Worrying about the young is probably genetically based: tribes or communities which do not worry about their young and do not act sensibly in response to their worries undoubtedly have but a short history. Recently it seems that Americans are worrying more about their young. Some years ago the economic historian, Robert Heilbroner, in his On the Human Prospect,1 after sketching three near-term scenarios facing our species: nuclear holocaust, worldwide famine and destruction of the ecosystem, stated what was causing the middle-age population such great unease as it entered the last quarter of the twentieth century: "our inability to pass on our values to the young."
More recently, James Q. Wilson wrote the lead article in the twentieth anniversary issue of The Public Interest, entitled "The Rediscovery of Character: Private Virtue snd Public Policy," with the statement:
The most important change in how one defines the public interest that I have witnessed--and experienced--over the last twenty years has been a deepening concern for the development of character in the citizenry. . . . A variety of public problems can only be understood--and perhaps addressed--if they are seen as arising out of a defect in character formation.2
Anyone familiar with Edwin M. Wynne's statistics on changes in the rates of youth homicide, suicide and illegitimate births from the years 1914 to 1982 knows exactly why there is this public concern about character development. While many are anesthetized to the plight of the young and have taken their moral confusion as a price of progress, many others are being jarred awake. Even political leaders seem to sense the public mood so that whether on the left or the right--a Cuomo, Reagan or Prince Charles--they urge the schools to be more aggressive in teaching traditional values. These men are but waking to the public's views registered in the 1975 and 1980 PDK Gallup polls in which 79% of the American people answered affirmatively to the question "Are you in favor of the public schools teaching morals and moral behavior?"3 Concern there is, but what must we do to teach morals and moral behavior, to have a positive effect on moral development, to form good character? These are our issues.
Carl Beriter4 has been urging public educators for some time to abandon this mission, claiming that in a pluralistic democracy, the schools have no right to attempt to transmit moral values or to attempt to influence ethical considerations. Recently, Kurtines and Gewirtz, in their book Morality, Moral Behavior and Moral Development5 suggest that the multitude of psychological models of moral functioning mirrors the moral pluralism in the country, with the clear implication of questioning the viability of the public schools. Indeed, that is what is beginning to happen in our society. Recently, a small, invitational conference chaired by protestant theologian, Richard John Neuhaus, was devoted to exploring the policy papers of a few leading protestant thinkers around this issue. Its clear message was that, behind the Moral Majority's sloganeering about the public school's infecting the young with secular humanism, there is a solid core of protestant intelligentsia which believes the lack of moral training, on the one hand, and the a-theological world--if not an anti-theological world-view--fostered by twelve years of largely compulsory education, on the other hand, is a violation of First Amendment guarantees of religious liberty. In short, what is being suggested is the dismantling of public education as we know it.
Some have an increased awareness that the public schools need more vigorously to engage this issue, while others raise questions about the appropriateness of moral education. While everyone is pursued by their own set of devils surrounding this topic, I have a particularly troubling set. I teach eighty teacher-education students, most of whom will soon be in schools--largely public schools. My particular challenge is what to tell them, if anything, that will prepare them to assume the role of teacher. My work is very immediate and involved with practice; it is hardly the place for a purist.
The recent history of teacher education's efforts to prepare future teachers for their role as moral educators and character developers shows a quiet retreat during the past twenty years. Teacher educators--sensitive, fidgety souls that we are--took the student's cry of the Sixties, "Don't trust anyone over thirty," quite personally. As confused as anyone by the moral shifts of the period, we downplayed the future teacher's role as a transmitter of social and personal values and emphasized other areas. The last twenty years has seen an enormous growth in research and writing on teaching techniques, strategies, models and skills. There also has been a major shift in teacher education from the lecture hall and library to the public school. Its approach has become clinical, so that some students have two or three semesters of clinical experience before student teaching. Philosophy and history of education have been sacrificed on the altar of technique and practice: more and more the vision of the good teacher is the good technician, the skilled craftsman who has acquired those behavioral skills and strategies which research on the "effective teacher" claims to be related to achievement. The fact that "effective" is defined by the students' mastery of objective questions and without reference either to higher order intellectual processes or to concerns about the moral effectiveness of the students is, of course, no surprise.
Teacher education students, however, are exposed to a psychological view of man as educational psychology has become stronger. The focus of psychological man is the individual, separated out from his social context. In recent decades the three dominant schools of psychology--behaviorism, developmentalism and self-actualization (or Third Force) psychology--have struggled over the teacher, each offering distinctly different metaphors of man related to the teacher as technician motif. Behaviorism gives a few minutes in the curriculum to "reinforcing pro-social behavior." The developmental school is a little more generous with the moral, providing the future teacher with a smidgen of Piaget and a dollop or two of Kohlberg. The big winner--to the degree that this is winning--is self-actualization with its offering of values clarification, which in fact, has gone well beyond the educational psychology course. By and large, however, the moral realm has been marginalized to the point of insignificance.
If teachers look upon their work with children as containing a moral dimension, this is something they bring to teacher education, not something they are taught there. It comes from their religious and civil backgrounds, their lived experience as students and their knowledge that their moral sensibilities were certainly affected by their teachers. Whether or not they come to teacher education with a well formulated picture of themselves as moral educators, inevitably they will have an enormous impact on students, whether kindergartners or high school seniors.
What, then, should we do to prepare teachers for their responsibilities as character and moral educators. While it is tempting to describe an ideal program of selecting and preparing moral educators--a West Point of Moral Education, if you will--I believe that it is more useful to discuss what can be done now within the context of most teacher education programs. In effect, this means bringing certain ideas to the students' level of awareness and giving them opportunities to test and try out some of these ideas. Future teachers are in need, first, of a vision of the moral agent, and, second, of an understanding of how they can and will affect their own students as each struggles to become a moral agent and to develop his or her own character.
THE MORAL AGENT
The teacher needs a vision of the moral person, some sense of the person as moral actor or agent. The view I will present is one that emerged from The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy (RVP) project on "The Foundations of Moral Education."6 (Reported at the meeting of the Association of Moral Education [AME], in Boston, 1985.) The project had three ten-person committees, one of philosophers, another of psychologists, and a third of professors of education. The two-year effort of each committee was to carry out intensive corporate reflection on their dimension of the issue and to prepare an extended volume on its results. The philosophy and psychology committee volumes have been published as Act and Agent: Philosophical Foundations of Moral Education and Character Development77 and Psychological Foundations for Moral Education and Character Development: An Integrated Theory of Moral Development8 by The University Press of America (UPA). The volume of the education committee, entitled Character Education in Schools and Beyond, has been published by Praeger.9 Subsequent volumes in the series from UPA are on the social context of values and the resources of Latin American and Chinese cultures for moral education.10
The education committee was composed of individuals such as T. Lickona, E. Sullivan, Clark Power, Edwin Wynne, Clive Beck, who were party to much of the discussion and all of the papers of the previous two groups. Out of the discussions of the education committee emerged an integrated model of the moral agent which contends that human character emerges from the workings of three components: knowing, affect and action.
Knowing
Persons are reasoning beings, knowers. They have a natural telos to understand the world inside and outside themselves. Also, and quite important, they exist in community central to which is a moral heritage, for each community has found certain patterns of behavior, certain human character traits--a certain "bag of virtues" if you will--necessary to sustaining the life of the individual and the community. The moral person learns these values, not simply in a rote or passive way, but in a conscious, intellectual manner--indeed, they are the stuff of social consciousness: what is courage and when is it needed; what happens to me and to my community if I become irresponsible, what is kindness and what are its consequences? The moral agent also knows the behavioral referents to kindness: what does kindness mean within my family, within my fifth grade class? What does persistence mean in my life as a student, and later as a husband and father?
Emphasis upon the moral agent's knowing means that students need to come to know the moral wisdom of their culture, what has been learned over the years. It means that they need to know its best literature and the most important aspects of its history. They need to know these stories and accounts, not simply for form or for cultural literacy, but to assimilate the moral lessons embedded in them. What is to be learned from Homer's steadfast journey; what is to be learned about courage and human frailty from the soldier's heroic roller coaster in The Red Badge of Courage;11 what can Gandhi's humble crusade tell us about the power of a moral idea whose time has come? Students need to know where we have been and what we have learned. This is not to be taken as the final word--far from it--but as the unfinished repository of our moral successes and failures. This is why they need the best literature and the best history, rather than some hack attempt to socialize the young to the biases of the tribe.
To insure against moral passivity, the young need to know how to think morally, how to reason through an issue or problem, rather than receiving someone else's decision. What is the good and the right in this situation, how do I choose between competing goods; what are the consequences of this course of action? To be moral agents, students need to be ethicists. Over their years of education they need to acquire the skills of ethical thinking: is this really a moral problem; what are the facts; what are the positive consequences for various courses of action; what are the negative consequences?
Also involved here is the formation of a moral imagination in order to enter within the world of the other and to consider possibilities without having to be presented with concrete events. Finally, part of developing the moral agent is to develop the quality of good judgement or what Aristotle calls, "practical wisdom"; we need to cultivate in our students a judicious style.
Affect
The moral agent is not raw intellect or disembodied reasoning, but has feelings, emotions and passions which play a great part in one's moral life. This affective component is one that many of us ignore or, at least, underestimate. In reality it is an energetic, vital moral engine which frequently takes over the life of the moral agent, drives him in directions his reason forbids, or gives energy to decisions to which reason points only timidly. We all know those who can talk a good moral game and can reason with the angels, but whose behavior is all too human. We need to help the child acquire not simply intellectual skills or habits of the mind, but habits of the heart: we need to help the young learn to love the good. Pascal said it best: "The heart has reasons, that reason does not understand."
Part of this learning to love the good lies in developing commitments--in particular, commitment to the moral life. This means developing a conscience or an inner voice, not merely of reason but of affect also, which calls us in a certain direction. It is a voice that can confront emotions of greed, self-interest and envy with a stronger desire to do what is right and good.
Another part of this moral affect is love of self or concern for one's own well-being. Moral education of affect involves the growth of self-love outward from the self, to family and friends, to communities seen and unseen, in order to develop a continually larger definition of what it means to love the good. Affect, though, has one other function, perhaps its most important, namely, to be a bridge between knowing and the third component, action: a link between thought and action.
Action
This is the crucial point. Any effort at moral education or character development which fails positively to affect the child's behavior in some important way is doomed: moral action is the bottom line. Action has three elements or subcomponents: will, competence and habit.
The term `will' has developed something of a bad reputation since the publication of Gordon Liddy's autobiography of the same name: his strengthening of his will as a young man by eating rats is not quite what we have in mind! Will is what is needed to mobilize and channel our moral energy; it provides the strength to push beyond our self-interest and laziness and fears; it will spur us to moral action and carries us forward to do what our mind and heart tells us we ought to do.
Competence refers to a repertoire of behaviors and skills which the moral agent needs in order to act effectively in the world. One needs to be able to listen and understand, to empathize with the troubled, and to serve those in need. One needs to be able to lead others to see and do the good, and to be able to stand up to injustice. These competencies need to be learned the same way the skills of decoding and encoding symbols, and the scientific method are learned.
Good will and the competence or the capacity to act are not enough; they must be habituated. Such moral action as telling the truth when a comfortable lie is handy, or saying the right but unpopular thing when silence is easy, needs to be a practiced response. One cannot stop and weigh consequences every time a moral event arises; they have to be practiced, habituated responses to life situations.
This, then, is our integrated model of the moral agent: a person whose understanding, emotions and behavior are fully developed. This is, we believe, an accurate, understandable and usable bases for preparing teachers for their roles in moral education and character formation.
WHAT THE TEACHER AS MORAL EDUCATOR SHOULD DO
Our second question, then, is what teachers should be taught in order to fulfill this role. This is a huge territory which I have categorized into six areas (if not six stages). "The Six E's of the Moral Educator and Character Developer" are example, explanation, exhortation, environmental expectation, evaluation and experience. I am suggesting that heightened awareness and training in these areas should be woven throughout teacher education.12
Example. This is perhaps the most obvious, but the one that makes us least comfortable. One of the facts of school life is that children watch their teachers to discover how grown-ups act. While not suggesting that teacher must be saints, secular or otherwise, they should be people who take the moral life seriously. In the same way that teachers should be models of people using their minds, they should be seen as models of people responding to life in a morally admirable way.
There is another aspect to this moral modelling. As stated above, many of our most important moral truths are embedded in our stories and in the history of our species. The heroes and villains of our stories and of our history need to be brought to the attention of our young, who need to know about Hester Prunne and Richard the Third, Adolph Hitler and Martin Luther King.
Explanation. Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, is often cited as an apologist for the school's socialization of the young into the dominant values of the society. He saw the school as a social vehicle to instill in the young the society's values and rules of conduct. However, Durkheim insisted that these efforts must be rational. He said, "To teach morality is neither to preach nor to indoctrinate; it is to explain." This teaching starts on the playground when the teacher explains why we don't duel with sharp sticks, and it continues through the senior year when the teacher explains to the soon-to-be high school graduates what their duties are to the Republic.
We need to educate morally through explanation--not simply to stuff students' heads with rules and regulations, but to engage them in the great moral conversation of the human race. Indeed, it is the very existence of this conversation that makes us human. Thirty-five years ago, as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto I was in a daze listening to a then obscure literature teacher named Marshall McLuhan carrying on about "The medium is the message." I see now how relevant was his point to schooling and the moral education of children. Our continual explaining of the rules is, in and of itself, one of the most important messages of school.
Exhortation. While the teacher's explanations are a crucial part of a child's moral education, the teacher's urging and exhortations also have a place in the process. A child who is discouraged by academic failure or by having been cut from a team, a cast, or a musical group often needs something stronger than sweet reason to ward off self-pity. A student who is quietly and passively slipping through school may need a teacher's passionate appeal to inspire him or her to shape up and use the opportunity offered by education. A youth who is flirting with racist ideas may not question this kind of sloppy thinking until he feels the heat of a teacher's moral indignation. A senior who has been turned down by a favorite college or denied entrance into an apprenticeship program may need more than the teachers nuanced explanation that life is unfair. He may need to be inspired or even goaded if he is to endure and transcend his disappointment.
Exhortation should be used sparingly and should never stray very far from explanation. Nonetheless, there are times when teachers must appeal to the best instincts of the young and urge them to move in particular directions.
Environmental Expectations. A classroom is a small society with patterns and rituals, power relationships and standards for academic performance, but also for student behavior. In a positive moral environment, students are respected and respect one another. The ability to establish a purposeful and civil classroom environment is what distinguishes the good, from the ineffective, teacher. A central factor in a classroom environment is its moral climate: are the classroom rules fair and fairly exercised; does the teacher play favorites; does good balance exist between competition and cooperation; are individuality and community responsibility both nurtured; are less able students protected, but also challenged; are ethical questions and issues of "what ought to be" part of the classroom dialogue?
I know of no handy guide to follow to establish and maintain an environment of moral expectation, and, once established, it is always moments away from collapse. But I have little doubt that the moral climate which exists within a classroom has a steady and strong influence upon the formation of character and of one's sense of what is right and what is wrong.
Evaluation. Perhaps here I have stretched alliteration past the bounds of good sense, but what I have in mind is allowing children to evaluate for themselves: Indeed, more than allowing, to create opportunities for students to reflect on what they value, what they think is the good, and what they believe is the right thing to do. If this sounds like an indirect endorsement of values clarification, I must plead guilty. As someone who has done his share of criticizing values clarification over the last two decades, I have come to appreciate its power to involve students in the kind of moral and value issues which have meaning in their lives. I have been so opposed to the idea of values clarification carrying the entire weight of the school's role in moral education that I failed to see its substantial contribution when used well and with the entire range of activities being suggested here. Of course, the same can be said for involving students in structured discussion of ethical dilemmas.
Experience. Twelve years ago, James Coleman, commenting on the enormous changes which have taken place in the world of children over two generations, wrote, "the modern generation of American youth is information rich and experience poor."13 The world of U.S. children has been radically altered by changes in the economy, in the means of production, and in the size and structure of U.S. families.
Today's young people are members of smaller and less stable families than was the case two generations ago. A modern house or apartment affords few tasks for children other than doing the laundry and the dishes, putting out garbage and a few other light and brief chores. These are restricted routes by which to develop a sturdy self-concept. At the same time, by the standards of any previous generation, today's young people exist in a self-focused, pleasure-dominated world of turn-on escapism (through MTV, sexuality, drugs, or simply "hanging out"). Only rare and fortunate teenagers encounter the kinds of experiences that help them break out of this envelope of self-interest and learn to contribute to others.
Schools are increasingly responding to this condition by providing students, both in school and out, with opportunities to serve. Within such schools, students are encouraged to help teachers and other students. Older children often help young ones learn academic or physical skills; students help teachers, librarians, or other staff members with routine clerical tasks. But out-of-school programs represent a larger departure from the ordinary. These programs enable students to provide services to individuals in need, such as a blind shut-in or a mother with a mildly retarded child. Other students work (usually without pay) in understaffed agencies, such as retirement homes or day-care centers. The school serves as intermediary and trouble-shooter between student volunteers and the individuals or agencies in need of assistance. Such service programs teach the skills of effective helping and cause young people to define themselves as persons who are connected to others. Moral abstractions about justice and community take on immediacy and students begin to appreciate the need to couple moral thinking with moral action.
These are the "Six E's of Moral Education and Character Development." Together they capture for me the dimensions of the moral growth of children for which I should be preparing my pre-service teachers. Of course, these skills and competencies overlap and are somewhat arbitrary as categories; together, however, they represent what I see as the teacher's domain in the moral and character education of the young.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: TOWARD A DEFINITION
I would like finally to focus on character development, for undoubtedly some may be uneasy with my moving between such terms such as `moral education,' `character formation,' `character development,' `values,' and the rest. This last section suggests what I believe character development to be and what it represents as a movement; what it is not and how it differs from what I know of the cognitive developmental and other recent approaches.
First, character development is quite eclectic--and appropriately so, for the human is a complicated beast. We need all the sensible theories, all the angles of vision, all the illuminating metaphors we can find when it comes down to practice, to the questions of what schools and teachers can do to help a child become a morally mature person. Trying to build practice on one metaphor taken from only one of many relevant disciplines, such as the cognitive developmental metaphor of stages of growth would seem to do, strikes me to be loading more weight on the theory than it can stand. Character development is ready to select from many disciplines and to use many metaphors--the growth metaphor, the Skinnerian metaphor, the fill-the-jug metaphor. This gets a little sloppy at times, but then public education is not really for the excessively tidy.
Second, character development puts heavy emphasis upon culture. While it fully engages the transformational goals of schools to make the student an active agent in the positive transformation of society, it places more emphasis upon the traditional role of the school as transmitter of the culture. This springs from the conviction that civilization is a great human achievement, but a fragile one, and that what we have learned must be conserved and vigorously passed on to the young in order that they preserve and improve the culture. Students need to know not only how to work their will through Robert's Rules of Order, but also the lessons of history about the dangers of banality, of wasting their lives on pleasure and self-indulgence and of human depravity, and about the need for human heroism. They have to learn that school is for them an enormous opportunity, that they have serious responsibilities to use the experience well and that there is life after high school, but also that it favors only those with such real skills and capacities as self-discipline and responsibility.
Further--and George Counts notwithstanding--the public pays teachers' salaries not to come up with schemes to change the social order, but to educate the young to a much more demanding idea, namely, to know the best of the past so as to preserve it and build upon it, so as to extend and improve it, and to make it available to more and more people. The vital and primary energies of the teachers and students should be centered around knowing what Edd Wynn calls the Great Tradition: the stories, myths and histories which represent our cultural heritage; its heroes and villains, real and fictitious, who have the capacity to ignite the moral imagination of the young. Cultural literacy and the traditional content of school is of central importance in character development.
Third, character development is more directive; it sees the teacher in a more active role than I perceive in the cognitive developmental tradition. Cultural transmission implies a flow of knowledge and skills from the culture, through the teacher, to the students. This is not to suggest a vision of schools in which teachers cram the cultural heritage down the throats of passive students. On the contrary, character education means vigorously engaging the students in the human story. This means that the teacher must help them to discover the glorious achievements of mankind, while being also the bearer of dangerous memory. "Things fall apart. The center does not hold."
Fourth, character development is more concerned with the collective life of the school, with providing a strong and positive environment for the student. It works hard to establish school spirit and a rich program of activities for students. Academic and social expectations for students are high, prizes and awards are quite evident, and grade, classroom and individual competition is encouraged. Students are expected to contribute to the welfare of the school, as a clear prelude to their responsibilities as an adult to look to the welfare of their spouse, their family, their community and their nation.
Fifth, in character development the teacher is more authoritative and more of an authority. He or she not only knows more, but has the responsibility to see that the students have a fair chance to learn what has been set out. The school and the classroom, therefore, is not a democracy: the rights and responsibilities of the students are quite different from those of teachers. To counter balance the demands for the teacher to manage and channel all the energy of the students and their diverse wills the teacher has power. Although this must be used in a just manner, the classroom and the school has not been designed for one man one vote participatory democracy. In my view, the high burnout or dropout rate of teachers in experimental "just-community schools" is related directly to confusion over this point.
Finally, character development appears to view the child, the student, in a somewhat different way from cognitive developmentalists. It sees the child as malleable, needing formation and a strong environment, for it sees the child as capable of both good and evil. Frankly, it is not as optimistic as the stage theory appears, for it sees the child as self-centered and in need of learning how to reach out beyond him or herself. It sees character development as cognitive, but also deeply involving the emotions of the child; it sees, too, the need for action, the need for schools and teachers to give students the opportunity to practice the virtues that are essential to a good life in a good society. (Here, democratic decision-making is important, but only one among many dimensions.) Training in the virtues that support a good life in a good society, such as responsibility, consideration and honesty, are a high priority. Since the notion of character draws quite heavily from Aristotle, I will end with his famous answer to the question, "How does a man become virtuous?" "We become just by performing just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control. We become virtuous by performing virtuous acts."14
Boston University
Boston, Mass.
1. R. Heilbroner, On the Human Prospect (New York: Norton, l974), p. 15.
2. The Public Interest, 81 (l985), 3.
3. "The Seventh Annual Gallup Poll of Public Attitudes Toward Public Schools," Phi Delta Kappan, 57 (1975), 240; and "The Twelfth Annual Gallup Poll of Public Attitudes Toward Public Schools," ibid., 62 (1980), 39.
4. Carl Bereiter, Must We Educate? (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, l973).
5. W. Kurtines and J. Gewirtz, Morality, Moral Behavior and Moral Development (New York: Wiley, l984).
6. Reported at the meeting of The Association of Moral Education (AME) in Boston in l985.
7. Edited by Frederick E. Ellrod, George F. McLean, et al. (Washington, D.C.: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy and The University Press of America, l986).
8. Edited by Richard Knowles and George F. McLean (Washington, D.C.: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy and The University Press of America, l986).
9. Edited by Kevin Ryan and George F. McLean (New York: Praeger, l987).
10. The Social Context of Values: Perspectives of the Americans, ed. O. Pegoraro and G. McLean (Washington, D.C.: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy and The University Press of America, 1989); and Chinese Foundations of Moral Education and Character Development, eds. V. Shen, Tran Van Doan and G. McLean (Washington, D.C., The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy and The University Press of America, 1989).
11. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (New York: Bantam, l981).
12. Much of this section appears in a slightly altered version in Phi Delta Kappan (November, l986) in an article entitled "The New Moral Education," Phi Delta Kappan, 67 (1986), 228-233.
13. James Coleman, Youth Transition to Adulthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, l975).
14. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, II, 1 1103a 35-b 3.