The Christian Digest
Presents
Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong
By William K. Kilpatrick
(New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1992)
[06/94]
William Kilpatrick is a Professor of Education at Boston College, where he teaches courses in human development and moral education. He has degrees from Holy Cross College, Harvard University, and Purdue University. He is the author of Identity and Intimacy, Psychological Seduction, and The Emperor's New Clothes, and is a frequent lecturer to university and parent audiences. He is a past recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Crisis in Moral Education
Educational fads come and go, but some stay long enough to do substantial harm. In 1955 Rudolf Flesch wrote Why Johnny Can't Read, a stinging indictment of one such fad. Children couldn't read because they were being taught by the wrong method, said Flesch. The method was called "look-say." It was meant to make reading easier but actually served to confuse children, with the result that many were developing reading problems--if they were learning to read at all. Flesch accurately predicted that if the method was not abandoned, SAT scores would plummet and functional illiteracy would soar.
But the educational establishment clung to the look-say method, all the while studiously ignoring a proven method of teaching reading--the "phonics" approach.
As of this date look-say--or some variation of it--is the method used to teach reading in the vast majority of American schools, and large numbers of children and adults continue to be held back in life by their lack of reading skills. (Editor: There are a multitude of problems in secular society and the modern public school system that lead to Johnny's reading problems, among them the prohibition of phonics in teaching reading. Our home schooling families believe in using the phonics method. However, we do not promote phonics to the point where we totally exclude sight-reading. For a fuller discussion of this topic, please see CCHB 2, page 85, "Keys to Reading.")
A similar situation exists with regard to moral education. In addition to the fact that Johnny still can't read, we are now faced with the more serious problem that he can't tell right from wrong.
Not every Johnny, of course, but enough to cause alarm. An estimated 525,000 attacks, shakedowns, and robberies occur in public high schools each month. Each year nearly three million crimes are committed on or near school property--16,000 per school day. About 135,000 students carry guns to school daily; one fifth of all students report carrying a weapon of some type. Twenty-one percent of all secondary school students avoid using the rest rooms out of fear of being harmed or intimidated. Surveys of schoolchildren reveal that their chief school-related concern is the disruptive behavior of their classmates. Teachers have similar concerns. Almost one third of public school teachers indicate that they have seriously considered leaving teaching because of student misbehavior.
The situation is no better outside of school. Suicides among young people have risen by 300 percent over the last thirty years, and one in seven teens say they have tried to commit suicide. Drug and alcohol use is widespread.
These behaviors are troubling enough, but just as worrisome are the attitudes that accompany them. Many youngsters have a difficult time seeing any moral dimension to their actions. An increasing number of brutal crimes--such as the "wilding" incident in New York's Central Park (a vicious assault on a jogger by a band of bored youths out for fun)--are committed "just for kicks." Hundreds of equally disturbing cases exist. Police say that juveniles are often found laughing and playing at homicide scenes.
One natural response to these grim statistics might be to ask, "Why aren't they teaching values in the schools?" To someone with that idea it might come as a surprise to learn that moral values courses have been in the schools for over twenty-five years. In fact, more attention and research have been devoted to moral education in recent years than at any time in our history. Unfortunately, these attempts at moral education have been a resounding failure. Why?
Flesch's analysis of the reasons why Johnny can't read is helpful here because the failure of moral education in the schools parallels the failure of the schools to teach reading. In brief, students are being taught by the wrong method--a method that looks more and more like a fad that won't go away. Ironically, this method, which made its appearance in the 1960s, not only fails to encourage virtuous behavior, it seems to actively undermine it, leaving children morally confused and adrift. On the other hand, there is an approach to developing character that does work. It is not a radical new method but, like phonics, an approach that has been tried and proven. It does not work perfectly, but it does seem to be considerably more effective than the current fads when it comes to encouraging responsible character traits in youngsters.
What are the two approaches?
One is called "character education." It is based on the idea that there are traits of character children ought to know, that they learn these by example, and that once they know them, they need to practice them until they become second nature. The other approach is called "decision making" or "moral reasoning" or "the dilemma method" or "Values Clarification." I'll generally use "decision making" as the designation for this approach. (Editor: In the following discussion of the "decision-making" approach to forming character and instilling morals in children, we do not want to give the impression that it's wrong to teach your children to make decisions! This is simply the name of a misguided modern method of teaching morals that has failed miserably! We should teach children how to make decisions, "training them up in the way they should go," so they will make the right choices. As the author brings out later, schools are not teaching children to make decisions, despite the title of the course. Nor do they give any sort of moral guidance or explain that there are right and wrong decisions. There are no absolutes, and as one student put it, "whatever gets you through the night, it's alright.")
Character education was what took place in school and society in the past. It was sometimes heavy-handed and liable to abuse, but it seemed to serve our culture well over a long period of time. It has been criticized as being indoctrinative, but in some crucial respects it may have made possible more real freedom of choice than we now possess. It has been dismissed as naive, but new evidence suggests that it is more psychologically sophisticated than the methods that replaced it.
The shift from character education to the decision-making model was begun with the best of intentions. The new approach was meant to help students to think more independently and critically about values. Proponents claimed that a young person would be more committed to self-discovered values than to ones that were simply handed down by adults.
That was the hope. But the actual consequences of the shift have been quite different:
It has resulted in classrooms where teachers act like talk show hosts, and where things like the merits of cannibalism are recommended topics for debate. It has resulted in non-judgmental drug education programs in which drugs are scarcely mentioned except to say that taking them is a personal choice.
For students, it has meant wholesale confusion about moral values: learning to question values they have scarcely acquired, unlearning values taught at home, and concluding that questions of right and wrong are always merely subjective. For adults it has provided a theoretical basis for questioning the importance or necessity of setting a good example to the young.
It has meant that the development of moral education curriculums has been turned over to theorists who have repeatedly expressed disdain for concepts such as virtue, character, and good example; the same theorists have dismissed past culture and history as being irrelevant to the search for values.
It has created a generation of moral illiterates: students who know their own feelings but don't know their culture. On the college and graduate level it has helped to produce students who are unable to identify the Book of Job or to name the Ten Commandments.
Finally, it has helped create an educational system with a de facto policy of withholding from children the greatest incentive to moral behavior--namely, the conviction that life makes sense--a policy of doing everything possible to prevent them from learning the larger purposes or stories that give meaning to existence. In failing to impart these stories, schools have deprived children of both moral context and moral energy.
How and why the shift from character education to decision making took place is the subject of this book.
What are these new curriculums like? The common feature they all share is the assumption that children can learn to make good moral decisions without bothering to acquire moral habits or strength of character. The underlying strategy is to elicit the youngster's opinion on a wide variety of topics, ranging from sex, drugs, stealing, honesty, etc.
This is not education in the traditional sense. It has overtones of sensitivity training, and it borders on invasion of privacy. Some experts worry that it amounts to unlicensed therapy (the chief architect of this kind of education was, in fact, not an educator but a psychotherapist). Many parents are concerned as well. They are not convinced that such exercises make for more honest or responsible children.
When it comes to sex education programs, the tendency in recent years has been to leave very little to the imagination.
Changing Bodies, Changing Lives, a text widely used in schools and recommended by the School Library Journal, is liberally sprinkled with quotes from teens describing their sexual experiences in minute detail, including gay students. At regular intervals the authors remind their young readers, "There's no `right' way or `right' age to have life experiences," and "only you can decide" what is right.
Another key teaching tool in the decision-making approach is the open-ended discussion of an ethical dilemma.
Here are two commonly used examples of these dilemmas:
A man's wife is dying of a rare kind of cancer. A local druggist has developed a cure for this type of cancer but demands far more than the man can afford to pay. Later the husband breaks into the store and steals the drug. Should he have done that?
A band of settlers is hiding from marauding Indians. A mother is faced with the choice of suffocating her infant son to prevent him from crying out, or allowing him to live and risking the lives of all the settlers. What should she do?
If you are a parent with one or more children in school, these exercises might make you feel a little uneasy--although it might be difficult to say why; we have become rather used to this way of framing moral issues. One way to get at the source of the unease is to ask yourself how these exotic dilemmas would translate into matters of everyday conduct. For example, would the dilemma about the man stealing the drug help your youngster resist a temptation to steal change from your dresser? As for the pioneer woman's dilemma, is it a good idea to introduce youngsters to extreme situations where one life is weighed against another?
A parent's intuitive answer is likely to be no. And it so happens there is a good deal of research demonstrating that the intuitive answer is the right one. For example, when drug education programs are patterned on the decision-making model, the result is increased drug use. Why?
The underlying problem became apparent to me one day when a graduate student from Japan asked, "Where's the `moral' in `moral education'?" In these curriculums a lot of time and energy are spent exchanging opinions and exploring feelings, but practically no time is spent providing moral guidance or forming character. The virtues are not explained or discussed, no models of good behavior are provided, no reason is given why a boy or girl should want to be good in the first place. In short, students are given nothing to live by or look up to. They come away with the impression that even the most basic values are matters of dispute. Morality, they are likely to infer, is something you talk about in class but not something you need to do anything about.
In one sense the decision-making curriculums have been a roaring success. They were set up to create a non-judgmental attitude about values, and it worked. When members of a high school class in a Toronto suburb were asked to express their views on morality, all but a few came up with a variation on the theme that morality is purely personal. One boy, whose view is representative, wrote:
Moral values cannot be taught and people must learn to use what works for them. In other words, "whatever gets you through the night, it's alright." The essence of civilization is not moral codes but individualism. ... The only way to know when your values are getting sounder is when they please you more.
When teachers carefully preface each discussion with the caution that there are no right or wrong answers, that is the distinct impression students come away with. Who says they don't listen? The irony is that instead of developing their own values, young people seem increasingly at the mercy of peer and media values. How do these programs manage to survive and prosper? Part of the answer is that parents don't know they exist or, if they do know, have only a vague notion of what they entail. Quite often this is a matter of deliberate policy. In one community, when a teacher asked what she should do if parents objected to the new Values Clarification program, she was told by a seminar leader, "You call it `life skills' and you do it anyway." In other communities, parents have been forced to sue under the Freedom of Information Act in order to find out what materials were being used in their children's classes. Professor Sidney Simon, who created the Values Clarification method, boasted that as a young teacher at Temple University he "always bootlegged the values stuff under other titles": "I was assigned to teach Social Studies in the Elementary School, and I taught Values Clarification. I was assigned Current Trends in American Education, and I taught my trend."
One of the metaphors that can be used to describe an individual's moral life is that of warfare or battle. It was a metaphor much used in the past, but it has fallen out of use. It is, of course, not the only metaphor that can be employed, but it may be one worth reconsidering. Because, if it is an accurate metaphor--if, for example, the struggle to overcome a drug addiction is in part a spiritual battle with evil (as many recovered addicts describe it), then it might be important to look at forms of moral education that would equip our young accordingly. If one has to do battle in life, one needs to be trained to do battle.
None of us want to go to untrained doctors, or fly with untrained pilots, or have untrained soldiers protect our country, but for some reason we have come to believe that one can be a good person without any training in goodness. We have succumbed to a myth that claims that morality comes naturally, or at most, with the help of a little reasoning. But it seems increasingly clear that these metaphors and the models that flow from them aren't working. The "natural" thing to do in most situations is to take the easy way out. The most perfectly rational plan of action is to always put yourself first.
Americans have been led to believe that their children will be able to fight their personal moral struggles with weapons that, upon examination, turn out to be very flimsy: there is not much evidence that values curriculums or the "self-esteem" they claim to foster have much effect on behavior.
How about parents? What can they do to encourage character development? They can, of course, do a great many things--from setting good examples to involving children in helping the hungry. But one of the most important things is also one of the simplest. Parents can spend time reading to their children. It may come as a surprise that a book on moral education places so much emphasis on stories. We have grown accustomed to thinking of stories as no more than entertainment. But they are, or can be, a lot more than that. Of course, no reading method, however good, will bring the child very far unless he is given something meaningful to read.
Those who become accomplished readers are those who have learned to love reading. And they learn to love it because it helps to make sense out of their lives. The same principle applies to moral education.
Stories help to make sense of our lives. They also create a desire to be good. Plato, who thought long and hard about the subject of moral education, believed that children should be brought up in such a way that they would fall in love with virtue. And he thought that stories and histories were the key to sparking this desire. No amount of discussion or dialogue could compensate if that spark was missing.
Stories have always been an important way of transmitting values and wisdom. They become all the more important in a society that, like ours, has experienced so much disruption in the family and in the community.
Drug Education
In the 1960s and 1970s, the human potential movement flourished--a loose alliance of psychologists and educators interested in expanding human possibilities by encouraging greater self-awareness. One of the chief goals of human potential psychology was to help individuals "get in touch" with their feelings, or to use the psychological term, with their "affective" side--thus the term "affective education."
The model for the classroom was the sensitivity group: The intensive group or "workshop" group usually consists of ten to fifteen persons and a facilitator or leader. It is relatively unstructured, providing a climate of maximum freedom for personal expression, exploration of feelings, and interpersonal communication.
These people were largely successful in getting their ideas across--at least, that is my impression after twenty years of teaching future teachers. They view their job as a therapeutic one: to facilitate self-expression, to enhance self-esteem, to be more open and non-judgmental. In short, to be more like therapists.
However, one byproduct of affective drug education is that it gives the users and risk takers in the class an undue influence--one they wouldn't normally have. In the normal course of events "traditionalists"--nonusers--avoid the users. They choose their friends from among peers like themselves and shy away from the others. The group process, however, throws users and nonusers together in intimate contact in a way that the traditional classroom does not. And in the upside-down world of in-depth sharing, the nonuser finds himself at a disadvantage. Why? Because the influence in such groups flows from user to abstainer. A 1976 study of teenage smokers conducted by the research team of Yankelovich, Skelly, and White suggests why:
The profile of the teenage girl smoker counters the image of a socially ill-at-ease youngster turning to cigarettes as a means of being thought of as more sophisticated or as a needed prop for handling social situations. Instead, it is the teenage girl smoker who is at ease socially, very together, and with full confidence in herself. Parties and social gatherings are her specialty.
The smokers were also far more likely to use marijuana and binge-drink. The non-judgmental classroom discussion is tailor-made for youngsters like these, and they tend to set the tone. In one sense they are models of what such classes are meant to encourage. They are risk takers par excellence, and they have no trouble talking about their feelings and experiences. To top it off, they are often quite entertaining. Considering that the other students are duty bound, as one guidebook puts it, "to demonstrate tolerance for each other's points of view," the users have all the advantages.
Under this induction, drugs become no longer something on the edge of an inexperienced student's awareness, no longer something seen on the evening news but personally unthinkable. Having been "energized" by one psychological classroom exercise and another and then placed in a circle for heart-to-heart discussion with peers; having exchanged feelings and found that, deep down, the users among his classmates are persons with feelings, too, the inexperienced student will be said to have "grown"--and in the process lost the fear of violating the prohibitions of his home and the commandments of his church.
The audience of one such drug education program, Quest, is now estimated to be about 2 million students per year, and it is just one of many humanistic drug education programs. But all the evidence is that humanistic education doesn't work. The failure of these programs is mirrored in the statistics. While educators have been busy helping youth to explore values and decide for themselves, the drug problem has continued unabated.
* Nearly six out of ten high school seniors say they have used illegal drugs (not including alcohol).
* The percentage of children using drugs by the sixth grade has tripled since 1975.
* One in fifteen high school senior boys has used steroids.
* One in twelve high school students admits to using LSD.
* More than half of high school seniors say they get drunk at least once a month. Two out of five get drunk at least once a week.
* The average age of first alcohol use has dropped to 12.3 years.
* A 1985 study showed that ten times as many twelve-year-old girls were smoking in comparison to a decade earlier.
Among the more effective programs is one called Building Drug Free Schools. Not a particularly catchy title as prevention programs go, but it's one program that seems to live up to its billing. Northside High School in Atlanta, at one time known to its students as "Fantasy Island," used the program to rid itself of a serious drug problem and dramatically improved academic achievement as well.
Asked to describe his "program," principal Bill Rudolph replies, "That's very difficult to do because we don't really have a `drug and alcohol program' here. What we have is a school that has very, very clear expectations for its students; and among those expectations is that they not break the law nor come to school under the influence of alcohol and drugs. ... But it also means some more important things. It means you go to class, you go on time, you try hard; it means that you're going to get two to three hours of homework every night. It means that we're going to put you in the most challenging courses that we can find for you.
"We don't really have a `drug program' here. What we're having is school, and we think what we're having is quality education, which precludes drug use."
How Not to Teach Morality
"It ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people," quipped G. K. Chesterton in 1910. If that guarded approach applies anywhere, moral education would seem to be the place. In learning right from wrong, young people ought to have the benefit of ideas that have been around for a while. After all, when researchers experiment with new treatments in medicine, the policy is to ask for adult volunteers, not to round up children. Common sense would seem to suggest a similarly cautious approach to experiments in teaching values.
The 1960s, however, saw Chesterton's formula turned on its head. In that decade and the next, educators vied to outdo one another in rushing the newest developments and techniques into the classroom and into young heads. Nowhere was this done more avidly than in the field of moral education. The oldest ideas were, in effect, banished from the classroom. Almost overnight, concepts such as virtue, good example, and character formation fell out of favor with educators.
Those were the days of the free speech movement, of flower children and campus sit-ins and Woodstock. It was also a time of violence--the murder of civil rights workers, the assassination of King and the Kennedys, the Vietnam War. Something was radically wrong with our culture, or so it seemed to many. And the revelations about Watergate in the early seventies did not help matters. The main sentiment--and it was a sentiment widely shared by educators--was that the culture was something to be ashamed of, not transmitted. It would be better if students started from scratch and developed their own ideas about society.
This was the atmosphere into which the so-called decision-making model of moral education emerged. It was a model that relied on students to discover values for themselves, and it promised that this could be done without indoctrination of any sort. Students would be given tools for making decisions, but the decisions would be their own. The idea gained ready acceptance in schools. Decision making was exactly what educators were looking for, and they rushed to embrace it.
The decision-making model developed along two different lines. One approach, called "Values Clarification," emphasized feelings, personal growth, and a totally non-judgmental attitude; the other, known as the "moral reasoning" approach, emphasized a "critical thinking" approach to decision making. Although both shared many assumptions and methods, it is important to understand the differences.
Values Clarification got its start in 1966 with the publication of Values and Teaching by Louis Raths, Merrill Harmin, and Sidney Simon--all professors of education. What the authors offered was not a way to teach values but a way for students to "clarify" their own values. The authors took pains to distance themselves from character education and traditional methods of teaching values. In fact, Simon once expressed a wish that parents would stop "fostering the immorality of morality." It was Simon, also, who took the lead in popularizing the new method. His Values Clarification: A Handbook of Practical Strategies for Teachers and Students was published in 1972, and quickly became a best-seller among teachers. According to the promotional blurb on the book's back cover, Values Clarification makes students "aware of their own feelings, their own ideas, their own beliefs ... their own value systems."
A value is essentially what you like or love to do. It is not an ought-to but a want-to. In his book Educating for Character, Professor Thomas Lickona relates the story of an eighth-grade teacher who used this strategy with a low-achieving class only to find that the four most popular activities were "sex, drugs, drinking, and skipping school." The teacher was hamstrung. The Values Clarification framework gave her no way of persuading them otherwise. Her students had clarified their values, and they were able to justify their choices with answers they found satisfactory ("Everyone drinks and smokes dope"; "Sex is the best part of life").
The moral reasoning approach--the other strand within the decision-making model--seemed to offer a good alternative to Values Clarification. It was the brainchild of Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, a man who was, in many ways, the opposite of Sidney Simon. Whereas Simon was a laid-back popularizer with a mind singularly tuned to the changing moods of the sixties, Kohlberg was a serious scholar whose ideas were buttressed by philosophical arguments, and whose research was highly regarded. Although Kohlberg, like Simon, rejected character education (he called it the "bag of virtues" approach), he had something other than feelings to offer in its place. Kohlberg wanted to turn children into moral thinkers.
How could students be brought to higher levels of moral reasoning? Kohlberg felt that the Socratic dialogue--the method used by Socrates and Plato--was ideal. The Socratic dialogue provided a way of drawing out ideas without imposing values or moralizing.
Here is an example of one such dilemma:
Sharon and Jill were best friends. One day they went shopping together. Jill tried on a sweater and then, to Sharon's surprise, walked out of the store wearing the sweater under her coat. A moment later, the store's security officer stopped Sharon and demanded that she tell him the name of the girl who had walked out. He told the store owner that he had seen the two girls together, and that he was sure that the one who left had been shoplifting. The store owner told Sharon that she could really get in trouble if she didn't give her friend's name.
The dilemma, of course, is to decide what Sharon should do.
The Jill and Sharon dilemma is actually a rather mild example of the form. Dilemmas about homosexuality, wife swapping, extramarital sex, abortion, and even cannibalism are routine on the junior high and high school levels and often make their way into elementary classrooms. The Donner Party dilemma, for example, tells the story of westward-bound settlers trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and faced with the alternatives of death by starvation or cannibalism. Another Kohlberg dilemma concerns a mother who must choose between the lives of her two children. A Values Clarification dilemma places the student in the position of a government bureaucrat who must decide which of several people are to survive in a fallout shelter and which are to die of radiation poisoning.
The danger in focusing on problematic dilemmas such as these is that a student may begin to think that all of morality is similarly problematic. After being faced with quandary after quandary of the type that would stump Middle East negotiators, students will conclude that right and wrong are anybody's guess. They will gain the impression, as Cornell professor Richard Baer has pointed out, "that almost everything in ethics is either vague or controversial...."
Youngsters are often much more perceptive than adults in sensing where this line of reasoning leads. As one teacher admits, "I often discuss cheating this way, but I always get defeated because they will argue that cheating is all right. After you accept the idea that kids have the right to build a position with logical arguments, you have to accept what they come up with."
Classroom time might be better spent in talking about the virtues of friendship, loyalty, and honesty, and how to practice them, rather than in dredging up situations where honesty might not be the best policy or where loyalty and honesty conflict or even where cannibalism might be a legitimate course of action.
Some of what is wrong with this assumption is revealed in a conversation Kohlberg had with Edwin Delattre shortly before Kohlberg's death. Delattre, who is professor of applied ethics at Boston University, tells it this way:
He [Kohlberg] expressed perplexity about the ineffectiveness of his methods in prisons where he had been working. He told me that he posed for inmates one of his favorite dilemmas: "Your wife suffers from an incurable and potentially terminal disease for which she must take regular doses of a very expensive medicine. The medicine is manufactured by a single company, and you have exhausted all of your financial resources in past purchases of the medicine." The question he posed is whether you should let your wife die or steal the drug.
The convicts were unperplexed. To a man, and without hesitation, they said, "Steal it." "But why," Larry Kohlberg asked them, "would you do that?" Laughing, they answered, "Because we steal things. We wanna know why the stupid husband didn't steal it in the first place!"
The point is that the decision whether or not to steal is only a dilemma for those who already think stealing is wrong. As Delattre observes, "no one can really have a dilemma or moral problem without already caring to be the kind of person who behaves well, the kind of person who wants to discover the right thing to do and to have what it takes to do it."
In short, it's a strange way to teach morality. Debunking moral values before they are learned is not a good policy. Before students begin to think about the qualifications, exceptions, and fine points that surround difficult cases they will seldom or never face, they need to build the kind of character that will allow them to act well in the very clear-cut situations they face daily. Suppose your child's school was instituting a course or curriculum in moral education at the fifth- to seventh-grade level. As a parent, which of the two models below would you prefer the school to use?
A. The first approach encourages students to develop their own values and value systems. This approach relies on presenting the students with provocative ethical dilemmas and encouraging open discussion and exchange of opinion. The ground rule for discussion is that there are no right or wrong answers. Each student must decide for himself/herself what is right or wrong. Students are encouraged to be non-judgmental about values that differ from their own.
B. The second approach involves a conscious effort to teach specific virtues and character traits such as courage, justice, self-control, honesty, responsibility, charity, obedience to lawful authority, etc. These concepts are introduced and explained and then illustrated by memorable examples from history, literature, and current events. The teacher expresses a strong belief in the importance of these virtues and encourages his/her students to practice them in their own lives.
The vast majority of parents will choose B--the character education option. But when I ask groups of teachers and teachers-in-training which of the two models they would choose to teach, they invariably prefer model A. Many teachers say they would not use the second approach under any circumstances.
Parents and teachers in America have been on different wavelengths for quite some time, but I don't think it's necessarily the parents who need to make an adjustment. I believe they prefer character education over the experimental model not because of some knee-jerk conservatism, or because of their limited knowledge of theory, but because they have a better grasp of what is at stake, and because it is their own children who are in question.
To introduce a child to the complicated and controversial issues of the day without some prior attempt at forming character is a formula for confusing him, or worse. To do it in a format that suggests there are no right answers compounds the confusion and amounts to a loading of the deck. One doesn't have to be exclusively liberal or conservative, religious or non-religious to be troubled by this scheme.
A History Lesson
From a traditional point of view, the chief way to counter our lack of will and determination is through the development of good habits. An effective moral education would be devoted to encouraging habits of honesty, helpfulness, and self-control until such behaviors become second nature. The idea is that we could then respond to tempting situations in an automatic way, much as an expert tennis player responds automatically to a hard serve. If we become persons of a certain kind, we won't need to debate our course of action, we will know "instinctively" how to act.
This is how the ancient Greeks and Romans understood moral education, except that instead of talking about "habits," they used the word "virtues." In its original sense, the word meant something like our word "strength." If you had a virtue such as courage, you not only had an idea about what constitutes courageous behavior, you also had the strength to act accordingly. And like muscular strength, you could lose it if you didn't keep in practice. Aristotle said that a man becomes virtuous by performing virtuous acts; he becomes kind by doing kind acts; he becomes brave by doing brave acts.
If Aristotle was right about this, it means, of course, that much of our modern talk about "choices" and "decision making" is rather shallow. An individual can't choose to do something if he lacks the capacity for it. For example, running the Boston Marathon is not a choice for those who are out of shape. It only becomes a choice for those who are willing to put in many months of training. In similar fashion, a child's freedom to choose altruistic behavior over self-centered behavior is severely limited if he has never formed a habit of helping others in need. Far from stifling our freedom to choose, habits actually enhance it. They give us command and control of ourselves.
How did the Greeks--and for that matter, all other civilized societies--go about teaching good habits of behavior? The best way for a young person to learn them was by identifying with and imitating someone who already practiced them.
But the Greeks, and the Romans, did not rely entirely on the power of good personal example. Worthy models, after all, are not always evenly distributed among the population; and some people have the bad luck to be born among thieves. In addition, even the best people are on occasion weak, fallible, and inconsistent. Traditional societies recognized this, and they compensated for it with a generous supply of models drawn from history and legend. A child might be surrounded by crass and uncaring adults, but he could always catch a glimpse of another vision from the storyteller in the marketplace or in the pages of a book.
This idea of molding or forming one's character according to the example of outstanding men and women--whether from history or legend--prevailed until fairly recent times.
It was a simple but profound concept: a life based not on principle or precept but on other lives.
It was also an indispensable concept for those living in a democracy. John Adams wrote that our form of government was only meant for a virtuous people, and Jefferson, Madison, and Washington concurred. A government of the people would work only as long as the people were good people. Schools did their part by explicit instruction in the importance of honesty, hard work, altruism, and patriotism, but also by presenting stories of virtue to children. The McGuffey Reader, which by 1919 had the largest circulation of any book except the Bible, contained readings from Aesop, Shakespeare, and the Bible as well as stories about Lafayette, Washington, and Wilberforce (the Englishman who almost single-handedly brought an end to the slave trade).
How well did character education of the past work? Can we compare it to modern methods? We have ways of making such behavior comparisons, because someone has been keeping score. FBI statistics show startling increases in crimes committed by children and teens over the last five decades. The difference can also be seen in the differing concerns of teachers then and now. Compare what classroom teachers identified as the greatest threats to the educational process in 1940 and today. First on the list in 1940 was talking out of turn; today it is drug abuse. The number-two concern in 1940 was chewing gum; today it is alcohol abuse. Number three in 1940 was making noise; number three today is pregnancy. The fourth most pressing problem in 1940 was running in the halls; today it is suicide. Fifth, sixth, and seventh on the list in 1940 were getting out of line, wearing improper clothing, and not putting paper in the wastebasket; today they are rape, robbery, and assault.
Moral Illiteracy
One of the basic problems in moral education is to find the proper balance between content and process. Where should the emphasis be placed: on the content of the Judeo-Christian-Western moral heritage, as was done in the past, or on independent thinking processes, as Kohlberg, Simon, and others would have it? The stress in recent decades has, of course, been on the second. Like the Cheshire cat, moral content has been in the process of disappearing from moral education. Not much of substance is left except, perhaps, for a ghostly smile.
This controversy about moral education is really part of a larger controversy in American schools and colleges. A look at that larger dispute may help provide some perspective on the smaller. For a long time the general curriculum has been under the same pressure as the moral education curriculum--that is, pressure to shift from an emphasis on content to an emphasis on process. Thus, it is argued, children don't need to learn to calculate so much as they need a process for thinking about math; they don't need historical facts so much as they need ways of thinking critically about the historical process. And the same applies to science, literature, and geography: the facts are not nearly as important as strategies for thinking about them.
Process-centered learning has been the rage now for several decades. What has been the result? One main effect is that students coming out of American high schools simply don't know many facts. Surprisingly large numbers of them can't locate the United States on a map of the world, can't distinguish World War I from World War II, can't identify Winston Churchill or Joseph Stalin. As for critical thinking, a 1989 survey of college seniors found that one quarter of them could not distinguish between the thoughts of Karl Marx and the United States Constitution.
One of the people who have written most cogently about this topic is Professor E. D. Hirsch of the University of Virginia. Hirsch's book Cultural Literacy created a stir and became a best-seller largely because he dared to make a list of 5,000 things that people in a literate society ought to know. Unfortunately, many of his critics tended to concentrate on the list and ignore the argument of the book. Hirsch's argument was basically this: Communities and cultures depend for their existence on shared knowledge. Without such specific knowledge and a shared ethos, it becomes difficult for members of a community to communicate and cooperate. Those without this knowledge will always be condemned to the margins of society. If the knowledge deficit becomes widespread, the culture will collapse.
Just as it is important for a community to have a common literate culture, it is equally important for it to have a common moral culture. America has had a common moral culture for most of its history. In the past most people would have known of Adam and Eve's disobedience, the treachery of Benedict Arnold, the generosity of the couple in "The Gift of the Magi," the selfishness of Scrooge, the Ten Commandments, and the Twenty-third Psalm. None of this knowledge would ensure decent behavior, but it would be a good start. It would at least guarantee that people were speaking the same language. Like a common stock of knowledge, a common set of ideals seems necessary to any society that hopes to socialize its young.
But, as is the case with factual content, there now appears to be a decline in shared moral content.
On the elementary and high school level the stock of knowledge about right and wrong has dwindled drastically. In 1985 Professor Paul Vitz of New York University reported the results of a comprehensive study of ninety widely used elementary social studies texts, high school history texts, and elementary readers. What Vitz discovered was a "censorship by omission" in which basic themes and facts of the American and Western experience had been left out. Of the 670 stories from the readers used in grades three through six, "there are no stories that feature helping others or being concerned for others as intrinsically meaningful and valuable." "For the most part," writes Vitz, "these are stories for the `me generation.'" More seriously, religion and marriage--institutions that have traditionally provided a context for learning morality--are neglected: None of the social studies books dealing with modern American social life mentioned the word "marriage," "wedding," "husband" or "wife."
In one story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a boy prays "to God" and later says "thank God," but in the sixth-grade version, the words "to God" are omitted and the expression "thank God" is changed to "thank goodness." Although many Americans pray and go to church, hardly anyone does in these ninety books which are supposedly representative of American life.
How does this lack of background knowledge affect the everyday lives of young men and women? That's difficult to say. But we do know that many young people no longer realize that rape is wrong, and there are indications that much greater numbers are unaware that drunkenness is wrong. In his book Educating for Character, Thomas Lickona relates a Catholic university chaplain's observation that "college students rarely confess, as students once did, the sin of getting drunk (always considered a grave sin in Catholic moral theology)." Lickona continues, "It's not that today's students at this university never get drunk; many do. But apparently they do not think, as their predecessors did, that getting drunk is a serious moral wrong." Student drunkenness, as might be expected, is on the rise on college campuses across the country. On many campuses, it is the major problem. Along with the increase in drunkenness, there has been a corresponding increase in vandalism. Colleges spend hundreds of millions annually in repairing dorms that have been trashed by students.
Parents tend to blame schools for this state of affairs; schools tend to blame parents. Lickona quotes a fifth-grade teacher in a Boston suburb:
About ten years ago I showed my class some moral dilemma filmstrips. I found they knew right from wrong, even if they didn't always practice it. Now I find more and more of them don't know. They don't think it's wrong to pick up another person's property without their permission or to go into somebody else's desk. They barge between two adults when they're talking and seem to lack manners in general. You want to ask them, "Didn't your mother ever teach you that?"
The question of whether schools or parents bear most of the blame is not an easy one to resolve; it's a chicken-and-egg dilemma: Parents influence the children first before they go to school, but schools shape the children before they become parents. In any event, one thing is clear: When both fail to hand on the stock of knowledge, experience, and example that constitutes a culture's moral capital, children are in trouble. They begin to resemble not Noble Savages but simply savages. We can see the effects of moral illiteracy in the increasingly casual nature of crime. Police report that growing numbers of young lawbreakers seem to have no sense of human community, no point of contact. Many young murderers and muggers sincerely do not understand what they have done wrong or why they should be punished. They are outside the common moral culture. The cool, blank stare one sometimes encounters among young criminals is blank in part because the light of civilization has gone out of it.
Vision and Virtue
In my conversations with teachers and would-be teachers, one of the most common themes I hear is their conviction that they simply don't have the right to tell students anything about right and wrong. Many have a similar attitude toward literature with a moral; they would also feel uneasy about letting a story do the telling for them. The most pejorative word in their vocabulary is "preach."
The latter attitude is a legacy of the Enlightenment, but it is far more widespread now than it ever was in the eighteenth century. The argument then and now is as follows: Stories and myth may have been necessary to get the attention of ignorant farmers and fishermen, but intelligent people don't need to have their ethical principles wrapped in a pretty box; they are perfectly capable of grasping the essential point without being charmed by myths, and because they can reach their own conclusions, they are less susceptible to the harmful superstitions and narrow prejudices that may be embedded in stories.
This attitude may be characterized as one of wanting to establish the moral of the story without the story. It does not intend to do away with morality but to make it more secure by disentangling it from a web of fictions. For example, during the Enlightenment the Bible came to be looked upon as an attempt to convey a set of advanced ethical ideas to primitive people who could understand them only if they were couched in story form. A man of the Enlightenment, however, could dispense with the stories and myths, mysteries and miracles, could dispense, for that matter, with a belief in God, and still retain the essence of the Christian ethic.
Regarding the Enlightenment habit of distilling out the Christian ethic from the Bible, consider how much sense the following principles make when they are forced to stand on their own:
* Do good to those that harm you. Turn the other cheek.
* Walk an extra mile.
* Blessed are the poor.
* Feed the hungry.
"Feed the hungry" seems to have the most compelling claim on us, but just how rational is it? Science doesn't tell us to feed the hungry. Moreover, feeding the hungry defeats the purpose of natural selection. Why not let them die and thus "decrease the surplus population" as Ebenezer Scrooge suggests?
Most cultures have recognized that morality, religion, story, and myth are bound together in some vital way, and that to sever the connections among them leaves us not with strong and independent ethical principles but with weak and unprotected ones. What "enlightened" thinkers in every age envision is some sort of progression from story to freestanding moral principles unencumbered by stories. But the actual progression never stops there. Once we lose sight of the human face of principle, the way is clear for attacking the principles themselves as merely situational or relative. The final stage of the progression is moral nihilism (a rejection of morality or religious belief) and the appeal to raw self-interest.
Music and Morality
No, this chapter is not about the latest dirty lyrics in the latest rap group's latest album. Nor does it deal with rumors that the members of such-and-such a rock group are devil worshipers (though they might be). Rather, it attempts to get at an effect of music that is more basic than the lyrics or the singer's persona. We can start our discussion of this effect with the common observation that we tend to learn something more easily and indelibly if it's set to a rhyme or song. Advertisers know this and use it so effectively that we sometimes have difficulty getting their jingles out of our heads. But there are more positive educational uses. This raises an interesting possibility. If Johnny can be taught to read through rhyme and song, might he also begin to learn right and wrong in the same way?
Allan Bloom, in his controversial discussion of music in The Closing of the American Mind, says that music should be at the center of education. It does the best job of giving raw passions their due while forming them for something better. Bloom feels that music now plays the decisive role in the formation of a young person's character. In this respect, nothing has changed since the days of Homer, when the young were immersed in epic songs. Of course, Bloom is not happy with the results because what today's youth are "musically in tune with, harmonious with" are no longer the institutions of their culture or anything on which a culture could be built. They are vibrating to the beat of a different drum--usually the one in a rock band.
Bloom's comments are based on several passages from Plato, who was much concerned with the moral effects of music--so much so that in the ideal society he describes, many kinds of music would be censored. These observations in The Republic stir up today's generation of students as nothing else in Plato can. They take music very seriously--as did Plato. Plato's argument is that certain kinds of music can foster a spirit of lawlessness which can creep in unnoticed, "since it's considered to be a kind of play," and therefore harmless. Despite the innocent appearance, however, some kinds of music are capable of subverting the social order.
To appreciate Plato's thesis, and to appreciate the mobilizing power of music, we might recall the role that the "Marseillaise" played in the French Revolution, or the role that "We Shall Overcome" played in the American civil rights movement. But this kind of large-scale revolution is not exactly what Plato had in mind. He was more concerned with music of a sensual or romantic type that would undermine discipline, moderation, and other civic virtues. The most obvious modern analogy--the one Bloom makes--is to the role rock music plays in prompting young people to throw off cultural restraints. The common adolescent practice of playing rock at a deafening volume in streets, buses, and public parks suggests how readily it lends itself to the violation of the simplest rules of civil behavior.
In Plato's view, music and character are intimately connected. Certain modes of music dispose the individual to "illiberality," "insolence," and other vices. By the same token, other modes suggest peacefulness, moderation, and self-control, and dispose one to an "orderly and courageous life." It's important to note that Plato is not talking about lyrics (although he was concerned about them) but about the music itself. A man raised on harmonious music, he says, has a better chance of developing a harmonious soul: he will be better able to see life as a whole, and thus "he would have the sharpest sense of what's been left out," of what is and isn't fitting.
In our own society, however, we seem to have managed to create an attachment to all the wrong things. Or more precisely, parents and teachers have, by default, allowed the entertainment industry ("a common highway passing through all the houses in America" is Bloom's description) to create these attachments. Rock music in particular, says Bloom, inclines children away from self-control and sublimation. It doesn't channel emotions, it pumps them up. Instead of a passionate attachment to what is good, noble, and just, youth develop passionate attachments to their own needs, wants, and feelings, and to people like Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson.
Yet the basic proposition--that different kinds of music produce different effects on the soul--is not entirely radical. Would anyone assert that "You Ain't Nothin' but a Hound Dog" has the same "soul" as a Gregorian chant? The one inspires to prayer and contemplation, the other to shouting and stamping. Not that there's anything wrong with shouting and stamping once in a while, but children these days tend to be raised almost exclusively on that sort of music. Besides, they don't need much incentive to shout, stamp, whine, and demand. They do these things naturally. Why should we want music that validates and confirms such juvenile states? Shouldn't children be exposed to other states of soul?
What we currently have is a censorship by omission. Either parents don't know about or don't have a taste for alternative forms of music because they themselves were raised on rock; or they do know but are afraid to exercise their parental rights for fear that their children's allegiance has already been captured, and to stand up to the music would only widen the rift. What results, says Bloom, is a pattern of denial: "Avoid noticing what the words say, assume the kid will get over it. His drug use will certainly stop at pot."
Bloom is actually more interested in the educational rather than the moral influence of rock. But if Bloom is not mainly concerned with moral effects, we can be. If rock can wreck the liberal imagination, it can also wreck or stunt the moral imagination.
I don't doubt the sincerity of feeling in listeners who respond to "We Are the World" (the theme song of the "Live Aid" concert), but I question whether those are the sorts of feelings that can translate into committed and sustained action. The actual behavior of many young people who are hooked on rock suggests that their real agenda is "I am the world" and "The world owes me a living." Rock music allows us to indulge in expressions of strong emotion while freeing us from the obligation of doing anything.
Rock is essentially performance music. It is not intended for participation but for dramatizing the ego of the performer. For the most part, it is too idiosyncratic and exaggerated for any amateur to sing. People do not stand around pianos and sing "Cum On, Feel the Noize" or "Let's Put the X in Sex"; songs like these are basically unsingable. Even if audiences at rock concerts tried to sing along, they would be drowned out by the amplification.
What do young people get in exchange for giving up genuine participation? The answer is that like the performer on the stage, they get to feel and show their own emotions--if only through body language. Rock confirms their right to have and express strong, sensual emotions. The message is "Your feelings are sacred, and nothing is set above them." At the beginning of adolescence the discovery of one's emotional self seems like a profound discovery. This is the part of the self that adults "just don't understand." But rock music does understand, and what's more, it sanctions these feelings.
A music that proclaims that the gratification of one's immediate desires is paramount is bound to lead in the direction of frustration and then anger, because the world never provides such gratification for very long.
Of course, there are softer brands of contemporary music that express kinder and gentler sentiments. But much of this is more properly classified as pop music rather than as rock. It lacks the heavy beat of rock, and it bears a strong resemblance to the pop music and the popular ballad that predate rock. Some performers alternate between the two modes. For example, when Elvis Presley sang "Love Me Tender," he dropped the heavy beat and reverted to the ballad form. And a similar changing of tone has been the pattern ever since. Whenever rock musicians try to express sentiments that aren't merely self-centered, the distinctive rock sound is either lost or muted.
This reversion to other forms of music says a lot about the limitations of rock. Even more instructive, however, is the attitude taken by rock fans toward pop music. For the most part they despise it as being too soft and sentimental. By contrast, the kind of rock that is considered "real" and "powerful" by the critics is almost always laced with themes of anger, frustration, or self-indulgence. For instance, a recent review of the "best discs" of 1991 included such terms of approval as "raging guitars," "angry guitars," "brutal sonic assault," "piercing screams," "barbed wire lyrics," and "nerve-hitting."
Anger is much closer to the center of rock than is kindness or caring, and it may even be edging out sex as the number-one preoccupation. Anger is, after all, a very common adolescent emotion, and it is easily exploited. "The anger is what helps you relate to the kids," said W.A.S.P. band member Blackie Lawless in a 1985 interview. "That's what makes rock 'n' roll what it is. You're pissed off. I'm still pissed off about a lot of things...."
One of the things that rock and the rock industry do best is to take normal adolescent frustration and rebellion and heat it up to the boiling point. A lot of this hatred is directed toward parents--the people who usually stand most directly across the path of self-gratification. Anti-parent themes are quite common on MTV, and heavy metal has been described as "music to kill your parents by." When I once asked some recent college graduates to explain what they thought was the deeper meaning of rock, I was surprised at how frequently the word "alienation" came up over the course of several separate conversations. Robert Pittman, the inventor of MTV, confirmed this interpretation of the "meaning" of rock in a published interview with Ron Powers: "It's all attitude. The attitude is: nothing is sacred. We're all having a really good time. We're all in on something everybody else doesn't get. We're special 'cause we're keeping everybody else out." Thus much of the solidarity rock supplies its young audience is a negative solidarity, a bond achieved by excluding those who should be closest.
Parents are not the only focus of anger. Many types of rock have for a long time exhibited anger toward adults in general. What is fairly new, however, is the expression of contempt for age mates as well. Girlfriends--if that is the correct term--are not simply presented as sex objects but as objects of abuse. Most of the world only became aware of this trend with the flap that arose in 1990 over the rap group 2 Live Crew and their album As Nasty as They Wanna Be. The album, which sold several million copies, presents the sexual mutilation of women as the preferred way of obtaining sexual pleasure.
Exactly what role rock plays in forming youthful ideas about sex is not something that can be quantified. But some children start to listen to the worst of rap and heavy metal at ages nine, ten, and eleven. And according to a report of the American Medical Association, the average teenager listens to 10,500 hours of rock between the seventh and twelfth grades--more time than he spends in school. To say that listening to rock music doesn't influence ideas and attitudes is tantamount to saying that we aren't influenced by our environment. Until recently, researchers debated whether or not heavy exposure to television violence and pornography creates greater acceptance of violence toward women. That debate has died down now that new and more definitive studies have shown that it does. Is there any reason to suppose that heavy exposure to violent audio messages will have a different effect?
A child's musical environment is a large part of his moral environment. Right now, most of that musical environment is supplied by an industry that, as Allan Bloom says, "has all the moral dignity of drug trafficking." The first step in doing something about the situation is to wake up to its bizarre nature. For parents to give over a large part of their children's moral formation to people whose only interest in children is an exploitative one is a form of madness. But, as Bloom remarks, "It may well be that a society's greatest madness seems normal to itself."
Parents need to reclaim some territory for their children. Of course, the odds are very much against them. But at least one factor is in their favor. When children are young, they are still open to all kinds of music; they haven't yet learned they are supposed to like only one kind. It's a good time to help them cultivate good taste in music against the day when the forces of pop culture will attempt to dictate bad taste to them.
One of the characteristics of pure rock--that is, rock that is not combined with folk, blues, or ballad--is its absence of story. Robert Pittman is instructive on this point. He describes how he had to explain the concept of MTV to executives who wanted a beginning, a middle and an end to their television. "I said, `There is no beginning, middle and end. It's all ebb and flow,'" boasts Pittman. What these executives failed to realize is that "this is a non-narrative generation." MTV, accordingly, does away with narrative and replaces it with what filmmakers call montage: a rapid sequence of loosely connected images. This is the perfect fit of medium to music because rock is about the flow of experience, not about making sense out of experience.
In summary, music has powers that go far beyond entertainment. It can play a positive role in moral development by creating sensual attractions to goodness, or it can play a destructive role by setting children on a temperamental path that leads away from virtue. Other cultures have found ways of helping the temperamental self keep time with the social self--that is, with the self that must live responsibly with others. That synchrony no longer exists in our society. Until it is restored, the prospects for a moral renewal are dim.
What Schools Can Do
The core problem facing our schools is a moral one. All the other problems derive from it. Hence, all the various attempts at school reform are unlikely to succeed unless character education is put at the top of the agenda.
If students don't learn self-discipline and respect for others, they will continue to exploit each other sexually no matter how many health clinics and condom distribution plans are created.
If they don't learn habits of courage and justice, curriculums designed to improve their self-esteem won't stop the epidemic of extortion, bullying, and violence; neither will courses designed to make them more sensitive to diversity.
Even academic reform depends on putting character first. Children need courage to tackle difficult assignments. They need self-discipline if they are going to devote their time to homework rather than television. They need the diligence and perseverance required to do this day after day. If they don't acquire intellectual virtues such as commitment to learning, objectivity, respect for the truth, and humility in the face of facts, then critical-thinking strategies will only amount to one more gimmick in the curriculum.
If, on the other hand, the schools were to make the formation of good character a primary goal, many other things would fall into place. Hitherto unsolvable problems such as violence, vandalism, drug use, unruly classrooms, and academic deterioration would prove to be less intractable than presently imagined.
What became of the moral climate that was once so prevalent in schools? One of the most perceptive comments on its disappearance comes in a new book by Professors Edward Wynne and Kevin Ryan titled Reclaiming Our Schools: A Handbook on Teaching Character, Academics and Discipline. The authors acknowledge the destructive influence of Rousseauian philosophy in the sixties, but they also suggest that part of the explanation for the deterioration of the moral climate simply lies in the demanding nature of character education. To make rules and enforce them consistently, to give challenging assignments and correct them diligently, to keep in contact with parents and with other teachers, to police bathrooms, playgrounds, corridors, and lunchrooms, to demand respect from students and mutual respect for one another--all this requires considerable time and energy. And because it is all such hard work, there is a persistent temptation to find alternatives to it.
The authors note that in a great many schools, a strong pattern of work avoidance prevails--avoidance by both pupils and teachers. "Students and teachers essentially carry out mutual `pacts' to avoid creating trouble for each other. The pupils avoid conspicuous breaches of discipline ... and the teachers do not `hassle' pupils with demanding assignments." As time passes, though, breaches of discipline do tend to become more conspicuous. And more and more, teachers are tempted to look the other way. The upshot of this tacit agreement is that school is not taken seriously by either: both student and teacher come to look on it as a form of serving time. For the teacher, teaching becomes less like a vocation and more like a job. The idea is to leave as soon as you've put in your hours, and to take home as little work as possible.
That description does not do justice, of course, to the many teachers for whom teaching is still a vocation. But the more other teachers slack off, the greater the burden placed on those who don't, and the greater the temptation for them to follow suit. Not all of these problems are created within the schools. The authors point to a number of court decisions that have helped to create an air of confusion among teachers, leaving them uncertain of their right to discipline. The result is that schools become more depersonalized, less familial. Teachers become more indifferent, retreating from the kind of engagement and concern that was possible under the older order of authority. In addition to losing the power to discipline, they lose the power to care. Their attitude becomes that of the bureaucrat toward the client he must serve.
The same holds true for individual classrooms. The authors point to research showing that "effective teachers spend a significant amount of time during the first two weeks of school establishing rules and procedures ... such veterans seemingly sacrifice a great deal of time on drilling or `grooving' students on classroom procedures in the early weeks." It's hard work but it pays off, say the authors:
We know a first year teacher who patiently explained to his fifth grade students that they were not to talk in the hall on their way to gym. He soon discovered that the message did not get through. Instead of letting it go on or displaying aimless anger, he had them come back. He explained again and gave them another chance. They talked. He called them back again. Having missed twenty minutes of precious gym time, his fifth graders made it on the fifth try. There was no more talking in the halls, and many other messages got through with greater speed and accuracy.
Naturally, rules need punishments to back them up. Strangely, when one considers how much of a teacher's time is taken up with unruly student behaviors, textbooks for teachers devote very little space to the subject--and much of that surrounded with warnings about the dangers of punishment. Professors Wynne and Ryan are less reticent. They have a lot to say about punishment, about how and when to apply it, and what it should consist of.
Isn't it better that people behave themselves without compulsion? Yes, eventually, but sometimes compulsion is what is needed to get a good habit started. We don't wait for a child to decide for himself that tooth brushing is a good habit. The same applies to weightier moral matters. "You can't legislate morality" is a terribly simplistic formula. In fact, many laws are aimed at legislating morality, and--if morality is understood as proper conduct--many of them are quite effective at doing so.
Schools, like society at large, need to insist on proper habits of conduct. "At this moment in our history," observe Wynne and Ryan, "too many public schools are overly permissive. Thus, they fail to instill in our young the self-discipline needed for citizenship and full adult development. We believe strict schools (certainly by today's standards) are happy schools and, more important, schools that serve children and society well."
The United States has an AIDS problem and a drug problem and a violence problem. None of this will go away until schools once again make it their job to teach character both directly, through the curriculum, and indirectly, by creating a moral environment in the school. Schools courageous enough to reinstate and reinforce the concept and practice of the virtues will accomplish more toward building a healthy society than an army of doctors, counselors, and social workers.
What Parents Can Do
An acquaintance of mine, a well-educated man from another country, told me that the most shocking aspect of the culture shock involved in moving to America was to discover how badly behaved American children are. He said that this was also the reaction of the other transplanted parents he knows. Since this man had moved not to some gang-ridden region of the inner city but to a wealthy suburb with a reputation for having one of the nation's best public school systems, his observation merits some consideration. Moreover, since he happens to be a practicing psychiatrist with a thorough knowledge of child development, his judgment can hardly be dismissed as an example of outdated, Old World thinking.
His is not an uncommon experience. Even A. S. Neill, the founder of the English school Summerhill, and one of the world's foremost proponents of "natural education," was appalled at the behavior countenanced by his American disciples. He particularly didn't like the fact that children were allowed to continually interrupt adult conversations. Neill concluded that Americans didn't really understand what he meant by freedom.
One would expect that unpleasant behavior on the part of children might eventually provoke a hostile reaction on the part of adults. And indeed, this seems to be the case. There are mounting indications that Americans don't like children--at least, not nearly as much as they once did. One leading indication was the response to an Ann Landers column in the mid-seventies. She asked readers: If you had to do it over again, would you have children? Seventy percent of the 10,000 respondents wrote that they would not. This revelation was followed by a number of books and articles devoted to the same theme. I remember one article with the title "Do Americans Like Kids?" The gist of these books and articles was that parents were too stressed to pay much attention to their children; either that, or they were too absorbed in the pursuit of their own individual fulfillment. According to these accounts, children were increasingly seen as an inconvenience. Some authors suggested that this antipathy was symbolically represented by a spate of Hollywood films that depicted children as demonic.
The situation seems no better now. The April 6, 1990, issue of the Wall Street Journal reported that on the average, American parents spend less than fifteen minutes a week in serious discussion with their children. For fathers the amount of intimate contact with their children is an average of seventeen seconds per day. And whereas strangers would once make favorable comments about children in the company of their parents, nowadays they are just as likely to glare unapprovingly or make disparaging remarks--at least, that is the testimony I have heard from a number of parents.
The simple explanation for this aversion is that children and adolescents are increasingly disrespectful and disobedient to adults. One reaction, especially toward older children, is the "to-hell-with-them" attitude expressed in the bumper sticker slogan "I'm spending my children's inheritance." The other reaction is to shun the company of children. The increasing number of children in day care may be one manifestation of this shunning. For many, of course, day care is an economic necessity, but for many others there is another motivation. As Mary Pride, the author of a book on child rearing, points out, "One of the biggest reasons that mothers today are so anxious to get a job is simply in order to get away from the children. If I had a dime for every mother with a child in day care who went to work `to get out of the house,' I could buy Wyoming." "Why are grown women incapable of bearing the society of their own children for more than a few hours a day?" asks Pride.
The reason, of course, is that the children are no fun to be around. Misbehaving, bothersome children would wear anyone down. The prospect of facing all that hooting and hullaballooing alone for eighteen years is frightening.
What's the point of making these observations? I mention them because I think they help to bring perspective not only to our discussion of moral education but also to the discussion of child rearing in general. Child-rearing experts never cease to remind us that love is the central ingredient in raising children. And of course, they are right. But what also needs to be acknowledged by the experts is something they rarely say: it's easier to love children who are lovable. And all things considered, better-behaved children are more lovable than badly behaved children. Of course, we still love our children when they are nasty, whiny, disobedient, disrespectful, and selfish. But if that becomes their habitual behavior, the love of even the best parents begins to wear thin. By contrast, children who are obedient, respectful, and considerate have our love not only because it is our duty to love them but because it is a delight.
If parents are really serious about loving their children (and having others love them), the sensible course of action is to bring up lovable children. One of the most important things parents can do in this regard is to help their children acquire character. To do so has mutual benefits: it makes life easier for parents, but it also makes life easier for children. Well-behaved children are happier children, and they grow into a happier adulthood.
Most parents want their children to be honest, reliable, fair, self-controlled, and respectful. They know these virtues are good in themselves, and also good for their children. What prevents them from taking strong action to encourage the development of such traits?
Part of the answer lies in the influence of powerful myths, some old and some new, which dominate our thinking about child raising:
The myth of the "good bad boy." American literature and film loves to portray "bad" boys as essentially lovable and happy. Tom Sawyer and Buster Brown are examples from the past; the various lovable brats featured in film and television are contemporary examples. This strand in the American tradition has such a powerful hold on the imagination that the word "obedience" is very nearly a dirty word in the American vocabulary. The myth of the good bad boy is connected to ...
The myth of natural goodness. This is the idea that virtue will take care of itself if children are just allowed to grow in their own way. All that parents need to do is "love" their children--love, in this case, meaning noninterference.
The myth of expert knowledge. In recent decades parents have deferred to professional authority in the matter of raising their children. Unfortunately, the vast majority of child-rearing experts subscribe to the myth of natural goodness mentioned above. So much emphasis has been placed on the unique, creative, and spontaneous nature of children that parents have come to feel that child rearing means adjusting themselves to their children, rather than having children learn to adjust to the requirements of family life.
The myth that moral problems are psychological problems. This myth is connected to all of the above. In this view, behavior problems are seen as problems in self-esteem or as the result of unmet psychological needs. The old-fashioned idea that most behavior problems are the result of sheer "willfulness" on the part of children doesn't occur to the average child expert. If you look in the index of a typical child-rearing book, you will find that a great many pages are devoted to "self-esteem," but you are not likely to find the word "character" anywhere. It is not part of the vocabulary of most child professionals. For some historical perspective, it's worth noting that a study of child-rearing articles in Ladies' Home Journal, Women's Home Companion, and Good Housekeeping for the years 1890, 1900, and 1910 found that one third of them were about character development.
The myth that parents don't have the right to instill their values in their children. Once again, the standard dogma here is that children must create their own values. But of course, children have precious little chance to do that, since the rest of the culture has no qualms about imposing values. Does it make sense for parents to remain neutral bystanders when everyone else from scriptwriters, to entertainers, to advertisers, to sex educators--insists on selling their values to children?
Louis Sullivan, the [former] secretary of health and human services, points out that "study after study has shown that children who are raised in an environment of strong values tend to thrive in every sense."
It doesn't make sense for parents to work at creating one type of moral environment at home, and then send their children to a school that teaches a different set of values. Families concerned to instruct their children in virtue and character cannot rely on schools to do likewise. As we have seen, many schools have adopted theories and methods that are hostile to family values. Indeed, some educational theorists seem to proceed on the assumption that parents and families hardly matter. John Dewey, still considered America's chief philosopher of education, conspicuously omitted any mention of home or family in his otherwise exhaustive Democracy and Education. Dewey's omission is now reflected in the classroom. Paul Vitz's 1983 study of elementary school textbooks concluded that "traditional family values have been systematically excluded from children's textbooks." Philosopher Michael Levin of New York University goes further by describing current public school textbooks as having "a decided animus against motherhood and the family." The attitude of many educators is that parents are hopelessly out of date. Thus Princeton sociologist Norman Ryder approvingly observes that "education of the junior generation is a subversive influence," and identifies the public school as "the chief instrument for teaching citizenship, in a direct appeal to the children over the heads of their parents."
An increasing number of parents are fed up with this sort of philosophy and are voting with their feet. An article in the December 9, 1991, U.S. News and World Report entitled "The Flight from Public Schools" claims that "the nation's faith in its public schools is fading fast." Some families are abandoning public schools because they view them as educationally ineffective, some because they consider them dangerous, and some because they are seeking more traditional forms of moral or religious education.
What are the alternatives to public education?
Private schools. The existence of private preparatory schools makes it possible for parents to choose a school with a philosophy and tradition in keeping with their own. The private school option is, however, an expensive one and beyond the reach of most families.
Religious schools. The number of private schools increased by nearly 30 percent during the 1980s, with most of the increase accounted for by Christian schools and academies. While many of these new schools are as yet untested, the results of Catholic religious education are well known, According to the U.S. News article, Catholic schools boast a rate of graduation of 95 percent versus 85 percent for public schools, and they send 83 percent of their graduates to college as opposed to 52 percent of public school graduates. What accounts for the success of Catholic schools? Paul Hill of the Rand Corporation explains it this way: "If a school says, `Here's what we are, what we stand for,' kids almost always respond to it by working hard. Catholic schools stand for something; public schools don't."
Home school. The number of students schooled at home jumped from 10,000 in 1970 to 300,000 in 1990. Home schoolers take seriously the adage that "parents are their children's first and most important teachers." The advantage claimed by home schoolers is that parents can provide an education in keeping with their own religious and moral values, and at the same time supply more personal attention to their children's educational needs.
The word "culture" comes from the word "cultivation." Both plants and people grow best when a good environment has been prepared for them. For the youngest and most tender plants, the best environment is a greenhouse. It gives them a head start: upon being transplanted, such plants are larger, stronger, and more resilient to disease than other plants. Children need similar protection and nurturing for healthy moral development. "Then," as it says in the Psalms, "our sons in their youth will be like well-nurtured plants" (Psalm 144:12). The child brought up in a good home environment will be stronger, healthier, and more resistant to the various moral diseases circulating in the larger culture.
The first way to develop good habits is through good discipline. When Jeane Westin, the author of The Coming Parent Revolution, asked parents of grown or nearly grown children what they would do differently, the most frequent response was "increased discipline." These parents felt themselves victims of parenting advice that put a premium on "understanding" children and "relating" to them. As a result of such advice, many of these mothers and fathers had "understood" themselves into immobility. Unable to set limits, they found themselves accepting their children's most outrageous demands and behaviors. They were acting on the assumption that discipline must come from within the child. The problem, as Westin points out, is that children never learn to discipline themselves unless parents start them on that road.
It is for that reason that children need parents, not professional nurses and counselors. This view is corroborated by research into family patterns conducted by Dr. Diana Baumrind of the University of California at Berkeley. She found that the best-adjusted and most self-possessed children had parents who were loving, but also demanding, authoritative, and consistent in their discipline. By contrast, permissive parents, no matter how loving, produced children who lacked self-control, initiative, and resilience.
Setting limits and enforcing habits of good behavior is not easy in the short run, but it is the best policy for the long run. One paradoxical benefit for the child is more freedom when he grows older. Psychologist William Coulson observes of several friends, accomplished musicians who were made to practice their instruments as youngsters, that they "are able to do what they want today because they weren't free to do what they wanted when they were young."
Another good habit for children to acquire is helping with household chores. According to a Harvard study, which followed the lives of 465 boys into middle age, boys who were given jobs or household chores grew up to become happier adults, had higher-paying jobs and greater job satisfaction, had better marriages and better relationships with their children and friends, and were physically healthier than adults who had not assumed similar responsibilities as children. Psychiatrist George E. Vaillant, who directed the study, has a simple explanation: "Boys who worked in the home or community gained competence and came to feel they were worthwhile members of society. And because they felt good about themselves, others felt good about them."
The point of chores is to give children a sense of contributing to the family. And this sense of contributing increases the sense of belonging. Moreover, by encouraging a child to help with the work of the household, parents develop the child's natural desire to imitate into a habit that will serve him or her well for a lifetime.
If there is a cultural vacuum in many homes, a large part of the reason is that television has become the organizing principle of family life. Television, as critic Kenneth Myers has observed, can no longer be considered simply a part of the culture; rather, as Myers puts it, "it is our culture." "Television," he goes on to say, "is ... not simply the dominant medium of popular culture, it is the single most significant shared reality in our entire society. In television we live and move and have our being."
More than any other medium or institution, television defines what is and is not important. It shapes our sense of reality. It confers significance on events by paying attention to them, or, by withholding attention, it denies them significance. It does not, for example, confer much significance on religion. Although religious faith still plays a significant part in the lives of real families, it is close to nonexistent in the lives of television families. As critic Ben Stein observes in the Wall Street Journal, almost never does a TV character go to church or temple, seek religious counsel, or pray for moral guidance. Another impression left by television is that sex underlies everything: that it is constantly on everyone's mind--or should be. At the same time, as content-analysis studies have shown, television sex rarely takes place within the context of marriage but almost exclusively outside it. If schools are sometimes working at cross-purposes to parental values, the division between television and traditional family values is even sharper. As one Lubavitcher father observes, "It opens up the home to become the receptacle for whatever somebody in Los Angeles, or wherever, wants to dump onto your living room floor and into your kids' minds." "Those who think that their children will remain immune are just kidding themselves," says another Lubavitcher father.
Perhaps the most profound effect of television watching, however, is its effect on family relationships. Regular television viewing deprives families of opportunities to interact with one another. There are just so many hours in the day, and, right now, for many families television takes up a disproportionate number of them. Watching TV is much easier than conversation, and it is certainly easier than confrontation--although confrontation is sometimes what is called for in family life. Because TV tends to pacify children, thus providing temporary harmony, many parents use it as a substitute for the hard work of establishing real discipline. As Marie Winn observes in Children Without Childhood, "Instead of having to establish rules and limits ... instead of having to work at socializing children in order to make them more agreeable to live with, parents could solve all these problems by resorting to the television set. `Go watch TV' were the magic words." Kenneth Myers makes a similar observation: "I do believe that addiction to television (as opposed to deliberate, measured viewing) makes sincere and deep relations with people and with reality more difficult to sustain."
One group that has succeeded in raising loving and stable families is the Lubavitcher Hasidim. Although the Lubavitchers live in densely populated urban areas, their children are remarkably free of the plague of drugs, violence, and irresponsible sex from which other urban children suffer. For the Lubavitchers and other Orthodox Jews the center of religious life is the home. They regard the home as a sacred place, and their major priority is their children's moral and spiritual development. Lubavitchers place great emphasis on respect for parents and other elder relatives, such as grandparents. Close contact is maintained with relatives, and major Jewish holidays are occasions for convivial get-togethers.
Edward Hoffman, a clinical psychologist who has studied and written about the Lubavitchers, provides some revealing details of Lubavitcher life:
Far more than in mainstream America today, Lubavitcher children are taught to be compassionate and altruistic. Because charity is venerated as an act of piety, youngsters are expected to make a small contribution every Friday (before Sabbath) to the "charity box" that is prominently displayed in their home. In accordance with biblical precepts Lubavitcher parents are expected to tithe their income to charitable causes. In this way, too, family members learn to think in terms of mutual sharing rather than egoistic gratification.
If life among the Lubavitchers is more harmonious than in most families, part of the reason seems to lie in their orientation to a higher plan and purpose than the merely secular. Hoffman writes, "Lubavitchers partly attribute their vibrant family life to the fact that children do not `take orders' from parents. Rather, as one Hasidic rabbi explained to me, `All family members "take orders" from God, as we understand His commands in the Bible and other sacred books.' In the Hasidic view, the presence of clear religious dictates delineating right versus wrong behavior makes the parental role far easier--and less conflicted--than that faced by nonreligious parents in America."
The Lubavitchers seem like a curiosity to most Americans. Yet we find a similar orientation--to family and religion--among other groups who maintain thriving and cohesive families: other observant Jews, Greek Orthodox, Black Muslims, Mormons, Amish, and Asian-Americans. From a historical perspective, the greater curiosity is the current assumption that the family can thrive as a purely secular entity. In Hebrew, Roman, and European civilizations of the past, and even in this country during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the idea of the sanctity of the home was the rule, not the exception. And as with the Lubavitchers, many religious rituals or scripture readings took place in the home. Thus home life was linked to something larger than itself, to a larger vision and purpose. This twin vision of the family as being sacred in itself and as set within a larger sacred framework gave added authority to parents, and added strength to family bonds.