In an article titled Are We Living in a Moral Stone Age?, philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers writes: “We often hear that today Johnny can’t read, can’t write, and has trouble finding France on a map. It is also true that Johnny is having difficulty distinguishing right from wrong. Along with illiteracy and innumeracy, we must add deep moral confusion to the list of American educational problems.”

Amid fanfare, a new curriculum item has arrived on the scene in North Carolina’s public schools. It’s called character education, and along with the Student Citizen Act of 2001, promotes target behaviors that successful character education students should exhibit. Traits identified in the character education handbook are courage, good judgment, integrity, kindness, perseverance, respect, responsibility, and self-discipline.

Can a handbook and curriculum plan transform the morally confused into the morally upright? The state of North Carolina is betting that the answer is yes. Local school boards were required to implement character instruction by the beginning of the 2002-03 school year, unless they were granted a temporary exemption.

What the ethics experts say

The new curriculum manual makes liberal reference to centers of study in ethics, morality, and values. Prominent among these are The Center for the Fourth and Fifth R’s (for respect and responsibility), the Josephson Institute of Ethics, the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character, and the John Templeton Foundation.

Thomas Lickona, author of Raising Better Children and Educating For Character: How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibility and a faculty member at the State College of New York at Cortland, is associated with the Center for the Fourth and Fifth R’s. Lickona wrote the definition of character education that opens the new manual. The definition emphasizes student behaviors that stem from embracing “universal values that we all share.”

The welcome page for the Internet site of The Center for the Fourth and Fifth R’s says, “Character means living by these core values – understanding them, caring about them, and acting upon them.” Accordingly, a student who succeeds in the character education curriculum will presumably embody these traits.

Lickona’s book, Educating for Character, focuses on what schools can do as one component of the process, but the dedication page, which reads “to God,” indicates that character education, for Lickona, exists on a broader plain than just in the classroom. His work does not promote religion or a religion, but a deeper background clearly underlies the principles he advocates.

The Center for the Fourth and Fifth R’s addresses one difficult moral question by describing the behaviors that contribute to good character, as well as those that do not. In the essay The Neglected Heart: Ten Emotional Dangers of Premature Sexual Involvement, there is no moral haze surrounding uncommitted sex. The essay argues that the corruption of character and the debasement of sex are the consequences of premature, uncommitted sexual activity. In short, it concludes that people of good character would not engage in this activity, which is inconsistent with the development of good character. The North Carolina handbook does not transfer that sentiment to the text it has prepared for classroom teachers.

Other background sources for the manual also take a well-defined stand. Michael Josephson, president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics, released a 2002 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth. Commenting on the moral state of American youth, Josephson said, “The scary thing is so many kids are entering the workforce to become corporate executives, politicians, airplane mechanics, and nuclear inspectors with the dispositions of cheaters and thieves.”

By almost any definition, Josephson’s survey reveals dramatic declines in standards for good character. The contribution North Carolina chose to add to its curriculum handbook is a page paraphrasing the Golden Rule, as attributed to 13 religious thinkers or belief systems. This is couched in a section of text whose primary message appears to be diversity or multiculturalism, rather than the behavioral mandate stated as the Golden Rule.

Similarly, the handbook draws on the work of the John Templeton Foundation, which publishes a set of guidelines known as the Laws of Life. In North Carolina’s handbook educators are encouraged to have students enter the Laws of Life Essay contest. According to the curriculum manual, the contest “encourages young people to discover for themselves the core values that guide them.”

Nowhere on the John Templeton Foundation website is this process of self-discovery of own values identified with the philosophy of the founder. The site does identify the aims of the foundation, however, and its philosophy: “to encourage the world to catch the vision of the tremendous possibilities for spiritual progress in an open and humble approach to life;” and “to encourage growth in appreciating the potential of free societies.”

The Templeton Foundation started the Forgiveness Project in 1999 to research the scientific effects of forgiveness on offenders and victims alike. While the North Carolina manual embraced the credentials of a number of highly regarded ethical studies centers, the manual hardly embraced the spirit of the work the centers do.

History of character decline

Lickona states that the decline of values education coincided with the rise of evolutionary and relativistic theories, which started in the scientific community, but affected thinking elsewhere in society. Darwin’s and Einstein’s theories, and new studies in empirical psychology, which were popular at Yale University in the 1920s, undermined the earlier moral absolutes, Lickona said.

What crept into modern thinking instead was logical positivism and moral relativism, the idea that there is no objective right or wrong, and that all values are relative.

The belief that we should all be free to choose our own values, or that no one has the right to impose their values on another, is a further part of that legacy. The confusion over whose values we should teach, and the fear that teaching any version of morality in the schools would amount to teaching religion, has paralyzed character education in the public sector. Schools have failed to achieve at least one of the two great goals of education: teaching people to be good. Students who have not developed self-discipline cannot help their students to be smart, either.

Where are we in 2002?

Trends reported by the Center for the 4th and 5th R’s reveal serious values problems in young people. They report that in a survey most college students said they had cheated on a test or major assignment, that six of 10 high schoolers have tried drugs other than alcohol, and that four out of 10 ninth-graders say they have had sexual intercourse. They recount growing ethical illiteracy, “including ignorance of moral knowledge as basic as the Golden Rule and the tendency to engage in destructive behavior without thinking it wrong” as evidence of a national crisis of character.

A 2002 survey by the Josephson Institute of Ethics statistically documents a decade of moral deterioration, concluding that children today are significantly more likely to cheat, steal, and lie than children 10 years ago. The report was released as part of the national Character Counts! week of October 20-26.

In a final bit of irony, the percentage of students who agreed in 2002 with the statement “When it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know” was 76 percent for students in general; 79 percent agreed that “It’s not worth it to lie or cheat because it hurts your character.”

Character education sounds extremely appealing in the current environment, especially when one considers how far we have to go to return to a civil school society. “It is not a ‘quick fix’ or silver-bullet cure-all” states the North Carolina manual. “It is a transformation of the culture and life of the school,” according to Dr. Marvin Berkowitz, quoted in the text.

On a cautious note, the temptation to leave yet another aspect of childrearing to the schools will surely be felt. Just as children now receive breakfasts and lunches, health, and sex education, and virtually all academic instruction outside the home, there may be a tendency to relegate this aspect of education exclusively to schools as well, simply because it is the easy route.

Will the North Carolina curriculum transform the life of schools? It will if students “become good,” by behaving with respect, responsibility, and all the rest.

Since the curriculum manual imports none of the moral arguments for good behavior from its sources, however, and asks students to “discover core values for themselves,” it seems entirely possible that the moral haze suffusing school corridors may linger a while longer. Whether students will fail this new curriculum, and on what grounds, is an interesting and open question.

Palasek is assistant editor for Carolina Journal.