Education with Character

James Arthur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134471836
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The establishment of citizenship education as a compulsory subject has recently been accompanied by the government's policy of 'promoting education with character.' Schools are identified as having a crucial role to play in helping to shape and reinforce basic character traits that will ultimately lead to a better society. This radical new policy is explicitly linked to raising academic standards and to the needs of the emerging new economy. This book provides an introduction to character education within the British context by exploring its meanings, understandings, and rationale, through the perspective of a number of academic disciplines. The author examines character education from a philosophical, religious, psychological, political, social and economic perspective to offer a more detailed understanding of character education and what it can offer. He also considers how British schools can implement character education successfully and what lessons we can draw from the American experience. This book will be of interest to academics, researchers, policy makers and teachers with responsibility for citizenship education in their schools.

1: Character and the litany of alarm

Character is simply habit long continued.

Plutarch

To emphasise the idea of character is to recognise that our actions are also acts of self-determination; in them we not only reaffirm what we have been but also determine what we will be in the future. By our actions we not only shape a particular situation, we also form ourselves to meet future situations in a particular way. Thus the concept of character implies that moral goodness is primarily a prediction of persons and not acts, and that this goodness of persons is not automatic but must be acquired and cultivated.

Stanley Hauerwas (1981: 49)

One of the most significant ethical developments during the past two decades has been a deepening concern for character. We are rediscovering the link between private character and public life. We are coming to see that our societal problems reflect, in no small measure, our personal vices. Scholarly discussion, media analysis, and everyday conversation have all focused attention on the character of our elected leaders, our fellow citizens, and our children.

Thomas Lickona (1991: 49)

To enter on a discussion about character and, even more, about character education is to enter a minefield of conflicting definition and ideology. It is rare indeed to find an educational topic about which there is so much fundamental disagreement. The only generally agreed position seems to be acknowledgement of its importance.

There is, first, the question of how to define character: can there be said to exist such a thing as a regular and fixed set of habitual actions in a person that constitutes his or her character? A Marxist might regard character as a fluid entity determined by the power structure of the existing society; a Calvinist as an unvarying orientation decided by God. Various shades of psychological and psychiatric opinion would point to early socialization or lack of it as being responsible. Secular liberalism, long predominant in educational theory, looks to modification and reinforcement through discussion and persuasion. Character education is inherently a multidisciplinary endeavour, which requires its adherents and critics to ask divergent questions and employ disparate methods in approaching the subject.

Given the multifarious positions taken in respect of character, it follows that the discussion about character education, and whether it is possible, is equally discordant. The variety of approaches results in a bewildering variety of educational schemes and curricula. This may be seen as a positive phenomenon potentially resulting in concrete classroom solutions, or perhaps as a wasteful overlapping of character education resources. James Leming (1993a) believes that this diversity of academic opinion hampers effective development of character education as a school subject. He says that: ‘the current research in the field consists of disparate bits and pieces of sociology, philosophy, child development research, socio-political analysis, and a variety of different programmes of evaluation’. It has proved a difficult task for teachers and academics to arrive at a clear and workable definition of character, and more particularly, character education.

Why, then, enter this minefield? In short, because it is important. ‘Character education’ is a rapidly growing movement. In the USA there has been a proliferation of organizations, courses, literature and curriculum materials seeking to promote character education. The New Labour government in the UK, with its heavily moralistic ethos, has taken up the baton. The establishment of citizenship education as a compulsory subject has been accompanied by the Green Paper, Schools: Building on Success (February 2001) and the White Paper, Schools: Achieving Success (September 2001). The latter speaks at length of ‘education with character’. The goal of this ‘education with character’ appears to be to instil certain virtues so that they become internal principles guiding both the pupil’s behaviour and decision-making for operation within a democracy. It is intimately connected with citizenship.

Given the generally agreed importance of the topic, it is the aim of this book to review some of the existing work and its underlying assumptions in order to clarify the confusion of programmes currently in our schools. Such a task should not be approached without an honest statement of one’s own position. First, that there is such a thing as character, an interlocked set of personal values which normally guide conduct. Character is about who we are and who we become, good and bad. Second, that this is not a fixed set easily measured or incapable of modification. Third, that choices about conduct are choices about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ actions and thoughts. I believe that we can be active in shaping character in ourselves and in others. Character education is normally viewed as a specific approach to moral education. The argument is, that character education is not simply about the acquisition of social skills: it is ultimately about what kind of person a pupil will grow up to be. Whilst recognising the wide range of factors involved in the formation and expression of character, I intend this book to concentrate on moral aspects of the concept of character. The moral economy of schooling refers to how schools teach and develop character and how they establish norms to evaluate character. At the very least it is about organizing the school around a vision and ethos that links the ethical to the demands of public life.

The litany of alarm

Those who have advocated character education in America and Britain often present it as a response to a list of ills facing society which originate in the behaviour of juveniles. This list would normally include the following, which have all shown a stubborn increase despite many attempts by government, schools and welfare agencies to address their causes: suicides, especially of young males; teenage pregnancy and abortion; the crime rate, particularly theft by minors; alcohol and drug abuse; sexual activity and sexual abuse; teenage truancy and mental health problems. This teenage dysfunction has to be contextualized and set against a backdrop of family breakdown, domestic violence, poverty and the media’s provision of an endless diet of violence and sex. Perhaps as a result of this, increasing numbers of children are arriving in early schooling showing symptoms of anxiety, emotional insecurity and aggressive behaviour. They seem devoid of many social skills and suffer low self-esteem. There are many reasons for the existence of these symptoms but they have a common effect in significantly reducing the ability of the school to develop positive character traits.

Thomas Lickona (1996) lists a further set of indicators of youth problems: dishonesty; peer cruelty; disrespect for adults and parents; self-centredness; self-destructive behaviour, and ethical illiteracy. Altruism often appears as the exception whilst self-interest has become the rule. The general moral relativism of society is also routinely blamed by character educators for this litany of social and moral breakdown, which is often referred to as a ‘crisis in moral education’ (see Kilpatrick 1992: 13f.). This moral relativism, it is claimed, has replaced the belief in personal responsibility with the notion of social causation. All of the social indicators above have increased rapidly since the 1960s and there is clear evidence, from a brief reading of British Social Trends, that the problems are increasing with greater rapidity. Gertrude Himmelfarb (1995: 222) details how the statistics concerning social ills (crime, drunkenness, illegitimacy, pauperism, vagrancy etc.) in England in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century were all recording some decline, but fails to mention that other problems such as divorce, drugs, teenage prostitution and suicide were not recorded at all. Whilst Himmelfarb praises Victorian virtues, she does not suggest a return to them.

Social statistics today are often claimed to be far worse than those of the Victorian era and, according to character educators, show how our situation is deteriorating. They point to the social statistics to be found in British Social Trends (2002), which indicate that schoolchildren and young people in the age range 14–24 commit the greatest number of crimes in Britain. This category has the highest abortion rate, together with being the largest user of illegal drugs. It is also the category (from age 18) that has the lowest participation rate in local and general elections. Some of the statistics for this group exceed the rates for abortion, teenage pregnancy and crime in most countries in Europe and in the USA. The virtual irrelevance of the central tenets of the Judeo–Christian moral tradition to the lives of most British young people is often considered another significant factor in the perceived decline in moral standards. Schoolchildren are also regularly exposed to explicit images in the media with the implicit message that sexual activity is the norm, while many parents and teachers are silent on the matter.

A criticism levelled at promoters of character education by certain commentators is that they do not examine sufficiently the complex issues that underlie many of the social statistics they detail. David Purpel (1997: 147) makes the point that ‘Even if there has been a significant increase in teenage pregnancies there is still a question of why it is considered a moral transgression.’ He asks which framework character educators use to criticize the degeneration they see around them. For Purpel, teenage pregnancy and divorce are not problems at all. Others would strongly argue that there never was a ‘golden age’, with every generation for the past two hundred years producing its own ‘litany of alarm’ and harking back to the good old days. Harry McKown (1935: 18–34), writing in America in the 1930s, provides his own litany. He bemoans the social break-up of the family (caused by economic pressures as opposed to marital difficulties); he decries the excessive individualism of the age; notes the decline in citizen participation in elections; abhors the ‘tremendous increase in crime’; is saddened by fewer young people attending Church; is concerned by the negative effect of advertising on the young; and sees the implications for morality in everything from public dancing and smoking to the wearing by young people of ‘types of close-to-nature clothing and bathing suits’.

Timothy Rusnak (1998: 1) believes that fear is the justification for many character education programmes in the USA. The same sense of ‘fear’ is perhaps justification for the Social Affairs Unit’s publication in 1992 of Loss of Virtue: moral confusion and social disorder in Britain and America (Anderson 1992). Hyperbolic reaction to events often expresses itself as society-wide moral panic. The murder of James Bulger in 1993 was an example of this in Britain. The case involved two 10-year-old boys who captured, tortured and murdered a toddler in Liverpool. Their crime inspired a public debate about morality and character which was stimulated by the sensationalist tabloid press. Teachers at the boys’ school were criticized for failing to instil a sense of morality in their pupils. The Church of England was also blamed for not enunciating moral principles clearly enough. The trial judge in his summing-up referred to a horror film called Child’s Play 3, about a malevolent doll. The judge was struck by the similarities in the film to the method of the attack used by the boys on their victim. It was clear that someone, or something, had to be blamed – a scapegoat was needed. Although many found it difficult to accept that children could have been wholly responsible for this murder, the boys were found guilty and given long custodial sentences. But events such as these are not exclusive to our time. There are many such cases in the past. In 1954, for example, a 16-year-old British Boy Scout stabbed a 72-year-old woman to death with 29 blows because he was afraid she would discover his forgery of some Scouting certificates.

It is unlikely that an adequate working definition of character education for schools can be found by analysing extreme examples of child behaviour. Nor should efforts to control a child’s destructive or extreme behaviour be held out as character education. The truly valuable function of the litany of alarm is to help us fix our attention on how effectively to address the social and moral problems of individuals and society.

The rediscovery of character education

Terry McLaughlin and Mark Halstead (1999: 136) take issue with contemporary approaches to character education in the USA, alongside two major critics of the movement in America – David Purpel (1997) and Robert Nash (1997). They claim, rightly, that American character educators generally begin with detailing the social ills of society and then offer character education as a remedy; that these character educators also believe that core values can be identified, justified and taught. In addition, they claim that character educators seek explicit teaching in the public schools of moral virtues, dispositions, traits and habits, to be inculcated through lesson content and the example of teachers, together with the ethos of the school and direct teaching, and measure the success of character education programmes by the changes in the behaviour of pupils. Character educators also, they claim, leave explaining difficult moral concepts until later in the pupil’s development. McLaughlin and Halstead then criticize these views, arguing that character education is narrowly concerned with certain virtues, that it is restricted, limited and focuses on traditional methods of teaching; also, that there is a limited rationale given for the aims and purposes of character education by those who propose it in schools and that there is a restricted emphasis on the use of critical faculties in pupils. They observe the character education movement: ‘lacks a common theoretical perspective and core of practice’ (1999: 139).

Whilst McLaughlin and Halstead are reasonably sympathetic to character education, they paint a bleak picture of current practices in the USA. Above all, they fail to deal with Nash, whose language can often be extreme. Nash (1997) believes that most models of character education are deeply and seriously flawed, authoritarian in approach, too nostalgic, pre-modern in understanding of the virtues, aligned to reactionary politics, anti-intellectual, anti-democratic and above all dangerous. He seeks to replace this tradition of character education with one that is not based on any moral authority and lacks a common moral standard by which to evaluate competing moral vocabularies. McLaughlin and Halstead might have pointed out that he cannot condemn other competing moral vocabularies as he so obviously does from his own post-modern position. It appears that Nash refuses to acknowledge that all education rests on assumptions and beliefs and that a plurality of positions, including character education, can co-exist. Nash’s main contribution to the debate is to emphasize the importance of intellectual enquiry in educating for character.

In the case of Purpel, McLaughlin and Halstead, they do not answer his claim (1997: 140) that character educators are ‘disingenuous’ in their debates about character education and that they are effectively a conservative political movement with a hidden agenda. In any event, there is no necessary connection between a conservative political outlook and character education. Many have believed in the possibility of perfecting man through the alteration of his environment, as this book illustrates and as can be demonstrated by the experiments in character education in nineteenth-century Britain (see chapter 2). The real issue for character education lies in rationale and justification and in finding an answer to the question of why some character educators associate the concept with virtue ethics.

David Brooks and Frank Goble (1997) in The Case for Character Education follow a standard structure of argument used by many who advocate school-based character education. As previously mentioned, Harry McKown (1935) was one of the first to develop a model of writing about character within the context of schooling, a framework which has since been adopted by many others. McKown’s book defines character education, presents a 1930s litany of alarm, explains why we should have character education in schools, describes the objectives of such a programme, suggests how it should be in the curriculum, through the curriculum and as an extracurricular activity, how it should be in the home and community and how it might be assessed.

Brooks and Goble follow the same pattern. They first ask: what is wrong with kids? Their answer: ‘They just don’t seem to know the difference between right and wrong’ (1997: 1). They then focus on pupil rates of crime, etc., detailing a litany of alarm. This leads to the conclusion that something needs to be done. They cite a lack of standards as the reason for the problem and offer character education as the solution. They attack all the other methods of moral education, ranging from values clarification to cognitive theories of development, and this is followed by the outlining of a number of teaching methods for character education. A virtue ethics approach to character education is suggested, but what this would entail for teaching in schools is never explained.

The book has a Foreword by the retired chief executive of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation (acting as chair of the Board of the Character Education Partnership) in which he emphasizes the idea of crisis in American society: ‘Today in America we have far too many twelve-year-olds pushing drugs, fourteen- year-olds having babies, sixteen-year-olds killing in epidemic numbers. We have crime and violence everywhere, and unethical behaviour in business, the professions and in government.’ The book appears to be an inadequate explanation of why schools should adopt character education programmes. Brooks and Goble ignore the effects of poverty, the lack of educational resources, particularly the absence of good teachers in some schools, and the effects of increased ethnic and religious diversity in school and society.

A more educationally relevant and realistic approach to character education is provided by Edward DeRoche and Mary Williams (2001: 165). They present a range of practical suggestions for designing and implementing a character education programme in school. They acknowledge that research into the effectiveness of character education is extremely limited and that what research there is does not provide much proof of any effectiveness at all. They draw on the review of character education research by James Leming (1993a) and agree with him that didactic teaching methods have no significant effect on character development and that the development of reason does not necessarily result in a related change of behaviour. DeRoche and Williams argue strongly in favour of individualized school-based character education programmes that are designed by the whole school community within a context of guiding pupils to pursue what is worthwhile and good in life. To the question of whose values or virtues should be taught they answer that they must have consensual allegiance in the community. They give emphasis to community, particularly the powerful influence of the ethos of a school on character development. They are not alone in emphasizing this area since others, such as Kevin Ryan and Karen Bohlin in their excellent text (1999), give very serious attention to character building in community, to which we will return in chapter 9. All of these books, whether consciously or not, follow a model which has its origins in McKown’s 1935 seminal work and which was revived by Thomas Lickona’s publication of Educating for Character in 1991.

It is important to stress that few in America or Britain would consider the school the most important location for character education, even if it remains the main public institution for the formal moral education of children. The mass media, religious communities, youth culture, peer groups, voluntary organizations, and above all parents and siblings, exert significant influences on character formation. It cannot be easily assumed that the school makes more of a difference than any of these. However, it would be reasonable to suggest that certain positive features of the school will contribute to character development. It is common in society to hold pupils responsible, not only for their behaviour, but also for their own character. Yet the burden of character education has inevitably been falling principally on the school. Obviously, some schools have the potential to be more effective than others at influencing character development. Some would argue that the ordinary state school has a more limited role and would need to open longer and for many more days in the year to...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• British foreword
• American foreword
• 1: Character and the litany of alarm
• 2: An historical perspective on character formation
• 3: The virtues of character
• 4: Theological insights into character
• 5: Theories of character development
• 6: The politics of character
• 7: The social foundations of character
• 8: Character and the market economy
• 9: Character education
• 10: Schooling for character
• 11: Conclusion
• Bibliography