Once when I was a guest on a radio talk show, a parent phoned in to tell us about a school incident that frustrated and disturbed her. A few weeks earlier, the parent had received a curt note from her son's 5th grade teacher informing her that her son had been caught taking lunch money out of his classmates' backpacks. Students in the class had been reporting missing lunch money for some time, and the school finally identified this woman's son as the culprit.
The woman requested a meeting at the school, and the next day she found herself in a room with the 5th grade teacher and an assistant principal who was there in the role of guidance counselor. The woman expressed her dismay at her son's behavior and said that she was determined to see that it never happened again. She then asked how they could work together to give him the message that stealing is wrong.
The teacher and counselor greeted this question with a moment of awkward silence. Then the counselor said something along the lines of, "Well, it's important for you to know that we are speaking with your son about this incident, and we are not referring to it as 'stealing.' We don't want to give your child a self-image as a thief, which could only stigmatize him. Instead, we are calling it 'uncooperative behavior,' and we have explained to him that he will never be popular if he continues to act this way. This approach reflects our professional judgment, and we recommend that you take the same approach and support our efforts."
The mother said that when she tried to discuss the matter with her son, he "just blew it off" by saying, "Don't worry, Mom, the school is handling this." She had no confidence that the boy had learned any kind of indelible lesson from his misconduct.
Now the school, in its well-intended but clumsy way, certainly tried to meet this student where he was, playing on his desire for popularity and social acceptance. But by consciously avoiding terms like right, wrong, and stealing (the literal description of the student's deed), the school rejected moral language that could guide the student throughout his life. The message the school offered the boy was instrumental and amoral: You should avoid actions that will make you unpopular. This is hardly a charter for a life of ethical integrity.
The Building Blocks
Morality is a natural part of the human system. Every child begins life with the rudimentary building blocks of character. Four such blocks identified in recent scientific studies are empathy, fairness, self-control, and obligation (Damon, 1992, 1999; Kochanska, Murray, & Harlan, 2000; Thompson, 1998; Wilson, 1993).
Empathy, the capacity to experience another's pleasure or pain, provides the foundation for caring and compassion. Even newborns cry when they hear sounds of crying and show signs of pleasure at happy sounds; by the second year of life, it is common for children to comfort a peer or a parent in distress.
A concern for fairness emerges as soon as children begin playing with friends. When a playmate grabs all the cookies or refuses to relinquish a spot on a swing set, the protest "That's not fair!" is a predictable response, because even very young children understand that they have an obligation to share with others. The child's desire for self-control can be seen in an infant's eagerness to regularize behavior through repetition, rituals, and rules. Obligation expresses itself in children's wishes to follow the directives and expectations of their caregivers.
Yet despite these robust early beginnings, the child's natural moral sense requires nurturing if it is to develop into a mature and reliable commitment to act in a caring and ethical manner. For one thing, the child's initial moral inclinations rely entirely on transient mood states. A flash of anger in a 3-year-old quickly extinguishes any empathy for the playmate who provoked the anger. In addition, the child's early leanings do not come with any program for moral action. We would not want to count on children to create a just social world, asThe Lord of the Flies by William Golding (Coward-McGann, 1954) illustrated in a chilling way.
The Need for Guidance
In order for children's natural moral capacities to become fully formed character dispositions, their natural empathy must develop into a sustained concern for others, their sense of fairness must grow into a commitment to justice, their desire for self-control must grow into a sense of personal responsibility, and their feeling of obligation must become a determination to contribute to noble purposes beyond the self. Without this kind of growth, the child's early capacities may atrophy or take on grotesque forms.
For example, a counselor working with delinquent youth recalled one homicidal 14-year-old saying that he felt broken-hearted whenever he thought about people cutting down trees for Christmas (Samenow, 1984). This boy had wreaked violence on numerous people without regret, yet he felt sadness for fallen pine trees. The annals of criminal justice are full of such cases, psychopaths who have feelings for a pet or a younger sister but who treat nearly everyone else with absolute callousness.
Adult guidance is an essential ingredient in transforming children's natural moral inclinations into dependable and effective character traits. Education provides the bridge from the natural virtues to lives of ethical integrity and compassion.
All students enter school with a rich and lively morality, stemming from the moral inclinations they were born with and enhanced by their experiences since birth. They care about their family and friends and want to do the right thing. At the same time, they don't always know what the right thing is, and they (like all of us) are capable of selfish, destructive, and dishonorable behavior.
It is the vital responsibility of every school to work with the vigorous moral sense that students bring with them in a way that turns these inclinations into solutions for the ethical challenges students will confront. In a world where parents are not always on the scene and many communities have disintegrated, the bridge from a student's natural moral sense to the student's established moral character runs through the school.
Making the Most of Opportunities
The boy who stole lunch money no doubt had a moral sense. He very likely cared about other people in his life, including at least some of his classmates, and he almost certainly understood that losing valued property is painful. When he stole the money, he probably did not think about how his actions caused pain for others. Nor did he take seriously the social laws against stealing. These are insights that any school should be prepared to teach. The boy's behavior provided the school with an opportunity for education about the moral implications of stealing and other antisocial behavior, as well as about the purpose of societal laws. On this chance to score valuable points toward its moral education aims, the school dropped the ball.
In my travels to schools, I have witnessed many similar missed opportunities. The most common of these revolve around cheating and other breaches of academic integrity. Cheating and plagiarism on homework assignments occur with astonishing frequency—I have heard rates as high as 80 percent of students who have done this at least once during high school— yet relatively few schools use such incidents to teach moral awareness.
- Cheating is unfair because it gives the cheater an unfair advantage over students who do not cheat.
- Cheating breaks the trust between student and teacher.
- Cheating violates the school rules, and rules are necessary for preserving social order and individual rights.
- Cheating is dishonest behavior, and no one wants to become a person who is known (by self and others) as dishonest.
These four points all connect with students' natural moral capacities: fairness, empathy, social regulation, and self-control. But they also show students how their natural inclinations apply to real-world challenges, such as living up to the code of academic integrity, despite temptations to do otherwise.
In the stealing example that I presented at the outset of this article, the school could have emphasized themoral—not just instrumental—reasons why people shouldn't steal. Such moral reasons include respecting the rights of others in the same way that you expect them to respect your rights (the Golden Rule); refraining from disreputable behavior so you will be known as a person of integrity; upholding rules that are necessary for social harmony and justice; and having compassion for peers who need the goods you might steal from them. When a teacher conveys such principles to a student, the teacher conveys both an understanding of how decent societies work and a program for a life of good character.
Considering Student Concerns
The example of the lunch-money thief was a case of a school's stooping to a student's level rather than attempting to elevate it. Rather than show the student how his deed violated important moral norms, the school did little more than validate the idea—already familiar enough in early adolescence—that popularity is desirable.
But at least as common as such mistakes are examples of the opposite sort—that is, schools that pay too little attention to what students know or care about. These schools try to reach students with language that is too removed from their own motives and experiences. In such cases, no bridges at all are built, and the students ignore or misunderstand the schools' messages.
Recently a friend who works with a major state education department showed me the standards that the state currently uses to guide instruction in 8th grade civics. As we read through the document, we both felt abashed at our ignorance of many of the concepts that the standards required. Students were expected to be able to "describe the nation's blend of civic republicanism, classical liberal principles, and English parliamentary traditions" and to "analyze the principles and concepts codified in state constitutions between 1777 and 1781 that created the context out of which American political institutions and ideas developed." We looked at each other in amazement: This is meant for 8th graders, not political science doctoral students!
In all the nuanced treatments of political process and constitutional democracy, it was hard to see what any 13-year-old could connect with. Missing entirely were insights about the kinds of issues that children have experienced: governing play and games through social rules; establishing just solutions when peers disagree; respecting authority (including determining whether authority is legitimate); and obtaining redress for legitimate grievances.
When civics is taught through the lens of a student's own concerns and experiences, it comes to life. For example, the civil rights movement of the 1960s taught thousands of young people— many of whom had experienced discrimination in their own lives—valuable lessons about constructive civic participation and democracy that have lasted them a lifetime (see MacAdam, 1988).
Moral and character education must consist of more than skin-deep efforts that ask students to merely recite virtuous words such as honesty, tolerance, respect, courage, and so on. Moral and character education need to engage students in activities that help them acquire regular habits of virtuous behavior. Such active engagement nurtures students' capacity to make moral choices freely.
Toward an Enduring Moral Sense
Teachers should make the effort to present admirable examples to the young, and they should regularly discuss with students the deep questions of meaning, purpose, and what really matters in life. Our research shows that youngsters learn moral truths by seeing them enacted in the lives of real people and by reflecting on how this informs their own search for direction (Damon, 2009). At the same time, it is essential that teachers help build bridges from students' own lived experiences to their development of a mature moral character.
To accomplish this, teachers must be careful not to lose their students in a barrage of negativity. Character education, in addition to teaching children what not to do (don't lie, don't cheat, don't act disrespectfully, and so on) also must have a positive side, inspiring young people to dedicate themselves to higher purposes. In the long run, it is a sense of positive inspiration that captures students' imaginations.
Charitable work is one way to introduce students to a larger purpose. Research has found that community service programs, especially when combined with reflection about the significance of serving others, are powerful supports for character development (Hart, Atkins, & Donnelly, 2006; Youniss & Yates, 1997).
Another source of inspiration that students are eager to speak about is vocation, which goes beyond working to earn a living (as important as that is). The idea that work can be a calling—a means of using one's skills and talents to contribute to the betterment of the world—is a powerful source of purpose for any student. As a discussion topic, the meaning of work fits naturally into many parts of the school day. Teachers, guidance counselors, and coaches can all take part in helping students develop a sense of vocation.
To fulfill their character education missions, schools should make special efforts to provide students with these sources of inspiration, enabling young people to discover their own admirable purposes. Once young people are committed to truly noble aims, they won't need external injunctions to walk the straight and narrow path.