OP-ED: The Need for Character Education

In today’s world of public education, a child’s academic success and future prospects for happiness are determined by two narrow measures: their math and reading scores. 

Schools have been placed on state oversight lists and even shuttered for not showing improvement in these two areas.

As a result of this focus, our public schools have narrowed curriculum and directed their limited resources to support the singular goal of achieving higher scores. 

Art, physical education, music, foreign language, home economics, shop classes, etc., have been severely cut back or eliminated entirely at cash-strapped inner city schools to provide time for double doses of math and reading instruction.

Now while I believe that it is critical to have a literate and mathematically knowledgeable population, I do not think that these are the only skills that define an educated person.

Now more than ever, I think that we must take a serious look at the type of people that we want our young generation to be. In other words, how do we develop the content of their character?

To ensure that our schools are producing thoughtful, creative, articulate, sensitive and compassionate citizens, we must be explicit in our demand that schools are given the latitude to teach and nurture these traits in our children. 

At one time the primary goal of education was to produce good citizens who were active participants in civil society, capable of maintaining and defending our constitutional democracy as well as ensuring that we provided industry with a competent work force. 

The concern for the development of good citizens has diminished and the dominant theme in discussions of public education center on preparing a labor pool to serve the needs of multinational corporations. 

At one time, the home and the church were the places where children received direction on the development of their character and calibration of their moral compass. Today, the power of these two institutions in the area of character development has waned. This is clearly evidenced by the choices that too many of our children choose to make.

These include the not-so-dangerous but nonetheless degrading choices in personal appearance that our young people are allowed to engage in, such as young men sagging their pants so that their entire behinds are exposed and young ladies of school age dressing like strippers and prostitutes-- not to mention the facial and neck tattoos, some of which contain offensive language and images. 

These considerations also include more horrific choices, such as the popularity among teenagers with videotaping fights and posting the videos on line for the entire world to see as well as publicly humiliating each other with Facebook posts or Twitter tweets.

Whether we see our young people beating and shooting elderly people in broad daylight or assaulting innocent people to steal their electronic devices, it all boils down to our failure as a community and as a society to identify and prioritize the development of good character as one of the key elements to defining what a successful person looks like. 

One way that we can think about correcting this failure is by demanding that character education be made a mandatory part of school curriculum. By doing this, we would be saying in loud and clear terms that we value good character and good citizenship.  We would be telling our children that who they become as people and what we want our country to look like in the future matters to us.  

Many believe that by mandating character education in the schools, we are letting negligent parents and ineffective social and cultural institutions off of the hook.  I say that the schools are the one place that we can be sure that every child will have a chance to learn about their own role in maintaining the fabric of our society and will in turn teach their children to be of good character.  This will ensure that the cycle of people entering our civil life with no sense of responsibility to anyone but themselves will end. 

Some school systems, like the State Board of Education in North Carolina, have already begun to have serious discussions about the role of character education in their schools.   

And since we are so hung up on tests, let’s give one to see if the lessons of character were well learned.  Here is a sample of a potential question:

If you see two teenage girls engaged in a physical fight in public you

a)     Call 911 and report the incident to the police and locate the nearest adult to assist in breaking up the fight.

b)    Stop to watch or cheer on the fight

c)     Ignore it and mind your own business (after all you are not a snitch)

d)    Take out your cell phone to start videotaping to post on YouTube

Unfortunately for us, if this question were given to our children today, the majority of them would fail.