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Character Education

seen as a defense against the increasing secularization of American society as a consequence of its growing industrialization and urbanization. After World War I, the demands for character education subsided. For one thing, immigration was greatly curtailed so the worries on that score lessened. In addition, the newly emerging social sciences tried to distance themselves from religion, regarded as unscientific. For example, Gordon Allport (1927) at Harvard argued that personality (a system of measurable traits) rather than character (a system of unmeasurable values) was the

by David Elkind

haracter education is a luxury that we cannot afford. It has absolutely no demonstrated benefits and consumes precious instructional time that could be put to much better use. Todays teachers are already overwhelmed with demands to get students to meet state mandated academic standards as well as to teach drug, multicultural, and antibias curricula. In this pressured climate, character education is a needless additional burden. The truth is that the effort to put character education into our schools is driven by moral, rather than academic, concerns. These curricula are advocated because the larger society feels that its traditional values are threatened and that delinquent behavior appears to be spiraling out of control.
Before I make my case that character education is a time-consuming frill, however, a bit of history is necessary to demonstrate its societal, rather than its pedagogical, origins. schools around the turn of the century and was retained for a few decades thereafter. The waves of immigration of that time worried many established Americans who feared the immorality and lawlessness of the incoming hordes. Moral education in the schools was one way to help prevent thievery and vandalism by inculcating moral values while the children were still young. Such education was also

Character Education Since the Beginning of the Century

Character education was initially introduced as a curriculum into our

David Elkind is a professor of child development at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. He has written extenstively and is perhaps best known for his popular books The Hurried Child, All Grown Up and No Place to Go, and Miseducation. Professor Elkind is a past president of NAEYC. He currently is the co-host of the Lifetime television series Kids These Days.

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proper subject for psychological investigation and, by extension, for educational consideration. The post World War I rejection of moral education was aided and abetted by the research of Hartshorne and May (1928-1930) in the late 1920s who demonstrated that moral education was unrelated to childrens moral behavior. Finally, the growing evidence of the virulent racism and anti-semitism in Nazi Germany, and its strong support in this country (e.g., Henry Ford and Father Cauglin), made concern with morality a highly sensitive topic. For all these reasons and probably more, moral education was all but defunct in our schools until the 1960s. The events of the 1960s the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Womens Movement, and Watergate all served to once again raise our moral temperature. More heat was generated by social science with the research of psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg (1975) who elaborated and extended Piagets studies of moral development to include the advanced morality of adulthood. The timing was fortuitous because of the heightened awareness of the social, educational, and economic inequalities in our society. Kohlbergs work was widely disseminated and became required reading in our psychological and educational psychology textbooks and the basis for much new research on moral development, as well as new programs of moral education and values clarification in our classrooms. Although the new moral education initiatives were largely instigated by the moral and value conflicts of the 60s, they were aided and abetted by other societal changes. With the movement of women into the workforce, the increased rate of divorce,

and a growing number of single mothers and fathers, parents had less time to engage in moral and values training at home. Character education programs, introduced to counter the social inequities brought so violently to the surface in the 1960s, have now been appropriated to fill the void left by the growing decline of moral training in the home. What began as a reaction to a societal crises was continued as a remedy for changes in the family. Schools are now expected to compensate for the diminished role of parents as purveyors of moral values and virtues.

integrate. Parents of white children did not entertain African-American parents in their homes nor vice versa. At home, children could still get virulent racist messages that might undo any positive experiences they had at school. Children learn racism, much as they learn tolerance, from parents and other significant adults, not from one another. Peers can reinforce these attitudes but not create them. I believe a similar argument can be made for the uselessness of character education. First of all, it is not even clear what we mean by such education. My thesaurus, for example, has 53 entries for character. The most common definition, the one employed in educational circles, is that of the good person who exemplifies such virtues as honesty, truthfulness, fairness, generosity, locality, and fidelity. Many character education programs focus upon honesty and fairness, which are values that are basic to the society of schools. Yet even if we concentrate upon these values, two major problems remain. One of these is developmental, the other is situational. With regard to the development of honesty and fairness, we need to first recall that childrens understanding of these values changes with age. School-age children, for example, make up hypotheses (sometimes called lies) to explain certain events such as their having lifted something from a store. Once their hypotheses are formed, children really believe in them and often bend the facts to fit them. What is a lie from an adult standpoint is really not a lie from the perspective of childrens construction of reality. This does not mean we condone either taking things (dishonesty) or lying (untruthfulness) but only that we take account of developmental considerations.

Why Character Education Curricula Are Ineffectual

In preparation for writing this article, I did a web search and found hundreds of character education sites. These sites included: a variety of character education partnerships; character education curriculum projects; character education resources; character education for children of the world; and a character education home page. Clearly, character instruction is now a major enterprise for many educators all over this country and around the world. To reiterate the theme with which I began, the preoccupation with moral education is both ineffectual and needlessly time consuming. Character education is ineffectual because it attempts to use our schools to solve social problems that originate elsewhere. Using the schools in this way has not worked in the past and is not likely to succeed now. School busing, for example, did not solve the segregation and racism problems in our society, and one might make the case that they may have made them worse. Busing didnt work because the adults in childrens lives did not

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When, for example, children confront us with a hypothesis as to how something came into their possession, the best approach is to leave the question open and to check out the hypothesis with the child not to assume dishonesty and untruthfulness. This example illustrates a couple of points about effective character education. First, to be effective, such education must take place in the context of a lived experience. Secondly, the most powerful lesson is the teachers modeling of fairness and lack of prejudgment. The childs hypothesis about how he or she obtained something may in the end be true. By not rushing to prejudgment, and by giving the child the opportunity to elaborate and to test out his or her hypothesis, the teacher provides a model of objectivity and fairness that the child can internalize and use as a guide in future, similar situations. Moral values are best taught by example in meaningful, everyday situations. The second issue in moral education is that moral behavior itself is very situational. In my college classes I often present my students with two different moral dilemmas. One of these places them in a phone booth where they discover that, thanks to a fault in the connection, they can call anywhere in the world without putting money in the coin slot. The other situation puts them in the college bookstore at the checkout counter where a friend is at the register. While engaged in conversation, the friend inadvertently gives the student the wrong change, $10 too much.

Most students say they would take advantage of the phone companys largesse but not of their friends mistake. They explain that the phone company overcharges them anyway and that they are entitled to the free calls. On the other hand, because they believe the friend will have to make up for the register shortfall out of his or her pocket, they would return the extra money. There is thus a clear difference between moral knowledge and judgment and moral behavior. To the extent that character education is intended to instill moral knowledge and judgment, it will have little or no impact upon childrens choices in problematic situations. There is simply no close connection between knowing what is right and what is wrong and doing what is right and what is wrong. Sometimes this comes about because of value clashes. For example, our desire to tell the truth may conflict with our loyalty to a friend when the truth might get him or her into trouble. Moral dilemmas of this sort are the rule, not the exception.

to childrens needs are the best purveyors of moral values. In the end, taking some of the pressures off teachers, and supporting and encouraging them in their efforts, will do more for character education than any curriculum ever could, or ever will.

References
Allport, G. (1927). Character and personality. Psychological Bulletin, 24, 284-293. Hartshorne, H., and May, M. (19281930). Studies in the nature of character, Volumes 1, 2, and 3. New York: Macmillan. Kohlberg, L. (1975). The cognitive developmental approach to moral development. Phi Delta Kappan, 56 (10), 670-677.

Conclusion
The current time and effort spent in character education is largely wasted and uses up precious time that could be much better spent in other instructional activities. The hope that character education curricula in our schools will help reduce the immoral behavior of youth flies in the face of what we know about the chasm between moral knowledge and moral behavior. This is not to say, however, that effective moral education does not take place in our schools. It does. As I suggested above, character is best taught not by a curriculum but rather by example. Teachers who are competent, caring, and sensitive

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