Character 101

Children aren’t born with a finely developed sense of right and wrong. Someone has to teach them, the same way someone has to teach them the times tables, how to ride a bicycle and how to tie their sneakers.

The Puritans concluded their commonwealth’s moral well-being depended on their children’s ability to discern good from evil. Since, from their perspective, the tenets of morality were contained in a book, the Bible, they established tax-supported public schools to teach succeeding generations to read.

We learned another lesson from the Puritans besides the value of general literacy. They came here for religious freedom, a liberty they promptly denied to everybody else who moved to Massachusetts.

Our Constitution is based on the understanding that religious freedom can’t exist unless everybody has it. It also rests on the recognition that churches should be free from interference by the government and that government should be free from interference by any specific church. In short, both are stronger when they’re independent of each other.

While we may disagree in the often fringy debates over classroom Christmas trees and carols at winter concerts, most of us, especially if we hold strong religious beliefs, likely agree that schools shouldn’t be in the business of teaching any group’s religious doctrines to anybody else’s children.

Morality is clearly connected to religion. Yet even as we subscribe to differing religious beliefs, most of us can endorse what Jefferson called a “general religion” of “peace, reason and morality.” It’s encoded in our laws, and manifest in the conduct that most of us expect from each other, virtues like honesty and self-sacrifice, even as its absence characterizes the conduct that most of us condemn.

I learned this general religion growing up. My mother and father were my principal instructors, but I also learned lessons from my neighbors, my Sunday school and the Boy Scouts. I didn’t always heed those lessons, but we don’t always learn what we’re taught, whether it’s morality or adverbs.

At public school, I knew what was expected of me, and I can recall from time to time my teachers sermonizing on virtues that my classmates and I appeared to be lacking. I also knew what happened both at school and at home to students who violated those moral and behavioral standards. Teachers’ classrooms were expected to be places that reinforced the general morality, but teachers weren’t expected to deliver explicit lessons in character. They were supposed to be occupied teaching me reading, math and geography.

Today, “character education” is increasingly an explicit part of the school day. Supporters promote it as a “student-achievement tool” that can “help students perform better.” Naturally, all this is supported by “a growing body of research,” which together with $2 is almost enough to buy a cup of Starbucks coffee.

Reformers have been touting character education for decades, going back to middle school disciples’ 1980s introduction of “teacher advisories,” small group counseling sessions carved out of the academic day. Proponents lament that advisories are often “squeezed out at the secondary level to make room for more intense academics.” They dispute that character education is an “intrusion on the school day,” even as they argue that a “designated portion of the day” should be “devoted to character education.”

Heaven forbid that schools should focus on “intense academics.”

Boosters claim that “scientific evidence” proves that character education “enhances” academic achievement. They further claim that office discipline referrals are reduced when schools adopt character curricula. Inconveniently, a 2010 U.S. Department of Education study “did not find that social and character development programs improved student outcomes.” As for reductions in discipline referrals, that’s often because teachers are directed not to refer students to the office for discipline, but rather to ask offenders “to set their own consequences for discipline.”

I’m not against “respect, responsibility, caring, fairness and honesty,” or in favor of “bullying and school violence.” When we talk in class about literature or history, we discuss morality. We talk about liberty and slavery, honor and hypocrisy, perseverance and human frailty, deceit and fidelity, justice and mercy.

It’s easy for me. I teach English and history. But even if I didn’t, I would still be mindful of the example I set. I would still try to be honest and just and merciful, I would still try to be strong enough to admit when I’m wrong, and I would still maintain those same expectations for my students.

Second-graders don’t learn virtue by teaching them that “dream” stands for “discipline, responsibility, enthusiasm, accountability and maturity.” High school students don’t become moral human beings because when they’re 15, you add “big” for “bravery, integrity and grit.”

You can’t teach morality with a slogan and a kit.

Students see through our lessons about moral character when they see us impotent in the face of offenders who don’t have it. When they see disruption and evil tolerated in their classrooms, when children are called upon to combat bullying, while adults stand by ineffectually wringing their hands, bound by their dainty philosophical objections to exclusion and punishment, students learn that our words are just words.

Before we can expect the nation’s children to learn character, the nation’s parents have to teach it. And the rest of us, including the rest of us at school, have to act on what we already know.