You are here:   Home > Teaching and Learning Strategies > Character Education

Roadmaps For Life – Notes From The Journey

This article has been adapted from a speech given to the K - 12 faculty at Campbell Hall School, a large Episcopal school in North Hollywood, in February 2003

by Midge Bowman

 

My presentation reminds me of the comment I once read on a record jacket. Pianist William Masselos was performing a Charles Ives sonata – a big, sprawling, challenging work that almost defies interpretation. He said, "This is how I understood this sonata on September 17, 1982. If I were to record it next month, you would hear a different work." So these are my thoughts on moral education on February 18, 2003.

In The Moral Intelligence of Children, Robert Coles tells a story about one of his students, Marian, who arrived at Harvard from a Midwestern, working class background. She was working her way through school by cleaning rooms of classmates in the dorm. She was treated with rudeness and even crudity. Finally she was propositioned by a student whom she knew to be very bright-- a pre-med and an accomplished journalist. That was the last straw. She came to Coles full of anger, telling him she was leaving "fancy, phony Cambridge." "I've been taking all these philosophy courses, and we talk about what's true, what's important, what's good-- well how do you teach people to be good? . . . I've taken two moral reasoning courses with that guy [the one who made the overtures] and I'm sure he's gotten A's in both of them-- and look how he behaves with me and I'm sure with others . . . What's the point of knowing good, if you don't keep trying to become a good person?"

How do you teach people to be good? Marian asks the question for all of us in education. We know that we can teach children to obey rules, meet standards of behavior, treat others with respect, and learn the value of service. But for me, the ultimate goal of moral education is the development of character, those qualities of mind and spirit that define a person. Character is forged in the crucible of decision-making. Choices lead us either toward what will enhance the best in us, or toward what is destructive of self and others. I think people are drawn toward the good in their choices when they realize a sense of calling, when they realize they have something of value to contribute that no one else can in precisely the same way, when they realize that the world needs them.

In The Soul's Code, James Hillman presents his 'acorn theory' which holds that "each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived." I want us to envision that what children go through has to do with finding a place in the world for their specific calling. They are trying to live two lives at once, the one they were born with and the one of the place and among the people they were born into . . . The entire image of a destiny is packed into a tiny acorn, the seed of a huge oak on small shoulders.

In a similar vein, Agnes Sanford, in her biography, Sealed Orders, speaks of the strong feeling that she had a purpose in life, but that the information was sealed-- not available to her except through living. She had to live with the question of her calling.

Teachers work with the raw material of character, the sense of calling, though it is often hidden. What we see instead are hints of talents, suspicions of leanings, or suggestions of deep interest in a subject that may turn out to be a life-long passion. Our recognition of these talents, interests, bents, is an important part of the child's developing sense of self-worth.

Education originally meant "to draw out" but today it too often means to pour in, to fill up with facts. I am reminded of the sculptor who said his work as an artist was simply to remove those parts of the stone that were in the way of the emerging image. Moral education involves seeing deeply into the heart of the child to find that emerging image. Dr. Naomi Remen counsels us to "Pay attention from the heart." We should look at our students as if we were novelists or a poets, rather than teachers, seeing beyond the moment into the possibilities.

The acorn theory reminds me of John, a student in a big mixed-age classroom of 6 and 7 year olds. There was a kitchen and an art corner, a reading cubby and a science area. The kids had been studying various artists: impressionism and Van Gogh, pointillism and Seurat. They then tried to reproduce the pictures in order to get a concrete understanding of the different styles. John, had brought a big art book of the Sistine Chapel for Show and Tell. Afterwards he went to the art corner to begin his version of God reaching out to Adam. He worked through the whole period. When it was time for reading group, John kept painting. His teacher called him several times, but he refused to leave the easel. Finally, she lost patience with him. "John, this is your last call. You must come to reading." He turned to her, a small boy with a shock of blond hair, and asked, "Is this important or isn't it?" I have never forgotten that moment because it was all about a sense of a calling, a true passion. The teacher agreed it was important and John stayed in the art corner. Today he is a well-known medical illustrator.

Some of you may have seen the British film series Seven Up which was filmed right after WWII. During the Blitz, many children were separated from their parents and sent to the country for safety. They went to school with the local children so there was an unusual cross-section of English class system. The film interviewed a group of seven year olds about their lives and what they wanted to be when they grew up. That original film has been followed up every seven years, interviewing the same people. I last saw 35 Up and am anxiously awaiting 42 Up.

What was most compelling was how faithfully each of the adult's lives unwittingly and almost invisibly, followed the childlike visionary statements they made about themselves at the age of 7. There is a real sense of journey as these lives have unfolded. In subsequent films I watched these kids struggle through adolescence and young adulthood. For a period of almost 20 years, many of them seemed to have lost the sense of who they were, but by their late 20's and 30's, they were back on track, in touch with that primary sense of themselves from their earliest years. The acorn theory was at work.

The character acorn provides no guarantee that each child will magically develop to his or her full potential and schools have been laboratories for the development of character since the time of Plato. Even as recently as 50 years ago, independent schools saw the development of character as their most important objective, "developing decent people in decent communities." In 1941, Frank Hackett, Headmaster of Riverdale Country School, said, "The essential purpose of our kind of school is not an intellectual purpose, but a moral and spiritual purpose."

I would like to see schools return to the idea of developing the character - the particularity – of their students. Although parents like to think of their children as unique, they force them into the college admissions mold without realizing how that may actually devalue their child's unique talents and interests.

As we consider how best to develop character, I want to review the different models of moral education and how they may be used in schools. I think you will see that, while there is something of value in all of them, no one system is sufficient. The real task is for each school to create an overarching vision of moral education for its community and to use whatever strategies best meet the needs of the children it serves.

Some of the key schools of thought in moral education are:
· The virtues approach – Wm. Bennett, Kevin Ryan, Tom Lickona
· Values Clarification- so popular in the 70's
· Stage theory of cognitive development – Piaget, Kohlberg, Fowler
· Ethic of Care – Gilligan, Noddings

The virtues approach, sometimes called the "fill the jug" method, involves teaching kids rules and non-controversial values, and providing examples through stories with moral messages, in the hope that children will internalize these values. The virtues approach has worked particularly well with younger children although Ryan and Lickona work with older students.

In elementary school, as never before, children become intensely moral creatures, interested in figuring out the reasons of this world – how and why things work, but also, how and why they should behave in various situations. "This is the age of conscience" Anna Freud once observed, "This is the age that a child's conscience is built – or isn't; it is the time when a child's character is built and consolidated, or isn't."

At the elementary level, moral education is about the inculcation of good habits and behaviors. At that level, most students are accepting of and conforming to the community's standards. Since young children have to see things concretely, the basics of moral vocabulary at this stage are taught best through stories, projects, and play acting.

Values clarification, though popular in the 70's, has all but disappeared from schools though I think it had merit. It was one of the first approaches to moral education. Coming as it did so soon after the revolutions of the 60's, it shied away from promoting any criteria for moral action. The whole point was simply to get kids to talk about moral issues in order to come to a greater understanding of how they might behave in any given situation. I remember a series called Inside Out that was shown on educational TV in our area. Each week kids would watch a short story concerning a moral issue: a fight with your best friend, stealing, name-calling, lying, peer pressure, etc. There was no closure, no ending. The point was to lead kids in a discussion of what they might do in such a situation. I found that the kids liked the sessions, but I never knew if it really impacted their moral development. However I think films like these have an immediacy that interests kids and could be used to help kids think more precisely about the outcomes of actions and to discuss the implications of choices.

Cognitive Developmentalism: The work of Lawrence Kohlberg in moral reasoning is probably the best known and best documented area of moral education. Building on Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget's theories of cognitive development, Kohlberg found that people as they mature, move through a six stage hierarchy of moral reasoning beginning with Stage 1: punishment and obedience; through Stage 4: law and order, and culminating in Stage 6: universal ethical principles exemplified in the lives of Gandhi and Mother Theresa.

Stage theory has been especially valuable to teachers because it has made us aware of the need to present moral concepts in ways that are appropriate to the cognitive level of the child. Middle School is a perfect time to see several levels of moral reasoning at work. The trials of being "out" of the "in" group is a Stage 2 instrumental/reciprocity struggle. It is also a time when kids begin to question rules and to be really interested in why rules are necessary – a Stage 4 issue.

Kohlberg cautions that kids don't just naturally move up the levels and very few of us every reach Stage 6. The teacher's role is to judge when a child is ready to move and to encourage that growth through asking questions that lead to a higher level of reasoning, much like Reuven Feuerstein's concept of mediated learning. I think there are two main problems with Kohlberg's model: it is sometimes difficult to assess the moral level of a child and no proven connection has been shown between moral reasoning and moral behavior, witness Marian's story.

I first learned about the Ethic of Care through Carol Gilligan's work. Her first book, In a Different Voice, challenged Kohlberg's system. In his research, women routinely scored lower in moral reasoning than men, whereas Gilligan found women not morally deficient but, rather, reasoning from a different set of values. Their decisions were based on their concern for others, "on preserving human connections regardless of what principles might be at stake."

Nel Noddings agrees and the corpus of her work has been to elaborate the importance of relationship in moral action. "Because human beings are defined in relation to on another, one cannot be moral alone." The beauty of this model lies in the realization that moral learning may best occur simply by virtue of living together in a learning community where teachers care about children. We should all be wary of circumscribing moral education through an emphasis on technique alone.

Noddings has some interesting ideas about school reform. She would change schools into what she calls "centers of care" where courses would be interdisciplinary so teachers and students would stay together for longer periods of time to allow for relationships to develop and to deepen students' understanding of connections between subjects. It's a great vision, but impractical. However many of her ideas are very useful.

With the exception of the Ethic of Care, all these models stay at the level of the intellect, ignoring the enormous role the human heart plays in moral action. Parker Palmer talks about this lack: "I was formed – or deformed – in the educational systems of this country to live out of the top inch and a half of the human self: to live exclusively through cognitive rationality and the powers of the intellect; to live out of touch with anything that lay below that top inch and a half – body, intuition, feeling, emotion, relationship."

I think this is partly why the results of moral education have been so tenuous. Moral education can't be just one more course in the curriculum, or a set of rules, and the payoff can't be having a list of good deeds in community service that strengthens your college application. While we have theories and some curricular materials, no one system has managed to provide a dramatic and compelling rationale for the moral life that touches the heart and awakens the emotions in young people.

Also, too often "being good" is assumed to be an end in itself, but kids may question the payoff of moral action, especially when they see business people condoning unethical actions in order to achieve greater profits or greater power, and further, see that those who do take a stand against fraud or injustice are often vilified. It is important for kids to know that right action demands courage and conviction; that it can bring harsh responses; that there are often no short-term rewards. Morality takes courage. In light of these facts, students may ask, "Who would want to be moral?"

As a society we have become polarized: we see ourselves as liberal or conservative, religious or secular, with the result that we have lost a middle ground – a meeting place where opposing ideas can be considered with the goal of greater mutual understanding. There is a kind of moral paralysis. We shy away from any real exchange of ideas for fear of getting into disagreements that may be politically incorrect. We don't know how to engage in reasoned discussions with people of opposing views. It is easier to avoid the confrontation. And sometimes we simply don't know what we think about an issue. This is particularly true in teenagers. Carol Gilligan found that when she asked questions of a moral nature, the kids would respond with, "I don't know" or "like, you know." Their inchoate feelings had no coherent way of being expressed. Most kids lack any experience or training in how to think about moral issues. And in this vacuum, they turn, not to their teachers or parents, but to their peers.

Several years ago, the Girl Scouts commissioned a study of moral issues with Robert Coles as the director. 5000 children in grades 4 – 12 in public, private and parochial schools were involved. Questions ranged from simple, "Do you believe in God?" to complex, "If a teenage girl wants an abortion, who has the final say, the girl or her parents?" The bottom line all the questions sought to illuminate was "How do you decide what is right and wrong? What system of values informs your moral decisions?" The survey found:

. . . an unmistakable erosion of children's faith in, and support for, traditional sources of authority. Although children believe parents, teachers, and religious leaders care for them, increasingly they turn to their peers for guidance on matters of right and wrong…When it comes to the truly serious issues of right and wrong in children's lives, teachers and clergy are, much like wallpaper, present – but almost purely decorative.

Our culture is adept at asking technical "how to" questions, but we are not comfortable with spiritual or moral "why" questions. Robert Coles found that young people particularly are deeply engaged in such questions of meaning and purpose. He sees children "as young pilgrims well aware that life is a finite journey and as anxious to make sense of it as those of us who are farther along in the time allotted us. "

If we confine our teaching to the level of facts and "how to" questions, kids can keep school at arm's length and us on the wallpaper. They will never know school as a place that cares about the deeper aspects of their lives. I believe we can recapture their attention if we open our classrooms to questions that people down through the ages have thought about - the meaning of life, the existence of God, death, sexuality, friendship, death, good and evil. If we make our classrooms places where these kinds of discussions can take place, we will bring the heart back into education.

But getting off the wallpaper is only the beginning. If we open our classes to questions like these, we raise a whole set of other issues. I believe that to be truly effective, moral education must be grounded in a strong sense of community. We need that corporate commitment in order to make moral education the heart of a school so that values inform, however subtly, everything the community does.

Building such a community takes four things:
· Commitment by the whole community, starting with the Head and the Board
· Clarity and agreement about core values
· Willingness to allocate time and resources
· Teacher training

Campbell Hall has already made this kind of commitment. You have said so in your school mission and philosophy. You have clarified your core values in the Lower School Community Standards and in the most recent Honor Statement developed by students and faculty in grades 7 – 12. You have allocated time and resources and are committed to teacher training. You are what I would call "an intentional moral community," a term Quakers use in describing their schools. The question now is: How can you deepen these commitments, moving your values off the pages on which they are written and into the lives of your students.

I suggest there are three ways you can make this happen: through acquiring skills of moral discussion; through using experiences both in and out of the classroom to foster moral thinking; and through the example of role models.

Skills for addressing moral issues. Katherine Simon in her new book, Moral Questions in the Classroom: How to get Kids to Think Deeply about Real Life and their Schoolwork, provides many suggestions about how the consideration of moral questions can hone kids' thinking skills in traditional academic areas. A good moral discussion will involve marshalling evidence to support an opinion, listening sensitively to other views, analyzing alternative interpretations, reflecting on preconceptions and, finally, reconsidering whether the original opinion is still valid.

Simons rightly makes a distinction between moral questions and spiritual ones. Moral questions have to do with right action: Do I have responsibilities toward homeless people in my city? Is it okay to cheat if I think the teacher's grading system is unfair? Should someone who is caught using illegal drugs be sent to jail or be given treatment?

Simons describes one school's class on Morality for 11th graders. A full two weeks were devoted to presentations of student reports on contemporary social issues. "In most cases, the students followed a 'pro' and 'con' format . . . striving to give a balance of arguments before outlining their own opinions" The students responses were enthusiastic. When asked if there was one thing connected to school that she will never forget, one student replied:

Last year in Morality, we had to do . . . individual projects-- write an essay, do research and all that . . . I had child molestation. I learned so much from that, and I will always remember it. Like I can still remember the things I wrote down. . . I . . . love the fact that I had the opportunity to talk about it and share it with others.

Since many moral questions are of an interdisciplinary nature, Simon suggests that teachers work in teams. At a high school in San Anselmo, teachers of history, literature and biology, created a 10th grade course with the overarching question, "Should limits be put on human behavior?" They framed various provocative sub-themes like " the use of force is never justified" and "human beings have the right to use other human beings." Students explored these ideas from the different perspectives of the three disciplines through research, projects, and presentations.

Other than the topics, such class assignments are not much different from those in a standard academic course but the topics lead to a greater sense of personal involvement and participation. Sometimes an issue will arise unexpectedly and a teacher will have to manage the discussion. Simon contends that while teachers are supposed to lead their students in discussing serious moral issues, many of them have not had the chance to regularly practice engaging in such discussions themselves, especially not in situations where people hold strongly divergent views. She believes it is essential that teachers experience first hand what their students will in similar situations. She suggests teachers get together to practice: simulating an incident, taking roles and working through the process.

Spiritual or existential questions are different from moral ones and demand a different approach: "What happens when we die? Why is there so much suffering? Do we have free will or are our fates determined?" Questions like these can't be approached simply through reasoned argument – at least they haven't been since Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic theologians. The issue here is more about considering the big questions without needing to come up with an answer. These are issues to be lived with over time. As Rilke says, "Live the questions." Here more active listening, respectful questioning, even willingness to suspend disbelief will help kids feel they can express their ideas freely.

Simon found that teachers often unwittingly close off these kinds of discussion through:

· Emphasis on facts and "right answers" at the expense of deeper issues. The choice is not between teaching facts or raising big moral questions but from helping kids see how facts may relate to larger questions.
· Steering clear of "hot topics", i.e. "There are so many conflicting opinions about this that we don't have time to talk about it."
· Deferring to an outside moral authority. "This is a good question to talk about with your parents or priest, or rabbi."
· Meandering conversations where everyone shares interesting ideas but there is no follow through or shaping so that, at the end of class, little will be remembered.

An interesting counterpoint to these very disciplined discussions is Nel Noddings' insight about the power of ordinary conversation and its potential for moral discourse. She says that many times trust builds through talking about shared interests like sports or hobbies. That kind of comfortable talk creates a relationship that may later invite serious discussion.

Many children, even teenagers, lack opportunities to have real conversations with adults. There are plenty of directives: clean your room, drive safely, finish your homework, but no conversation where both parties "speak, listen and respond to one another. For many young people, this is a rare experience . . . [yet] when children engage in real talk with adults who like and respect them they are likely to emulate those adults."

Even with young children, spiritual questions will arise through stories or from experiences the kids may need to share. Here the best way is to create an atmosphere of trust, listening without judgment, encouraging kids to write or draw about their feelings and questions and to reach their own conclusions. My 5 year old grandson Henry had a conversation with his dad, Matthew, recently about death and love but it could as easily have happened in school. A friend's grandfather had died and Henry wanted to know if the same thing could happen to his grandpa. When Matt replied that yes, grandpa would die someday, Henry asked, "Will you get old and die, too, dad?" "Yes, but not for a long, long time. We will have plenty of time to be together." "Well when you get old, I'm going to clean the leaves off your roof. That's how much I love you." Henry had watched our son clean the gutters on our flat roofed home. He was able to see the relationship between love and action.

The role of experience in moral education. Remember the Chinese proverb: "I hear – I forget; I see – I remember; I do – I understand." Important as it is to acquire skills of discussion and reasoning about moral issues, values become real through experience. Kevin Ryan talks about the role of experience in internalizing moral values through a cycle of action, reflection and understanding:

Internalizing virtue isn't just about acquiring a set of habits. It's about gradually gaining wisdom – acting and then reflecting on what we've done, learning from our mistakes, and coming to a greater understanding of how to live a life shaped by such qualities as compassion, respect, and honesty.

School offers a variety of experiences both in and out of the classroom. I have already talked about moral discussion in the upper school. Cognitively, the majority of children in lower and middle school will be at the level of concrete operations, so less talking and more action provide the best form of moral education for these age groups.

As an example, some of you may remember the third grade teacher, Jane Elliott who, in 1968, shortly after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., divided her class by eye color to teach a lesson about discrimination. "Brown-eyed people are better than blue-eyed people." It was a very difficult experience for the kids, but more learning took place than through any amount of reading and lecture. Sixteen years later, at a class reunion, students vividly recalled the lesson and the impact it had on their thinking.

One of my teaching colleagues says that concepts are like "hooks" – that we need a conceptual base in order to have something on which to hang any specific circumstance. We can't talk about values unless the kids have first thought through the concepts. Then when a situation arises where you must intervene, particularly in lower and middle school, you can refer back to the concepts and ask kids to identify the larger issue: "Is this about honesty, trust, kindness?" That will help defuse the situation and move everyone to the big picture.

The key to most successful interventions is time, enough time for everyone to be heard and for them to "hear" each other (because reality usually looks completely different to the various combatants!) and then more time to work through what is a fair solution.

Time is a given in moral education. In Quaker schools, bullying, put-downs, and hurtful words between students get attended to, not with automatic consequences, but through reaching out to those concerned. The investment of time in one-to-one conversation itself sends the message that the community cares, and that it cares for everyone involved.

If you are not able to give the situation sufficient time for kids to talk, don't begin the process. Just be a judge and jury and mete out punishment.

In speaking about experience, I must admit some worry about how insulated many kids are from a certain level of reality. They are exposed to a steady diet of violence on TV and video games without any understanding of what violence means in real life. Middle Schoolers are especially vulnerable to the media's casual attitudes toward sexuality that offers all the wrong models. Most 11 and 12 year olds literally lack the ability to foresee the consequences of their actions, yet premature sexual activity happens all too often. They are being exposed to situations that push them into decisions for which they are not cognitively ready. I remember picking up a note written by a 7th grade girl to her friend asking whether she should "go all the way" with a certain boy. The friend had replied, "What have you got to lose?" There was no sense of what this decision might mean to her future.

Interestingly, there is work being done now with virtual reality scenarios where kids can actually place themselves into a story line and play out the various possible consequences of actions. Some preliminary research has shown that affective responses to the virtual world are the same physiologically and emotionally as they are to what we call "the real world." While a virtual world is no substitute for the real one, this could be a helpful tool in moral development.

As important as school is, there are things that can't be learned within its boundaries. We must provide gateways into the larger world through broader and broader avenues of involvement: beginning with simply visiting or working with kids in a higher division, then field trips, community service, wilderness trips, school exchanges, internships and foreign travel.

And we should remember that these experiences don't all have to be dissected or talked about in order to have an impact. Anyone who has gone mountain climbing with kids knows that a spiritual dimension is present for many of them. Extra-curricular activities are natural allies in moral education. These experiences affect kids directly and we can trust that learning takes place.

Douglas Heath's massive research following the lives of Haverford graduates into adulthood, found little to no correlation between grades and test scores, including the SAT, and later success in life. What did predict success was involvement in a rich mix of extra curricular activities: "Youngsters who had many hobbies, interests, and jobs, or were active in extracurricular activities were more likely to be successful in later life."

Heath wasn't arguing that grades and aptitude tests were unimportant, simply that "they do not measure well the rich variety of skills and character strengths, particularly interpersonal and ethical ones like caring, empathy, and honesty, that contribute most to adult success."

I long for the day when parents cease to view K-12 schools as primarily instruments in the college admissions process and instead become our allies in helping their children become happy, healthy and fulfilled regardless of where they spend the next four years after commencement.

One last comment about gateways. Their key purpose is to broaden students' vision so that they may understand that how they think and the choices they make, have implications not only for themselves. It is helpful for kids to understand that moral education is not simply an attempt influence their personal behavior as far as drugs and alcohol, cheating, or promiscuity. Personal ethics make more sense I believe when kids understand these larger implications. Issues in science provide many opportunities to see how individual decisions have planetary implications, whether it is global warming, energy conservation, genetically altered crops or cloning.

I propose that schools think about transforming community service programs into larger gateways where older kids could choose an area of interest and stay with that area for a semester or trimester. Areas could include:

· Environmental issues – Field work, Marine Biology, Forestry management, fisheries, air quality, transportation
· Health and Human Services – Work with a nonprofit groups: homeless shelters, day care centers, Salvation Army, soup kitchens
· Political experience – Work on a political issue or with a political party or groups like Amnesty International
· Arts internships: teach art or music to little kids; work for an architect; assist at a gallery
· Diversity. Work or live as a minority in some culture not your own on an Indian reservation or with refugee populations

Again, as Kevin Ryan proposed, all these experiences need to be reflected upon, written about, and shared with others in the school community.

Communitarian philosopher, Amitai Etzioni, suggests we consider school as a "set of experiences." Children learn about moral action through "a thousand small experiences in a thousand different relationships where you see all the facets of courage, caring and respect." Values are "caught" as much as they are taught. They are caught primarily from role models.

In schools, everyone is a role model-- faculty, administration, staff, other students, parents, volunteers, even board members. Since during the K –12 years, students may spend more time at school than with parents, we must never underestimate our influence. As role models, we need to be aware that we are being constantly observed, although often unconsciously! Coles says:

We grow morally as a consequence of learning how to be with others; how to behave in this world, a learning prompted by taking to heart what we have seen and heard. The child is a very attentive witness of grownup morality.

This does not mean that we must become icons of virtue or clay saints. One of my favorite colleagues observed in his yearly self-evaluation, "I am a public saint and a private mess (at least according to my wife)."

As I mentioned earlier, values can be caught from popular culture as much as they can at school. Mary Pipher in her wonderful book, The Shelter of Each Other, speaks of the impact of this culture on families, but it also speaks to what we face as educators:

Our culture is at war with families…Since birth the current generation has been fed a steady diet of junk food and junk values…Families in America have been invaded by technology, mocked or 'kitschified' by the media, isolated by demographic changes, pounded by economic forces and hurt by corporate values.

Coles saw "an awful lot of kids who are bright, but whose conscience in not all that muscular…. They seem torn between a sense of right and wrong that conflicts with the 'get ahead at any cost' attitudes that they've picked up in their family lives."

I am reminded of Hillman's quote about how children are trying to two lives: the one they were born with and the one shaped by place and people they were born into, i.e. the culture.

Adolescents struggle with messages that they must excel, be successful (monetarily), be popular, be "cool." Because of these pressures and because social needs are so intense in this period, they form a subculture based on models seen as rebelling against the main culture and standing for the alienated young. These models are carefully engineered for commercial exploitation of this age group…and make astonishing fortunes by feeding on the adolescent's lack of other models and [the] need to belong.

The lack of other models is what we need to address. The powerful need for role models and affiliation might be turned in more positive directions through offering ways for kids to impact our culture through working on environmental issues, for example. Our real challenge is how make the moral life so compelling and attractive to kids that they act in positive ways not because they ought to, but because they choose to. That is what William James was trying to articulate when he spoke of finding "The moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. "

In earlier times, there was an ultimate reason for right action: the struggle between good and evil for the purpose of saving one's immortal soul, with vivid descriptions of all the horrible things that would happen if we didn't obey the rules (of the church). The struggle was dramatized through art and myth, in the stained glass windows of the great cathedrals, in tales of King Arthur and the search for the Holy Grail, King Lear, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress.

In all of these depictions, there was the sense of life as a journey full of adventure, danger, dead ends-- of fear and hope, of the need to persevere in the face of difficulty, of struggle with good and evil in ourselves and in the world. But we have lost touch with that visceral connection. Hillman says "we dull our lives by the way we conceive them." Perhaps the popularity of Lord of the Rings is that it depicts the struggle between Good and Evil right in the middle of the Shire placing us small folk in the midst of the battle. Evil is not an abstract, distant concept in Middle Earth and the stakes are high.

Kids need powerful role models both past and present and literature and history abound with them. Think of Raoul Wallenberg, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Elie Wiesel, Mother Teresa, Simone Weill, Corrie Ten Boom, and ordinary people like the villagers in southern France who hid hundreds of Jews from the Nazis simply because it was the right thing to do. More recently the firemen of 9/11, and communities who have come together to fight hate crimes. Ask kids to research and write about their own personal hero or heroine and respond to the question: "What would I have done in a similar situation?"

I found an example of teachers as heroic role models when I first met my priest, Robert Taylor, Dean of St. Mark's Cathedral in Seattle. Dean Taylor grew up in Capetown, South Africa. His parents were not at all religious, but because he had a slight learning disability, they enrolled him in the Cathedral School. This was when apartheid was still the law of the land and many of his teachers were involved in the fight against it. Robert spoke of the power of knowing that his teachers were willing to put their personal safety at risk to fight for what they believed. Their examples changed his life.

In college, Robert followed in their footsteps, leading hunger strikes and demonstrating against apartheid. He came under police surveillance and was facing the prospect of life imprisonment over his refusal to serve in the armed forces (since they were used to subdue black populations) when Archbishop Desmond Tutu smuggled him out of the country. He left not knowing whether he would ever see his family again. Robert's commitment to a life of moral action was directly related to his teacher role models.

The final component in a moral community is the commitment to teacher training. Peter Greer, Headmaster of Montclair Kimberley Academy warns: "Be wary of any school that announces, 'The total school teaches ethics and character.'" Given my strong feelings about community, I don't agree entirely, but certainly he is correct that we need specific training as moral educators.

Training should include three goals:
1. Ground all teachers in the basics of ethics and moral development so everyone understands the challenges and their mutual responsibilities.
2. Include the entire school community, staff as well as faculty, in some kind of yearly ongoing training and enrichment about moral issues.
3. Try to integrate a moral and ethical component into every aspect of school life.

There is no single right way to educate kids to be moral agents. Because of the diversity of student age, personality, and background, no one teacher can be a powerful or meaningful role model for every child. That is why it is valuable to have a diversity of age, experience, culture, ethnicity, and even pedagogy in your faculty. The ways you choose to educate yourselves about moral education will vary and this in itself will enrich the whole school community.

The words of a Middle School administrator speak to the importance of finding one's own way as a moral agent. When her school decided to look at everything through a moral lens, she began to keep a "moral moment journal:"

. . . a written record of and reflection on situations that call one to do the right thing when there are varying understandings of what the right thing actually is. I have found that this writing, done either in the process of trying to make a decision or after having made one that needed to be made quickly, has several advantages. First, it forces me to objectively clarify the situation in my own mind and it compels me to see the incident through all the principle characters' eyes. Secondly, the recording affords me the chance to answer the following questions in a calm, thoughtful manner.

· What are the values at stake here?
· What is the moral issue?
· What are my options?
· Does the incident require only a sympathetic ear or does it require action?
· What message will I be delivering if I act? If I do not act?
· What variables might cause me to see my decision in a different way?

She closes by observing that moral education isn't about perfect decisions, but rather about dealing with tough moments with increased moral courage.

There are many good resources available for teacher training: The Council for Spiritual and Ethical Education's Summer Institutes and workshops; Kevin Ryan's Center for the Advancement of Character Education (CAEC) at Boston University, Matthew Lippman's Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State. All have excellent web sites, publications and teacher training opportunities. I also like the Mysteries Program, pioneered at Crossroads School. Beyond that, there is a growing list of fine books on aspects of moral and character education. I hope the annotated bibliography I have prepared will be helpful.

If moral issues are going to be a valid part of any course, it is clear that a lot of time and training will be necessary. But training will cover only the technical side of things. Moral education, in my definition, is an interactive process involving the development of mind, heart, and spirit, not only of our students, but of ourselves as well. That will involve a commitment to our own personal development as moral educators.

Psychologists long ago abandoned the idea that at age 21, we are mature adults and remain the same until we die. Human development, fortunately, is not like that. We continue to grow and change throughout our lives. If you are expected to be a role model and a trained expert in moral issues, you need time and support to think through you own values and inner life. As Abraham Maslow suggested years ago: after survival needs are met, the search for a meaningful life becomes a deep need to be filled. One of the beauties in working in a school that is an intentional moral community is that the search for meaning is recognized as one of its goals for both you and your students.

There are some interesting models of adult development that are pertinent to our professional as well as personal experience. Erik Erikson was one of the first to suggest that there are developmental tasks across the life span. You probably already know the tasks he outlined for childhood and adolescence: Trust vs. Mistrust in infancy; Autonomy vs. Doubt in early childhood; Industry vs. Inferiority in school age; Identity vs. Identity Confusion in adolescence. The three tasks of adulthood are: Intimacy vs. Isolation in young adulthood; Generativity vs. Stagnation in middle adulthood; and Integrity vs. Despair in late adulthood.

Developmental tasks have to do with the way we perceive ourselves and our relationship to the world. The goal is to develop to our fullest potential through living these qualities – bringing them into our lives. If we succeed, we find that Intimacy brings a larger sense of Love; Generativity, a commitment to Caring, and Integrity, the perspective of Wisdom. But development doesn't have to happen. If we do not attend to these tasks, our future may retreat into as sense of Isolation, Stagnation and Despair. Not a happy picture. Although Erikson presents these tasks chronologically, in reality we work on these three issues throughout our adult lives and school is a good place to practice them. How might they be addressed in a school setting?

A school recently administered a questionnaire to grades 5 – 12 to find out more about the student perspective in the learning process. One of the questions was, "What motivates you as a student?" In all the grades, the teacher's enthusiasm for the subject and their compassion or interest in their students received the highest number of responses. A teacher's interest can be shown in many ways, but there is a special sense of intimacy in one-to-one conversations where a teacher can give a student real attention in an atmosphere of trust. It needn't be lengthy –kids have their friends for bull session – but it must have a quality of real interest.

Anna Freud observed how important it is for adolescents to be in touch with at least one adult in a candid and trusting way, even though many young people deny having any interest in such a relationship. "When I hear teenagers being especially scornful of their elders, I know they are in need of exactly what – of whom – they are most scorning."

This kind of moral companionship is one that teachers can offer. It might be assumed that this role would most frequently happen between upper school kids and their teachers. But it is also possible that in a K – 12 school, students will seek out a teacher who knew them at an earlier age and had established a bond of trust.

Companionship can take many forms: informal conversation, expert advice, or just a flicker of recognition. I was at Starbuck's earlier this month when one of my former students came in. I had been head of the lower school when she was little and she continued through all twelve grades. I had not seen her since she graduated. She turned to me and said, "I've been thinking of you recently and realize I never thanked you for looking out for me when I was in upper school." As I remember it, we had relatively little contact when she was in high school, often just a greeting in the hall or a question about how she was doing. Yet we had somehow maintained a sense of relationship that she valued.

We all know that the frantic pace of life means that teachers must often assume a quasi-parental role especially with kids who may not feel close to their own parents. Generativity is about a concern for the next generation and a desire to nurture one's students both in and out of the classroom. It may seem a small thing, but turning out for athletic events or recitals or school plays is a kind of generativity, showing an interest beyond your teacher/student relationship. It can also take the form of mentoring and support for a student's academic passion. One science teacher I know has arranged to include some of her most interested students in her work with a cancer research lab.

My role model for generativity was Meta O'Crotty, my 10th grade English teacher and later my colleague at the Bush School. She taught there most of her professional life. Meta was not an administrator's dream. She was quirky, continued to smoke when everyone else stopped, was often late with her comments, and was pig-headed about teaching what she wanted to teach the way she wanted to teach it. She was one of my favorite people, even after I became an administrator, because she loved kids and they knew it. She was generative par excellence!

At some point in her career, Meta discovered that her 9th grade English students had not been read to by their parents when they were younger – no bedtime stories. She was horrified, feeling that they had been robbed of a whole piece of their childhood. Thereafter, she spent one period a week in each of her classes, reading aloud to her kids: Charlotte's Web, The Once and Future King, and any other title the kids brought up. To do this, she cut back on the standard curricular requirements.

Meta fought retirement and ended up dying unexpectedly at 67. She left her class saying she felt unwell. Evidently she drove herself to her apartment, sat down in her favorite chair and left us. At her memorial, student after student spoke of the difference she had made in their lives because she cared about them and about her subject matter. Time spent in her classes fed their hearts as well as their heads.

Integrity is the ability to achieve some sense of perspective about the course of one's life: to see the patterns and events, triumphs and failures, that have made it your unique life and to accept that. Like Hillman's acorn grown into an oak or Agnes Sanford finally opening her Sealed Orders, there is a blessing in sensing that our lives have had a purpose, no matter how humble. Integrity is more about who we are in all our particularity and eccentricity, and less about what we are in the world. Emerson said, "Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you say you are."

I think our students sometimes see our integrity, our wholeness, even better than we ourselves. They are in truth a mirror, facing us day after day. I have always felt that teaching is an act of faith: we can rarely know the impact we have on our students. But sometimes they return to tell us what our presence in their life meant. That is a precious gift and a kind of confirmation.

The need for community support. Even after a school has defined itself as a moral community and trained its teachers, there will be a continuing need to support faculty who are undertaking this responsibility. This is because considering moral questions and nurturing relationships with students demand that we face what I call the challenge of being ourselves.

The late Bruno Bettelheim stressed the importance of teaching first as a human being and second as a teacher:

A teacher impresses most with his personality and attitude toward teaching. Children respond much more to personality than to teaching. What motivates you as they conceive it? Are you interested in their point of view rather than solely in your subject matter? The way you bring your life to children is all-important.

How do we bring our lives to children? Certainly not with personal confessions or by breaching the delicate boundaries of intimacy with students. It is rather the willingness to be in dialogue, to take your student's ideas seriously, and, when appropriate, to share your own struggles and questions in reaching ethical decisions. Bettelheim felt even more strongly about this:

Teachers must allow students to debate moral issues as they arise in both the formal and informal curricula of schools. And rather than remain neutral observers, teachers should express – but not impose- their own reasoned views about moral questions… Why should a child bother working through a moral problem, or risk taking a stand, when the child's supposed moral mentor refrains from publicly doing so?

Bettelheim was right. Our willingness to wrestle with moral questions is the realest form of modeling. But this can only happen if the school, as a community, is committed to supporting the free, respectful expression of opinion by teachers and students. It can mean some stressful moments, especially if parents aren't fully supportive, but it is the only way I know to show kids that values are important –important enough even to argue about.

Some schools have not been able to maintain an atmosphere of support. My first administrative position was as Head of a Lower School. True it was 30 years ago, and time does tend to soften the rough edges of memory, but at that time, parents and teachers, at least at our school, felt themselves to be part of a team whose main goal was to provide the best educational environment possible for their children, both at home and at school. There was great respect for skills and boundaries. Parents were welcome and volunteered a great deal, but it was clear that the classroom was the teacher's turf. There was an atmosphere of freedom and trust that was modeled for the children.

When I returned to that same school 15 years later, the situation had changed. Parents had become both more frightened and more adversarial, threatening lawsuits or board action. Some even felt free to march into a class at any time to confront a teacher about their child. Many teachers felt demoralized and wary. The strong sense of community that I remembered had almost vanished. In such an environment it would be impossible to expect a teacher to be a strong moral educator.

Another school's experience was similar. The upper school students had been under a high degree of stress over some diversity issues, so the administration decided to move to discussion of a different moral issue-- the Holocaust-- to give the kids a little distance but to keep them talking about values. The school devoted a whole day with speakers in the morning and discussion groups in the afternoon. It was a valuable experience, but to the administration's dismay, most of the faculty was unwilling to take a stand on the issue or even to voice an opinion. "We're facilitators – we don't take stands." There was a palpable fear that taking a stand might bring retribution from parents or board members.

And this fear is not unfounded. Robert Coles relates, with some degree of sadness, the kinds of collusion he saw at some independent schools, where children were often not confronted with their wrong-doing because it would be too difficult to prove, or there were "psychological" reasons for the behavior, or the administration wouldn't risk action because of the disruption it might produce.

In such cases, it is often the teacher who is most at risk. To protect faculty, the whole community, starting with the Board, must make the moral expectations of the school clear to the public. An intentional moral community welcomes difference as long as it is part of a respectful dialogue and during the admissions process, parents should understand what kind of a community they are joining. At hiring time, teachers should know that moral education is part of their job description.

Let me close with Mary Pipher's beautiful description of what schools and families can do to raise healthy, moral children. She really summarizes all I have been trying to say today:

Raising healthy children is a labor-intensive operation. Contrary to the news from the broader culture, most of what children need, money cannot buy. Children need time and space, attention, affection, guidance and conversation. They need sheltered places where they can be safe as they learn what they need to know to survive. They need jokes, play and touching. They need to have stories told to them by adults who know and love them in all their particularity and who have a real interest in their moral development.

Since she wrote those words, our nation has moved to a new level of psychological threat and I feel I must add a 9/11 postscript. Our newest and greatest challenge as a moral community will be helping our children cope with living in a time of terror. It is hard to know precisely what will be the effect on our kids but there is no question in my mind that their future will be a very different one from ours.

As the pressure mounts on us to be models of courage and strength, community support of each other will be crucial. One of the gifts of living in a moral community is emotional nurturing, a sense of belonging and connection. As the NASA director said after the Columbia disaster, "This is more than a job. We're a family; we depend on each other." That sense of family is what we can offer our students.

In times of chaos, qualities of stability, consistency, and nurture are invaluable. We can provide a sense of normalcy in coming together for rituals and celebrations – traditions that kids look forward to and remember. Even small things, done regularly, create a sense of order and coherence. And let us not forget to laugh.

Instead of always looking toward to the next grade or the next vacation, we can, with our students, take time to find beauty in the present moment. My friend Meta O'Crotty used to say, "Don't worry about tomorrow. Effect the quality of the day."

Hopefully we can create a legacy-- a store of memories, habits, prayers, and friendships-- that will sustain our students come what may. A note here on the importance of memorization. We have let our memory muscle atrophy from lack of use. I remember reading somewhere that novelist, Francine Duplexis Grey, recalled her days in a Catholic girls' school when every infraction brought with it the task of memorizing lines of poetry. She had occasion to memorize a lot and now is grateful for this legacy of beauty. In times of terror, a prayer or a poem is something to fall back on, something coherent in the midst of chaos. A general during World War I insisted that all his men memorize the 91st Psalm and recite it every day. There was a surprisingly low incidence of fatalities among his troops. Since 9/11, I carry the 91st Psalm with me and I recite the 23rd Psalm often. Let your students choose some short poem or prayer to memorize and recite together regularly.

Ultimately moral education is about love, about relationship, about compassion. I think we should speak our love and delight in our children, bless them, express gratitude together at meals and other times, make acts of kindness and love a living thing among us. It is our bulwark against the darkness.

During the Dark Ages, the monks of Skellig Michael kept the light of civilization alive. Clinging to a bare rock off the west coast of Ireland, in tiny stone huts, besieged by Viking marauders, they somehow survived and with them the legacies of literacy, history, and language. At the dawn of the medieval period, it was these monks who traveled to Europe, sharing their knowledge to build the great universities.

Perhaps our future as moral communities lies in becoming like Skellig Michael, places of faith and hope, keeping the light alive for coming generations.

---

Bibliography

Coles, Robert. (1990) The Spiritual Life of Children. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Coles, Robert. (1997) The Moral Intelligence of Children. New York: Random House .

Coles, Robert. (1986) The Moral Life of Children. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Etzioni, Amitai. (1993) The Spirit of Community. New York: Touchstone.

Glazer, Steven, ed. (1999) The Heart of Learning. New York: Penguin Putnam.

Heath, Douglas. (1999) Fulfilling Lives: Paths to Maturity and Success. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Hillman, James. (1996) The Soul's Code. New York: Random House.

Noddings, Nel. (2002) Educating Moral People: A Caring Alternative to Character Education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Mary Pipher. (1996) In the Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding our Families. New York: Grosset/Putnam.

Powell, Arthur G. (1996) Lessons From Privilege: The American Prep School Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Simon, Katharine G. (2002) Moral Questions in the Classroom: How to Get Kids to Think Deeply About Real Life and Their Schoolwork. New Haven: Yale University Press.

---

© May 2003 New Horizons for Learning
http://www.newhorizons.org

For permission to redistribute, please go to:
New Horizons for Learning Copyright and Permission Information