The Discourse of Character Education

Culture Wars in the Classroom

Peter Smagorinsky, Joel Taxel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135608668
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this book Peter Smagorinsky and Joel Taxel analyze the ways in which the perennial issue of character education has been articulated in the United States, both historically and in the current character education movement that began in earnest in the 1990s.

The goal is to uncover the ideological nature of different conceptions of character education. The authors show how the current discourses are a continuation of discourse streams through which character education and the national purpose have been debated for hundreds of years, most recently in what are known as the Culture Wars--the intense, often passionate debates about morality, culture, and values carried out by politicians, religious groups, social policy foundations, and a wide range of political commentators and citizens, in which the various stakeholders have sought influence over a wide range of social and economic issues, including education.

The centerpiece is a discourse analysis of proposals funded by the United States Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI). Discourse profiles from sets of states that exhibit two distinct conceptions of character are examined and the documents from particular states are placed in dialogue with the OERI Request for Proposals. One profile reflects the dominant perspective promoted in the U.S., based on an authoritarian view in which young people are indoctrinated into the value system of presumably virtuous adults through didactic instruction. The other reflects the well-established yet currently marginal discourse emphasizing attention to the whole environment in which character is developed and enacted and in which reflection on morality, rather than didactic instruction in morality, is the primary instructional approach. By focusing on these two distinct regions and their conceptions of character, the authors situate the character education movement at the turn of the twenty-first century in the context of historical notions about the nature of character and regional conceptions regarding the nature of societal organization.

This enlightening volume is relevant to scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and students across the field of education, particularly those involved in character education, moral development, discourse analysis, history and cultural foundations of education, and related fields, and to the wider public interested in character education.

PART I

INTRODUCTION
TO FRAMEWORK FOR THE STUDY

In this part of the book, we introduce the study and review the key constructs that inform our thinking about character education. In chapter 1 we introduce ourselves and our interest in the topic of character education. Chapter 2 then presents the purpose of our study and explains how we conducted it. In brief, we became interested in the national character education movement when our own state began seeking federal funds to begin pilot programs. We then requested the character education initiatives from a variety of states and became intrigued by the ways in which both character and character education were construed. Our readings of the proposals for character education funding yielded a number of questions, which we refined and consolidated into questions that inquired into (1) the discourses and attendant ideologies through which character education is proposed, (2) the content and process of character education, and (3) the ways in which the interventions are assessed.

We then introduce the study in three chapters. First, we provide a historical overview of character education in the United States Next, we review the current state of character education, particularly with respect to how character education is constructed by various stakeholders and which assumptions undergird each perspective. Finally, we review the theoretical approach we take to our project, particularly with respect to the notion of discourse and its ideological nature.

Character builds slowly, but it can be torn down with incredible swiftness.

—Faith Baldwin

Chapter 1

Introduction to the Project

This project began in part to extend a friendship that began in 1998 when we became colleagues at The University of Georgia. Our many conversations since then—about character education and much else—have helped clarify who we are and why we believe and act as we do. We hope that our work on this study has contributed to our understanding of how to be better people in our relationships with others and to be the kind of citizen a nation needs to keep a democratic society vital.

Our friendship undoubtedly has both a personal and cultural basis. Both of us are in our fifties, born at the beginning of the post-World War II baby boom to parents who grew up in New York City. Both of us claim a Jewish heritage, Joel through both parents and Peter through his father’s family (Peter’s mother comes from a German-Irish Catholic family). Our Jewish ancestors originate in Eastern Europe, where the pogroms—government-supported massacres of Jews—and conscription into the Russian army forced their families’ immigration to the United States. Similarly, on Peter’s mother’s side, immigration was forced by the Irish potato famine of 1845 to 1850, which many current Irish historians now regard as both an act of nature and an act of genocide, given that food exports from Ireland actually increased for Protestant merchants during the great famine (e.g., Metress & Rajner, 1996). We recount this heritage not to begin by claiming status as victims, but because we are proud of these heritages and the courage and perseverance it took to escape from these hostile circumstances. We imagine that our forebears would fare well in just about any conception of good character, having maintained their beliefs and families despite vigorous efforts to suppress and eradicate them and having overcome tremendous obstacles to emigrate to a nation that provided them with new opportunides for freedom of expression and belief and opportunities to provide good lives for their children.

For this reason and others, we are also proud to be U.S. citizens. We have often tried to imagine the experience of our grandparents and their families escaping their desperate circumstances, traveling across Europe with all their belongings in their hands and finally arriving at the seaports and doing what was necessary to board the ships heading west to the United States. These boats were crammed with other refugees seeking a better, more secure life. We wonder what it must have been to have finally seen, at the end of an arduous journey across the Atlantic, the Statue of Liberty slowly appear on the horizon as they approached New York City. What a magnificent sight that must have been! But the trip was not yet over. They had to endure the uncertainty of the immigration inspection, which could reject them for any number of reasons. Finally, however, they were admitted and, along with the other fortunate refugees, they dispersed to try to find and be reunited with their families in this strange foreign city, a different world altogether from the rural villages in which they had always lived.

Our pride in this heritage—both of our families and of the nation that took them in—acknowledges our disagreements with many of our fellow citizens on the purpose, substance, and structure of U.S. life. This sense of pride also recognizes that the people of our country, both those who share and those who oppose our perspective, have often fallen short of our nation’s ideals, articulated in our Declaration of Independence and codified in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. We have disagreed with U.S. foreign and domestic policy on more than a few occasions and have engaged in critiques of our leaders. We view this dissent more as an objection to the political agendas and policies of politicians and opinion leaders than as a rejection of the fundamentals of the political system that insures our right to hold dissident views and speak them in public and, should we choose, run for office and replace those with whom we disagree. We are well aware that this cherished freedom has been defended on many occasions through military power. For their sacrifices—including those made by members of our families—we are grateful, even if we have not supported every cause for which our military has been called to action.

Like many urban immigrants and have-nots during the 1930s and 1940s, our parents became FDR New Dealers, an influence that we acknowledge has shaped our views of U.S. society and provided the common value system that has contributed to our friendship. Roosevelt still serves as the lightning rod for the disputes we review in our study of character education: hero to the marginalized working class for whom he provided opportunities for work by expanding government (e.g., Freidel, 1990), defender of the status quo to those on the left who view with suspicion the New Deal’s preservation of capitalism during its greatest crisis (e.g., Davis, 1986), and scourge to those who believe that he undermined the United States’ competitive capitalist economy and society through a more interventionist approach to governance (e.g., Powell, 2003). As members now of the relatively comfortable middle class, we see merit in contributing some of our resources to the national financial pool to provide the opportunities that enabled our own families to succeed, even if we are often horrified by some expenditures of our taxed income.

Roosevelt’s introduction of the income tax to address the Great Depression remains a topic of debate today, serving as the great equalizer to those for whom taxation provides services and opportunities and as the slippery slope to socialism to those whose incomes are taxed most heavily to provide the social safety net that mitigates the extremes of business cycles. We see ourselves as products of our families’ value systems and origins in the bottom rungs of the U.S. social ladder as immigrant urban Jews and Catholics. In that regard, we are in full agreement with those who argue that culture is transmitted from generation to generation, if not wholly and without alteration.

We are both also parents, each with two children and Joel with a stepson as well. In our role as husbands and parents we have faced issues of character development up close and personal. Our interest in this topic is hardly incidental. As parents we have sought to instill values in our children, values that often need negotiation with our wives. We have no illusions about our motives in doing so. We want our kids to become good people, or at least good people as we understand humanity. We hope that they adopt what we consider to be our better qualities, just as we have ended up embracing many if not all values of our own parents.

Yet in our reading about character education, we have come across criticisms of people like ourselves (i.e., political progressives) that presume that we have no interest in raising our children to share our values. By progressive, a term we use throughout this book to describe people of a generally liberal political orientation, we mean that we have a fundamental dedication to democracy, peace, social justice, civil rights, civil liberties, and environmental awareness. Progressive magazine, founded by Robert La Follett in 1909, defines its mission as striving “to put forward ideas that will help bring about a more just society and a more peaceful, humane world” (­h­t­t­p­:­/­/­w­w­w­.p­r­o­g­r­e­s­s­i­v­e­.o­r­g­/­h­i­s­t­o­r­y­.h­t­m­l­). We recognize that these values must be compromised during extraordinary circumstances. We both, for instance, supported the retaliatory strikes against the Taliban following the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, if not the subsequent unprovoked invasion of Iraq.

Conservative critics have, we believe, often misrepresented the views of progressives as away to justify their own beliefs. We have read, for instance, that progressives or liberals want to cut the moral umbilical cord between parents and children so that morals can be constructed anew by each generation. We see this caricature of beliefs as extremely destructive in the national effort to educate for character, or for anything else for that matter. Like just about every parent we know across the political spectrum, we hope that our kids turn out okay (as we define it), all the while assuming that our kids will modify some of values that we have tried to impress upon them as they engage with the world on their own terms.

Although we see parental influence on children as being inevitable and within each parent’s prerogative, we consider some parental transmission of values to be, at the very least, problematic. For many generations, for instance, racism has been transmitted from parents to children throughout the United States. Bringing up young children in an environment of hatred cannot possibly sustain healthy, moral civilizations. Although we seek to avoid making negative judgments about people whose values depart from ours, we are quite certain that value systems built on hatred violate what we understand to be principles of morality. We are especially grieved that so much conflict bred from hatred emanates from faith communities, which many people assert provide the origins for all moral thinking. We are certainly sensitive on this issue given the ways in which our ancestors were persecuted throughout Europe, both before and after the rise of Hitler and throughout much of the history of Ireland. Yet this accumulated cultural experience, accompanied by the New Deal’s institutional compassion for ordinary people, has helped shape our perspective on human relationships, economics, and society.

Readers should not be surprised to learn that we are both registered Democrats and hold what most would regard as generally progressive or liberal views, although not always in accord with one another’s or the policies of the Democratic party and its office holders. Our publications and presentations on the topic of character education have argued in favor of what we later characterize as a progressive or liberal orientation (e.g., Smagorinsky, 1999, 2000, 2001a, 2002a, 2002b, 2004; Smagorinsky & Taxel, 2002a, 2002b), and other publications have critiqued society from a progressive perspective (e.g., Taxel, 1997, 2002). It would be disingenuous for us to present our study as an impartial analysis of character education when we are well aware that we embrace certain positions and question others. Our biases aside, we have tried to present both conservative and liberal approaches to character education as faithfully as we can, and have used conservative critiques of liberal education as a way to sharpen our thinking on these issues.

Our study profiles character education initiatives from two distinct regions of the United States, the Upper Midwest and the Deep South. Perhaps some readers might find us guilty of regional bias in our presentation. Yet both of us have lived in the two parts of the country that we profile and have found much to appreciate in each. Joel earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying there from 1972 to 1979, and has lived in Georgia since 1980. Peter grew up in Virginia, where he lived for 15 years; lived in the Chicago area from 1976 to 1990; and has lived south of the Mason-Dixon line since 1990, first in Oklahoma (which allowed slavery as a territory and enforced racial segregation until the1960s)and since 1998in Georgia. Our experiences of living in these distinct regions ring true with the accounts of regional culture we provide to contextualize the character education programs. Although we acknowledge that we personally prefer the perspective offered in the Upper Midwest to that of the Deep South, we should stress that we are not trying to make value judgments about the qualities of the people in either region. Rather, we are attempting to situate different perspectives on character education in local history, culture, and ideology.

Our outline of our backgrounds and biases is designed to contextualize our presentation. As we will argue, situating any social issue in its cultural context helps to understand how it came to be and how it is socially sustained. We will call on our readers to decide how well we have done our job.

ORGANIZATION FOR OUR STUDY

We have organized our presentation into five parts. First, we introduce the study. This introductory section includes four chapters. We begin by stating the problem that motivates and focuses our inquiry, and by outlining our method of in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Author Biographies
• Part I: Framework for the Study
• Part II: The Discourses of Character Education
• Part III: The Deep South: Didactic, Individualistic, Authoritarian Approaches to Character Education
• Part IV: The Upper Midwest: Community-Based, Reflective Approaches to Character Education
• Part V: Conclusion
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index