, conflict resolution techniques, etc.) to clarify personally held values, and assess the effect of personally held values on friends, family, and the community. The point is that no academic program is value neutral, no matter its claims. There is in values clarification an implied assumption that any value held by a person is important, and indeed it is, because it is so held and has an impact on others. Also implied, as a hidden assumption, is that a person’s values are “okay” because of the dignity and integrity of that person. This kind of personal values relativity has been one of the strongest criticism of values clarification by proponents of character education’s movement to identify a core set of commonly held values.
Also in the background of the early character education movement was a program developed by the late Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg.5 His program was based on democratic ideas derived from citing the United States Constitution as the moral document of American society. Kohlberg held that students must be allowed a certain degree of moral reasoning and that the teacher must not impose personally held values on students. Under Kohlberg’s program, students would be told short stories that presented moral dilemmas,6 placing values like loyalty and honesty in conflict. While the stories were sure to incite lively dialogue, critics argued that Kohlberg’s dilemmas assumed that students already had strong feelings about the values in question or promoted moral relativism, rather than helping children define values.
Kohlberg envisioned six stages of moral development, which was an expansion of Piaget’s two- stage theory. For Piaget, the ages 6-12 consisted of the heteronomy stage (rules laid down by adults with little questioning) and the autonomy stage (where rules are obeyed not because they are adult conceptions but because rules are important in group and society relations). Kohlberg’s six stages included (1) a preconventional level where the child is responsible to cultural rules and labels of good and bad, right and wrong, but interprets these labels either in terms of the physical consequences of action; i.e., punishment and reward; (2) a conventional level where maintaining the expectations of the individual’s family, group, or nation is perceived as valuable in its own right, regardless of immediate or obvious consequences—the attitude is one of conformity to personal expectations and the social order and loyalty to it; and (3) a postconventional or autonomous level, where there is a clear effort to define moral values and principles that have validity and application apart from authority figures or group pressures. Within each of these three major stages are two subordinate or transitional stages that complete Kohlberg’s six-stage cognitive-moral developmental process. That every individual actually moves through all of these stages in a sequential order has been questioned (that is, that they represent a universal pattern for all individuals), but there is little doubt that these stages (rather, platforms of cognitive/moral thinking) are observable in individuals in one form or another. Kohlberg documented in 1979 that 45 percent of 13-14-year olds were reasoning at Stage 2, 42 percent at Stage 3, and 3 percent at Stage 4.7

Neither values clarification nor the theories of Kohlberg (or teaching values in general) found a secure home in the public schools before 1980. However, between 1980 and 2005—with issues such as public school safety, school discipline, improving achievement test scores, and extraordinary violent events and behaviors in schools throughout America—character education was given a new birth, state and federal funding, and began redefining itself as an instrument for resolving many of these and other problems that now plagued the schools. During the past twenty-five years, the movement has moved through three recognizable phases: (1) an implicit phase in which programs were designed to enhance the emotional, intellectual, and ethical health of students—programs included values clarification and a decided emphasis on the research of Kohlberg, and continued with the Paideia Program and the children’s philosophy programs discussed below. (2) An explicit phase in which certain “traditional values” were identified as the cornerstones of virtuous and responsible conduct. This phase continues through the Character Development Group of Chapel Hill, North Carolina and is supported by the research of Thomas Lickona, Kevin Ryan, and Alfie Kohn, to mention the mainstays of the character education push. (3) Finally, character education is today moving into a phase devoted to teaching “civic values.” Civility education will be the new buzzword for 21st century character educators. Dr. Philip F. Vincent, founder of the Character Development Group in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, says that he has always emphasized civility education as a vital part of character education, and adds that civility education seems more and more to be the direction in which contemporary character education programs are moving (personal email).
PHASE ONE: During the second half of the 20th century, the Paideia Program, the Children’s Philosophy Program, and the Philosophy for Young Thinker’s Program were among the earliest programs (phase 1) that emerged in character education. Although these programs were not explicitly established as “character education” programs, they did direct their attention to the development of the inner person—the character—and introduced critical reasoning and reflective understanding into the life of the school curriculum. I think it correct to add these programs to the early history of character education in America; that is, if we begin with the redevelopment of public education after World War II.
(1) Begun at the University of Chicago, Mortimer J. Adler and the Paideia Group’s The Paideia Program, An Educational Syllabus8 was first published in 1982, 1983 and 1984. The Paideia Group included university professors, college heads, public school leaders, and leaders of institutes and centers for the promotion of education in the arts, sciences, and humanities. Its purpose was to reform basic schooling in the United States by promoting the equality of all children as human beings. This was thought of as “an equality that derives from their common humanity and personhood,” and /or equality that “is accompanied by individual inequality in talents and aptitudes.” The Paideia Program was thus developed as a curricular framework within which a variety of curriculums could be soundly built. This framework includes three types of teaching: the conduct of seminars, thinking skill and learning skill coaching, and didactic instruction (lecture). Hundreds of “great books” or readings are recommended with the program, which provide materials for seminar discussions, literature classes, language coaching sessions, and supplementary use in subject-matter classes in which textbooks are also used. Fundamentally, the Paideia Program was designed for all students in the belief that we all learn by doing and that every doing involves thinking. The program maintains that teaching is more than lecturing and memorizing, but includes discussing great ideas and skill coaching as well. The program is founded on the belief that all children are educable and all have the human right to aspire to become truly educated human beings in the course of their lives.
(2) The Philosophy for Young Thinkers9 program (PYT) was first published in 1983, with the entire curriculum of student books and teacher guides completed by 1988. Joseph P. Hester and Philip Fitch Vincent, the authors, who were at that time public school educators, state that the PYT curriculum was developed for integration into the public school curriculum—particularly into either social studies or language arts—and encourages students to chart their own course in their quest for solutions to significant human problems. The authors also recognized that the “process of integrating human knowledge and assessing human values is not an easy one. It requires a structure that promotes consistency and permits meaningful conceptualization.” The PYT curriculum provides student workbooks at every grade level and guides for teachers. The question “What is human about humans?” lies at its heart where lessons, conceived as answers to this question, are developed around a developmentally appropriate sequence of problem solving/critical thinking skills and a set of developmentally organized affective skills or values. Like the Paideia Program, PYT focuses on discussion and dialogue skills and engages students, working in cooperative groups, to resolve important issues of knowledge, value, and ethics.
PYT takes a values-centered approach. The authors comment in the introduction to the series, “Since 1977 we have worked toward the development of a pre-college philosophy curriculum which seeks an understanding of philosophical problems, endeavors to develop reasoning skills in our young people, and focuses upon studies in ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics as legitimate concerns of the public school curriculum.” Dorothy Sisk, professor at Lamar University, after a careful evaluation of the PYT curriculum, commented, “… the task of adapting present curriculum into dynamic, multi-disciplinary activities with an emphasis on higher-level thinking skills calls for a full understanding of the conditions for creative teaching and learning. Philosophy for Young Thinkers sets the conditions for creative teaching and learning for both the teacher and students. Utilizing the vehicle of philosophy, these imaginative and well informed authors tackle the considerable task of blending philosophical problems, thinking skills, values analysis, and activities into a dynamic whole.”10
Added to the PYT curriculum in 1985 and again in 1988 was the two-volume Cartoons For Thinking (CFT).11 Using the skills and affective values emphasized in PYT, these lesson plan books utilized selected political cartoons by the award-winning cartoonist, Doug Marlette and group dynamic activities written by social psychologist Don R. Killian, a professor at Gaston College. Published and distributed widely in the United States by Trillium Press, these two volumes provided a new dimension in character education by asking students to seek solutions to contemporary social and political problems in small discussion groups. Developed around the Paideia concept, these books allowed students to set in motion their values and ideas and modify them, if need be, as solutions to problems were sought in a group setting.
(3) One of the most exciting programs to emerge in the early days of character education was the Philosophy For Children12 program developed at Montclair State College in Upper Montclair, New Jersey by Matthew Lipman and his associates. Lipman organized the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC) in 1969, which began producing teacher training and student books for use in the pre-college classroom. Along with IAPC, Lipman heads the Institute for Critical Thinking at Montclair State College, which provides a strong research arm for the continual development of the school’s emphasis on advancing the cognitive and moral improvement of children, youth, and adults. Now a worldwide movement, the institute’s purpose has been to strengthen the reasoning and moral judgment of children. The authors queried:
The most appropriate source of assistance was obviously those subdivisions of philosophy known as Logic and Ethics. But how could these branches of philosophy be made available to children? The answer began to emerge in the third quarter of the 20th century. It began to dawn on educators that a major aim of education is to make children more reasonable, and if this were so, then the process of education should focus on the improvement of thinking. After all, if Reading and Writing are taught to children under the auspices of Literature, why not make Reasoning and Judgment available to children under the auspices of Philosophy? Children do not need to learn philosophy. Rather as with reading and writing it is something one does. An added advantage of introducing philosophy into the grade school has been the realization that this would be an ideal way of having children study values, for in philosophy, conceptual analysis plays a major role, and values are, among other things, concepts of importance.

The Philosophy for Children program and the children’s philosophy movement it inspired has emerged from this rather simple, but profound insight. The program’s website states:
Today, Philosophy for Children is the outstanding curriculum for grade school philosophy. In Philosophy for Children, students begin by reading texts in the form of stories. These stories are about fictional children who discover how to reason more effectively, and how to apply their reasoning to life situations. These stories are then discussed by the children in the classroom. Many problematic issues are encountered and examined. The students deliberate among themselves, and this process of deliberation is then internalized by the individual students: they become more reflective and begin to think for themselves. These classroom deliberations evoke thinking that is skillful and deliberate, thinking that employs relevant criteria, is self-correcting, and is sensitive to context. It is not just any kind of thinking: it is critical thinking . . . Philosophy for Children sharpens children's linguistic, logical and cognitive competence. If any subject should be added to the school curriculum, it should be philosophy. And if philosophy is to become a mandated subject in the schools, there is no better way of offering it than through the Philosophy for Children approach.
PHASE TWO: Today, there exist many hundreds of different types of programs, books – theoretical and practical – consulting firms, and Internet resources for educators wanting to develop character education programs in their schools. My own workbook (Talking It Over, A Workbook for Character Development) 13 for teachers, parents, and students was published in 2002 and includes thirty years of experience and insights into educating children in ethical values as it combines critical thinking and problem solving skills in a concentration on values and character development. Public, private-secular, and private-religious schools are also involved in the character education movement. The Internet contains many hundreds of sites dedicated to character education. Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly14 asks, “Can morality be taught like math or history? How can schools do it?” and points out, “From this country’s earliest days, a primary purpose of public education was to teach good character. Then moral instruction went out of style. Now, after court decisions banning school prayer and more and more school violence, such as the shootings at Columbine High School, the character education movement is going strong.”
No doubt the need for character education continues. The Josephson Institute reported in 2002, “Cheating, stealing and lying by high school students have continued their alarming, decade-long upward spiral. A survey of 12,000 high school students showed that students admitting they cheated on an exam at least once in the past year jumped from 61% in 1992 to 74% in 2002; the number who stole something from a store within the past 12 months rose from 31% to 38%, while the percentage who say they lied to their teachers and parents also increased substantially.” 15
The report also reveals significant deterioration over the past two years: Cheating rose from 71% in 2000 to 74% in 2002, theft increased from 35% to 38%, and those who said they would be willing to lie to get a good job jumped from 28% to 39%. The 2002 report also found that students who attend private religious schools were less likely to shoplift (35% vs. 39%) but more likely to cheat on exams (78% vs. 72%) and lie to teachers (86% vs. 81%). In addition, students participating in varsity sports cheated on exams at a higher rate than students who did not (78% vs. 73%).
Michael Josephson, president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics, said: “The evidence is that a willingness to cheat has become the norm and that parents, teachers, coaches and even religious educators have not been able to stem the tide. The scary thing is that so many kids are entering the workforce to become corporate executives, politicians, airplane mechanics and nuclear inspectors with the dispositions and skills of cheaters and thieves.”
For this reason, there is a perceived need for a resource book that inventories the most valuable of these resources, provides information about character education issues, books, centers, and associations. Although this book will not evaluate these resources, one of its purposes is to catalogue the major character education sites for easy use by school administrators and classroom teachers. There is a need for gathering these important sources in one volume. Advertisers, booksellers, and the Internet can often confuse the untrained educator into purchasing a program that does not fit the parameters of his or her school or classroom design. Educational conferences and character education conferences lure teachers and administrators who are easy prey to slick promotions and charismatic speakers. A single volume, updated on a regular basis provides the educator a convenient means of selecting and evaluating character education program designs. With over 1,300,000 Internet sites devoted to character education, unsuspecting educators have no expedient means of selecting and evaluating these many programs.

Expanded Applications

(1) In my 2003 book, Public School Safety: a Resource Guide, 16 character education was discussed as a component of many of the initiatives in school safety programs. In those pages a wholistic character education program was described, including training students and their parents in conflict resolution17 techniques, creative problem solving, and decision-making. The observation was made that “Providing additional information about these strategies will assist educational professionals in building their own long-term safety initiatives around such long-term courses of action as training, counseling, and home-school applications.” The initial reviews of this volume have been positive. This has led me to delve deeper into some of the areas emphasized in that book. Among these is character education. I presented the outline for this book to my former writing partner, and now nationally recognized expert in character education, Dr. Philip Vincent who made several suggestions, added valuable ideas from his experience and wisdom, and observed that a resource book in character education is indeed needed for current educational practitioners and character education professionals.
(2) In the spring of 2003 I returned to theme of ethics and placed the character education in a larger context of building a leadership culture within the school, the community, and the home. I understood that teaching foundational ethical principles lies at the heart of what many educators would characterize as “character education.” In Ethical Leadership for Public School Administrators and Teachers, 18 published in 2003, I observed, “A leader is someone others are willing to follow. Of course, there are students and adults who lead in negative and unethical ways. To prevent this kind of leadership from developing in schools, we must build a leadership culture that is based on ethical principles.” The heart of ethical leadership is the desire to serve one another and to serve something beyond our on interests. Based on these and similar ideas, H. Darrell Young and I created a “Manifesto for Ethical Leadership” based on sound ethical and leadership principles whose purpose it is to promote ethical behaviors among public school teachers and administrators. I have recently co-authored a workbook in leadership development – Leadership Under Construction19 – that includes the ethical character as an essential aspect of leadership development. The point made by Darrell Young, the major author of this book, is that we lead by serving first and that the servant leader is one who “leads from the inside out”—from character to behaviors we label as ethical and civil.20
The point has been made that character educators have correctly emphasized building ethical leadership skills among students. Dr. Philip F. Vincent21 indicates that his new research into civility education begins with an emphasis on developing and sustaining relationships. Relationship building lies at the heart of any character education, ethical, or ethical leadership initiative. Summarily, the point of departure in any character education program is on improving behavior—the behavior of students, teachers, parents, administrators, and other school personnel. No one can be excluded for such a program to work. Participatory ethical leadership is a key ingredient for developing and sustaining character education initiatives in schools. Many schools are eager to start their character education initiatives, but do not know where to begin. Additionally, although people recognize that parents/guardians and community members make important contributions to the process, getting people involved can be a real challenge. This book will be a great resource, providing information about the planning, development and implementation of character education initiatives.
Some Bumps In the Road

During the 1990s something of a taboo fell over any discussion of values, ethics, and character. Along with the rise of multiculturalism came the dictum that truth and value are relative. Possibly anticipated by Allan Bloom22 as “a closing of the American mind,” relativism, the undergirding support of the postmodern movement, was promoted as necessary to openness, a mindset that puts all values and cultures on an equal par with tolerance and acceptance of individual differences without overt evaluation being the key to understanding and objectivity. Relativism is possibly one of the most misunderstood and dangerous ideas to emerge in the 20th century. Bloom warned us,
Actually openness results in American conformism—out there in the rest of the world is a drab diversity that teaches only that values are relative, whereas here we can create all the life-styles we want. Our openness means we do not need others. Thus what is advertised as a great opening is a great closing. The point [in education] is to propagandize acceptance of different ways, and indifference to their real content is as good a means as any. Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power.

As we offer explanations for the rise of character education in our schools, we are forced to acknowledge that this new openness has created a values shift in our society. Openness can sometimes be a blind acceptance of any point of view in the desire to accommodate the opinions of others. Openness, conceived in this way, is the rationale for accepting any idea, any culture, any person, and any value on the grounds of tolerance, acceptance, and the politically correct thing to do. Openness has become a new virtue, but it has also resulted in values confusion. Character educators are asking, “What ethic other than openness is important for us to follow today?” The proliferation of experiences and images each of us receives from the print, audio, and video media serves this new openness to the extent that we find ourselves entrapped in a stereophonically televised ethnocentrism, and subsequently, in the morass of constant values conflict. Parenthetically, this openness may have reached a peak recently with the outcry over Janet Jackson’s 2004 Superbowl “revelation” and by the more recent legalization of “same-sex” marriages in San Francisco and Massachusetts.
Nothing is more central to a nation than its values and nothing is more important to the ordinary American’s private and personal experience than the values of liberty and equality, respect for others, responsibility for one’s behavior, and self-reliance. It doesn’t make any substantial difference what we call these—values, virtues, morals, or ethical principles—because these precepts and those particular values predicated on them are the foundation of character and civility education. We must remember that our nation was founded on Enlightenment principles chief of which was to “have courage to use your own reason.” Colin Brown reminds us that “the enlightenment challenge to be wise and bring everything subject to the judgment of critical reason” was not merely a challenge to 18th century thinkers, but a reminder to them to cultivate their own gardens.23 Brown points out that Rousseau’s theory of the state and society was based on the will of the people and that “the only valid basis for a society is for its members to agree to a social pact which will combine freedom with just government in the interests of the majority.
Because we are prone to probe and dicker, massage and nudge the values essential to civil and ethical behaviors, today’s character movement is a mirror of our national identity: it is the story of liberty and equality, of ethical transformation and accommodation, of values and value shifts in our society. It points to events, personalities, lifestyles, and laws (or rules and procedures based on law) that define ethics and values in other societies as they have impacted on and become part of the fabric of American culture. It requires an open and inquiring mind, but it doesn’t demand accepting any point of view without thorough investigation, evaluation, and discussion. Also, changing times and circumstances will, as in the past, precipitate the rethinking of our values, adjusting them to fit our ever-changing cultural landscape, and molding our teaching to fit what will become the accepted values of our time. Does this mean that our values are relative? In once sense it does—that our values do change, are flexible, and resist being unaltered. There is another sense of “relativity” which says that at any given time, the values held in different cultures and subcultures are valid in the places and situations where they are held and may be invalid in other places—in this sense values are held contingently with their meaning dependent of social and cultural traditions and circumstances. This second sense, held by many postmodernists and multi-culturalists, insisting on a language that reflects this kind of relativism (that is, values held contingently), can be detrimental to the promotion of cultural and international harmony, and a core collection of values that supports the efforts of character educators.
PHASE THREE: When examined up close, today’s character movement is the story of individuals and institutions, of people with vision, and those with a desire to bring some sort of civility back to our schools and students. This story is more than academic or educational in the strict sense of those words. It is found in song and poetry, in novels, plays, movies, books, magazines, academic literature, and advertisements; in any place we find human dialogue. This is why Dr. Philip F. Vincent, in his primary work, Developing Character in Students, a Primer,24 identifies five areas where character can be enhanced. These are the following: developing and maintaining school rules and procedures, in cooperative learning practices, in teaching thinking and problem solving skills, in literature about the ethical behavior of people, and through service learning. One should note that Dr. Vincent is an educator practitioner. He has spent most of his career in the public school classroom and at the central office level managing various educational programs. Only in recent years has he set out to share the wisdom cleaned from his hands-on experience. His own books, his publishing company, and his consulting company—the Character Development Group, located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina—are testimonies to his commitment to educating students, teachers, and parents in character education. In his first book, published in 1995, Vincent observed that although “There are values that are not controversial, I have yet to meet a parent who did not want a school to assist children in becoming responsible for their actions, as well as respectful and caring towards others . . . If we can agree on some values that we wish our students to have, and if we believe that these values are representative of people we recognize as having a good character, then we need to formulate a plan for developing these values in our students. We must recognize that an important role of schools is to facilitate the development of character and develop an educational strategy to remove our gridlock on the teaching of good values to students.” The strength of Vincent’s insights is the broad (five areas of application) umbrella he has envisioned for applying the principles and values he espouses in character education programs, allowing schools and school communities to determine areas to be emphasized and enhanced by local educators.
Like Dr. Vincent, we realize that many values have changed in our own lifetime; that values clarification, with its neutrality of ethical content, multiculturalism, relativism, and now post modernism have tried to shorten the list of values that are applicable in our schools and communities. On the other hand, we are compelled to point out that our philosophical and cultural roots are firmly planted in the Judeo-Christian understanding of history in terms of good and evil and damnation and salvation. Concepts like morality, ethics, and character cannot be fully understood without appropriating the substance of this religious tradition. The religious overtones of our cultural are perhaps nearer to our hearts than the conceptual overtones of Platonic thought, centering on order and revolving around the cathartic intuition of ideas. For our understanding of values, ethics, and morality in the Western Hemisphere, a good starting point would be to explore the relationship of secular values and those appropriated from the region’s dominant religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.25 This is why Colin Brown’s Christianity and Western Thought26 is such an important resource for ethics and character educators. Although it remains difficult to discuss the idea of character or the sources of ethics without returning to philosophical and religious traditions, this book will make every effort to remain practical and intellectually uncomplicated as it maneuvers through the crust of custom that still holds many of our values in place.
What brought the need of character education to our schools? It is difficult to pinpoint when dramatic changes in the American character began. Some cite the end of World War II; others drop it back to the end of Reconstruction. These were watershed decades during which the fabric of the American soul underwent reevaluation and substantial modification. There are those who point to the Depression of the 1930s, while others use the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan as a point of departure. In the second half of the 20th century, it was the Vietnam War and Watergate—thought of as watershed years when tension and change moved American values off center. Every era is important, but more significant than the tension brought by the events of a particular time, is to remember the inner meaning of democracy, liberty, and justice. Joseph Needleman27 says, “To a significant extent, democracy in its specifically American form was created to allow men and women to seek their own higher principle within themselves. Without that inner meaning, democracy becomes . . . a celebration of disorder and superficiality.”
So, as we work our way back through the contours of history to discover the idea of character and to grasp a vision of its purpose and meaning, we acknowledge the major and minor quakes that have agitated the precarious and insecure values of our nation causing rifts, dips, and changes in what we believe and the way we behave. Putting the problems of the past into perspective will help us evaluate and understand the critical issues we face today, but they should not shake us from our higher principles. As Needleman points out, “In … ancient teaching, freedom is understood not as the license to obey one’s desires but as obedient submission to a deep inner law; independence is understood as the discovery of one’s own authentic self, which—although it may seem paradoxical—is also a mirror of the common cosmic Selfhood; equality is understood as every human being’s right to seek the truth and to be allowed to give his or her light to the common welfare.” 28
The events and people and the ideas and movements of history tell us about the struggle, the shared sacrifices, and the uncertain future felt by Americans in every decade of our country’s adolescence. Therefore, the study of character education and character cannot be an abstract discussion of ethics and values. In the mid-1980s, as we gathered ourselves for the 21st century, we found that democracy and character had been snubbed in many quarters in favor of gender, class, race, religion, and the growing individualism and narcissism that had engulfed the major institutions of our country, including our schools. The rub of political correctness and multiculturalism has had a tendency to erase those common values that bring people together and instead have begun to separate us, emphasizing our differences and non-dependence on society, nation, and culture. At the same time, they have demanded that we have a concern for the collective whole and submerge our individualism under the cloak of the common good. The contradictions are obvious and the messages being sent to our school-age children are confusing.

The “Character” in Character Education

Although not a new movement, the emphasis on character education “programs” was new to us in the 1970s and 1980s and entered the educational scene with the purpose of clearing up some of our value confusion. Many felt the schools were ethically empty with the Ten Commandments and prayer now being “disallowed.” It seemed that all of our basic values were either considered trivial or lacked the official sanction of the federal and state governments. Entering this supposedly values-neutral territory, the character education movement has tried to formulate a carefully written set of traditional values called “virtues.” Advocates of character education try to avoid such terms as “values,” “morals,” and “ethics,” telling us that these words are philosophically loaded and carry too much cultural baggage. Yet, denying one’s cultural roots can have its own problems. Needleman points out, “Great ideas, ideas that meaningfully reflect something of the world’s ancient tradition of wisdom, have the power to bind people together and to bring unity under a goal and a vision that are stronger and deeper than all personal, short-term gain.” He says, “This is the mark of great ideas: they unify people and they also act to unify the disparate parts of the human being; they speak of a social order that is possible on the basis of an ordering within the individual self.”29 In short, they speak of “character.”

When we speak about a person’s character, we are trying to capture something of the person’s essence as a human being, the major traits or characteristics of the person, what the person typically does or says, the person’s major beliefs, and the person’s values or ethical principles. If we probe deeply enough, we find the self-concept with its flaws and compromises and with its immense courage and moral vision. The mystery of these two levels: the inner self within joined with that which is all too human and their complicated interaction is the territory where character, meaning, and value become solidified. James Q. Wilson,30 professor of Management and Public Policy at UCLA, recognizes this fusion when he observes that character is a distinctive combination of personal qualities by which someone is known (that is, a personality), and moral strength or integrity by which a person strikes a balance between his or her moral senses and prudent self-interest.
Contemporary educators interested in developing character in their students understand the importance of balancing self-interest and one’s moral sense. This balance is often called “virtue” and virtue is about striking a moral balance between genuine self-interest – what I most want to do for me regardless of the consequences or how it affects others – and the moral disposition acquired by love and affection. Virtue is more than a set of rules or procedures and it is not simply about human relationships. Rather virtue is about what these relationships ought to be; it is about morality and making moral choices. It is important to understand that that mystical realm between people that we call “relationships”—the realm of the “between”31—is where values are ultimately located and practiced. The importance of building and sustaining human relationships in character building cannot be over emphasized.
The daily discourse of ordinary people is permeated with moral references, and these concerns derive from their shared moral sense, a character-base, which is shaped by the basic realities and experiences they endure. Because humans share a moral sense, individuals with widely divergent perspectives are able to address common problems using common values as a guide. Understanding the nature of character as involving an expansion of our moral sensibilities has led to the gradual expansion of the imagination of those in power and their continual willingness to use the term “we” to include more and more different sorts of people. Our ideal of character, although culture-bound and local, is able to produce a consideration of others and a balance between their needs and our needs. Character education as moral and ethical education may be our best hope for the development of a widely accepted human moral base.




Books on the Cutting Edge

By way of introduction, several books of interest need to be mentioned that have proved to be on the diagnostic edge of research and program development in character education (the authors will later appear in the “personalities” section of this book). The earliest of these books were not a part of the character education movement, but an underpinning for those who would later develop programs and curricular modification in character development for classroom use. The choice of these books is not meant to disavow the importance of other similar and groundbreaking research. Indeed, these authors stand on the shoulders of such writers as Piaget, Dewey, and Kohlberg who perhaps represent the “classics” of moral education research and development. I think it still important to lift several books of more recent origins that are not only important historically to the character education movement, but which are still germane to classroom theory and practice. Any beginning teacher should read these books and study them thoroughly before proceeding into more recent books in character education. They are basic to our understanding and can stand as a primer to character education’s development and history.
The first of these books is David Elkind’s 32 The Hurried Child, Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon. Appearing in 1981, this was a groundbreaking book, which took a hard look at children and stress. Elkind brought to our attention the burdens adults have brought upon children. He identifies the children of the eighties as “the hurried children” who have been forced to achieve more, earlier, than any other generation. He notes that their traditional rites of passage come too early and their fears of failure are constant. Because these pressures can be overwhelming on children, Elkind offers insights, advice, and hope for solving those problems. Perhaps Elkind will help us understand some of the causes for the problems of today’s youth and the need for character education. For those who believe that character education represents a “cure” for many of the behavior problems and violence in our schools, they should perhaps heed the words of Elkind who said, “Hurried children seem to make up a large portion of the troubled children seen by clinicians today; they constitute many of the young people experiencing school failure, those involved in delinquency and drugs, and those who are committing suicide. They also include many of the children who have chronic psychosomatic complaints such as headaches and stomachaches, who are chronically unhappy, hyperactive, or lethargic and unmotivated. These diseases and problems have long been recognized as stress related in adults, and it is time we looked at children and stress in the same light.”
In 1984, William Watson Purkey and John M. Novak published the second edition of Inviting School Success—A Self-Concept Approach to Teaching and Learning.33 School administrators generally recognized this book as a tool for training both experienced and beginning teachers. In this second edition, Purkey and Novak offer an invitational approach to the educational process that teachers can use to increase their students’ motivation, performance, and happiness within the school environment. These professors show how a teacher’s language and actions can affect students’ self-concepts and either “invite” or “disinvite” the learning process. They define “invitational education” as “the application of an emerging theory of practice” which is based on four principles: (1) people are able, valuable, and responsible and should be treated accordingly; (2) teaching should be a cooperative activity; (3) people possess relatively untapped potential in all areas of human development; and (4) this potential can best be realized by places, policies, and programs that are specifically designed to invite development, and by people who are personally and professionally inviting to themselves and others. The authors recognize the basic need to be noticed and noticed favorably by others. They comment, “This basic need for affirmation has also been described by Martin Buber: ‘Man wishes to be confirmed in is being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other . . . secretly and bashfully he watches for a Yes which allows him to be and which can come only from one human person to another. It is from one person to another that the heavenly bread of self-being is passed.’ Thus, we create one another. The point is that each day students are influenced by the way the school treats them. Everything in the school counts, either positively or negatively.”
In 1991, Rexford G. Brown published Schools of Thought34 in which he argues that it is not enough to demand competence in the simple basic skills, but recommends that we need to create thoughtful learning environments for adults and children that develop the ability to think critically and creatively, to solve problems, exercise judgment, and to learn basic new skills. Brown traveled throughout North America and took examples from classrooms to demonstrate ways in which national, state, and local politics either encourage or discourage efforts to develop these thoughtful learning environments. For building the character of youth he recommends creating policy frameworks that encourage conversation, stimulate inquiry, and foster trust and collaboration. He also recommends raising our expectations for all students, especially poor and minorities. Also, in this book, Brown outlines the ways in which policymakers, legislators, teachers, administrators, and school boards can effect changes that will lead to a “literacy of thoughtfulness” for the 21st century. Fundamentally, Brown’s thesis is that “students at all ages must take increasing responsibility for their learning. That is the only way to get them deeply engaged and committed to their education. It is a natural way to teach them responsibility and reinforce the values that undergird all genuine learning: courage, honesty, persistence, and respect for knowledge and for those who know more. It is the only way to develop knowledge and habits of the mind that will endure. It is the best cure for discipline problems.”
The books mentioned above were forward-looking and perhaps groundbreaking for the advancement of character and self-concept development intended for students. Because they were published during the formative years of the character education movement they were thought-provoking background treatises for character development, pointing out the developmental needs of children and the direction schools ought to move to meet those needs. Modern character educators perhaps look upon the next three books as the “intellectual body” of the character education movement. The research and ideas, which they embody, are the energizing core of character education as it is practiced in classrooms today.
Thomas Lickona, an international authority on moral development and education who wrote Moral Development and Behavior35 in 1989 and Raising Good Children36 in 1983, has probably impacted character education the most with his detailed and carefully researched Educating for Character, How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibility.37 In this book Lickona discusses the educator’s role as model, mentor, and caregiver, the classroom as a moral community, in which civility and compassion are part of the curriculum, positive patterns for discipline involving home and school, and confronting the major issues of drugs, alcohol, and sex with children and youth. In the introduction to this book Lickona says, “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.” These books, and Thomas Lickona, continue to support the character education movement adding the much-needed academic research that undergirds and supports the efforts of education practitioners.
Highly acclaimed author, Alfie Kohn has written widely on the subject of education and human behavior on such topics as punishment, competition, and discipline. He has been featured on television and lectures at universities and school faculties and parent groups. His 1999 book, The Schools Our Children Deserve, Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards” 38 Kohn presents an ambitious, yet practical vision of what our children’s classrooms could be like. Well researched and carefully documented, this book asks what our children are doing in school and what skills they really need to succeed in life. He compares traditional, behaviorism-based educational practices with constructivism, which grew out of Piaget’s investigations and points out, “…there is a marked difference between classrooms that are relatively authoritarian or ‘teacher-centered’ and those that are more ‘learner-centered,’ in which students play a role in making decisions. It’s therefore worth thinking about the philosophy that predominates in the schools to which we send our kids.” Kohn’s treatise is a persuasive invitation to rethink our most basic assumptions about schooling, including the character of students, the role-models providing by parents, teachers, and important community leaders, and the values being taught both explicitly and implicitly in the school curriculum.

Again, in 1999, Kevin Ryan and Karen Bohlin published Building Character in Schools, Practical Ways to Bring Moral Instruction to Life.39 Packed with practical and inspiring wisdom about what schools, families, and youngsters themselves can do to build good character, this book has become a solid and foundational thesis in the nation’s growing character education movement. In this book the authors point out that young people in America today face a crisis of character with the disappearing of traditional role-models and their struggle to distinguish right from wrong. This book offers practical guidance for parents and teachers for character education. Its goal is to help children “know the good, love the good, and do the good.” It presents the principles and strategies of effective character education and explains what schools must do to teach students the habits and dispositions that lead to responsible adulthood.
This short introduction to the character education movement would be incomplete without mentioning the important work of The Joseph & Edna Josephson Institute of Ethics. The Institute is a public-benefit, nonpartisan, nonprofit membership organization founded by Michael Josephson in honor of his parents to improve the ethical quality of society by advocating principled reasoning and ethical decision-making. Since 1987, the Institute has conducted programs and workshops for over 100,000 influential leaders including legislators and mayors, high-ranking public executives, congressional staff, editors and reporters, senior corporate and nonprofit executives, judges and lawyers, and military and police officers.
The Joseph & Edna Josephson Institute of Ethics has been a vital resource for character educators, consultants, and academics. Through the Institute, Mr. Josephson founded CHARACTER COUNTS!, the nation’s leading character education system. It now reaches five million youngsters through the CHARACTER COUNTS! Coalition, a widespread partnership of schools and youth-serving organizations. Two Presidents, the Congress, most states and countless municipalities have endorsed the Coalition’s approach and declared the third week in October “National CHARACTER COUNTS! Week.” The Josephson Institute also launched the Pursuing Victory With Honor sportsmanship campaign, endorsed by virtually all amateur athletic organizations. Like all Institute programs, these projects are nonpartisan and nonsectarian, promoting a common language of core values called THE SIX PILLARS OF CHARACTER: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship.40
NOTES
1. E. Edward McClellan. Moral Education in America. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1999. See also, Lynn G. Beck and Joseph Murphy. Ethics in Educational Leadership Programs, an Expanding Role. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press, Inc., 1994.
2. Phillip C. Schlechty. Schools for the 21st Century. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1990.
3. S. B. Simon, L. Howe, and H. Kirschenbaum. Values Clarification: A Handbook of Practical Strategies for Teachers and Students (2nd Ed.). New York: Hart Publishing, 1978.
4. Howard Kirschenbaum. 100 Ways to Enhance Values and Morality. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995.
5. Lawrence Kohlberg. The Philosophy of Moral Development, volume 1, 1981.
6. S. B. Simon, L. Howe, and H. Kirschenbaum. Values Clarification: A Handbook of Practical Strategies for Teachers and Students (2nd edition). New York: Hart Publishing, 1978.
7. Lawrence Kohlberg. The Psychology of Moral Development, volume 1, 1984.
8. Mortimer J. Adler. Paideia Problems and Possibilities, a Consideration of Questions Raised by the Paideia Proposal. New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1983. See also: Mortimer J. Adler. The Paideia Program, an Educational Syllabus. New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1984.
9. Joseph P. Hester and Philip F. Vincent. Philosophy for Young Thinkers (2nd ed. Revised). Monroe, New York: Royal Fireworks Press, 1988 (first edition, 1983).
10. Ibid.
11. Joseph P. Hester, Don R. Killian, and Doug Marlette. Cartoons for Thinking volumes 1 & 2. Monroe, New York: Trillium Press, 1985, 1988.
12. Thinking, the Journal of Philosophy for Children. Volume 3, Number 2. Published by the First Mountain Foundation for The Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children. Upper Montclair, N. J.: Montclair State College, 1981.
13. Joseph P. Hester. Talking It Over, a Workbook for Character Development. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2002.
14. Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. http://www.pbs.org/wmet/religionandethics/week326/cover.html , 1/1/2004.
15. http://www.charactercounts.org/.
16. Joseph P. Hester. Public School Safety: A Resource Guide. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company Publishers, 2003.
17. Joseph P. Hester. Bridges, Building Relationships and Resolving Conflicts. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: New View Publishers, 1995.
18. Joseph P. Hester. Ethical Leadership for School Administrators and Teachers, Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Company, Inc., Publishers, 2003.
19. H. Darrell Young and Joseph P. Hester. Leadership Under Construction (forthcoming). Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2004.
20. Kevin Cashman. Leading From the Inside Out. Provo, Utah: Executive Excellence Publishing, 1998.
21. From recent conversations with Dr. Vincent.
22. Allan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
23. Colin Brown. Christianity and Western Thought, a History of Philosophers, Ideas, and Movements. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1990.
24. Vincent, Philip F. Developing Character in Students, 2nd edition. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Character Development Publishing, 1999.
25. Hester, Joseph P. The Ten Commandments, Legal and Social Issues. Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Company, Inc., Publishers, 2003.
26. Colin Brown. Ibid.
27. Jacob Needleman. The American Soul, Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2002.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. James Q. Wilson. The Moral Sense. New York: Free Press, 1993.
31. Buber, Martin. Between Man and Man. New York: Macmillan.
32. David Elkind. The Hurried Child, Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1957.
33. William Watson Purkey and John M. Novak. Inviting School Success, A Self-Concept Approach to Teaching and Learning. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1978/1984.
34. Rexford G. Brown. Schools of Thought, How the Politics of Literacy Shape Thinking in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1991.
35. Thomas Lickona (Ed.). Moral Development and Behavior. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976.
36. Thomas Lickona, Raising Good Children. New York: Bantam Books, 1983.
37. Thomas Lickona. Educating for Character, How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibility.
38. Alfie Kohn. The Schools Our children Deserve, Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards.” New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.
39. Kevin Ryan and Karen E. Bohlin. Building Character in Schools, Practical Ways to Bring Moral Instruction to Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999.
40. Josephson Institute of Ethics. http://www.charactercounts.org/mj-bio.htm.