Getting students to conform to a rigid list of virtues won’t transform them into thoughtful moral agents, say Dr. Joan Goodman and Dr Howard Lesnick, Penn professors who have co-written a new book i response to the growing “character-education” movement. They endorse a messier, but more meaningful approach to moral education.
By Susan Lonkevich | Photography by Bill Cramer
Sidebar | Who’s in Charge?
A dozen chairs have been pushed into a circle in Tricia Bagamasbad’s fifth-period English class at University City High School. The weekly class meeting—a ritual that stands apart from the rest of the West Philadelphia ninth-graders’ rule-laden school day—is about to begin. It’s a time to vent, philosophize, and tease apart complicated issues confronting them and their peers.
“Some girl who’s a friend of my family got pregnant,” one girl starts. “She’s 15 and she didn’t tell her aunt or grandmother. She delivered her own baby in the bathroom; then she stuffed it in the closet and smothered it in plastic. I don’t want her to be in prison for the rest of her life,” the student continues, “but that was a shame what she did to the baby. I think she should pay for what she did.”
Bagamasbad GEd’01, a student teacher completing her master’s degree at Penn’s Graduate School of Education, prompts discussion with a series of questions: How could this have been prevented? Should the teenager be punished? Should the girl’s guardians be held responsible—even if they didn’t know she was pregnant? Though none of her students would recognize it by such a name, Bagamasbad has been experimenting this semester with what two Penn professors, Dr. Joan Goodman and Dr. Howard Lesnick, call “moral education.”
More formal programs of moral education—or “character education,” as it is popularly known—have been proliferating around the country since the much-publicized student shootings at Columbine and other schools. Ten states now mandate some form of character education. President George Bush supports increased federal funding for it. Miss America has adopted it as her cause. Even folk musician Peter Yarrow has founded a character-education program called “Don’t Laugh at Me,” complete with its own theme song. But Goodman, a professor of education, and Lesnick, the Jefferson B. Fordham Professor of Law, argue in their new book, The Moral Stake in Education: Contested Premises and Practices, that much of what passes for character education in today’s schools is ineffective at best. They reject rigid curriculums purchased from outside companies and imposed on classrooms by school authorities in favor of a more organic approach that gives teachers the freedom to respond to the special needs of their students. Their goal is to create morally reflective human beings, able to make complex ethical decisions in a variety of contexts throughout their lives. In promoting this, the professors also challenge some traditional notions about school discipline, arguing, for example, that teachers should butt out of many playground fights and that exclusion of other children is often a normal and necessary part of growing up.
Goodman, who calls herself a “proselytizer” in the moral-education movement, has been teaching a Values and Education class at the Graduate School of Education for six years and has been working with teachers and parents at an affluent suburban school, Merion Elementary, for more than a year to cultivate a moral-education program there. She’s also helping Bagamasbad add a moral dimension to her teaching.
A child psychologist with a specialty in developmental disabilities, Goodman had observed the disappearance of schools’ traditional role as nurturer of values and morality in children, and believed that its absence explained some of the problems children were having. There is a lack of direction, “a sense of malaise, unhappiness and restlessness that I see in young people that I think causes some of the social problems the media picks up on,” ranging from hyperactivity to aggression and depression. When she noticed that values education was “making a little resurrection” in the 1990s, she began reading about it and decided to teach a graduate course on the topic. Goodman asked Lesnick to lead a session about church-and-state issues. He ended up co-teaching the whole course with her for one semester. Today they still co-teach a separate course on integrity in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Working on these classes and the book with Goodman “was appealing to me as a way to get out of what I had come to feel was a narrow focus on law and legislation,” says Lesnick. Like Goodman he has no formal training in philosophy, but he has taught ethics and professional responsibility for three decades and has been dubbed by at least one colleague “the conscience of the Law School.”
Despite the swell of popular interest in moral education, Goodman says, “I know for a fact that this is not being taught to future teachers” in most education schools. As more states start to mandate character education, however, she believes this will change.
While giving a reading at the Penn Bookstore, Goodman and Lesnick shed their personas as university professors and assume the identities of three characters in The Moral Stake in Education: One is a new fourth-grade teacher named Maria Laszlo, played by Goodman. The second is Tony, a recalcitrant student in her class, played by Lesnick. And the third, Hardie Knox—also played by Lesnick—is a teaching colleague with a stricter disciplinary style. The two teachers, who appear throughout the book, represent some of the central differences of opinion within moral education. For Maria, it’s more important that her students reflect on what is right and wrong rather than become “blind rule-followers.” Hardie believes just as strongly that “conduct is central, motive incidental,” and that students must learn to exercise self-control before they can become “skilled moral analysts.”
Baseball cap turned backwards on his head, Tony emits a series of burping sounds. Sensing that the student is struggling to fit into his peer group, Maria at first tries to ignore the distractions. They continue. Suddenly, Maria hears giggling in the classroom and discovers that he had put powder on her chair, so when she sat down, her behind was totally covered in white. Enraged, she grabs Tony and forces him down on the same powder-covered seat. She then orders him to stay inside during recess and clean up the mess. When his classmates are outside, Maria says to him, “I bet you thought of how the other kids would laugh. Did you think of how it might really upset me?”
“No, I didn’t think of that,” Tony mumbles.
After recess Maria launches into a class discussion, using a domestic scenario to get students to consider their own culpability when they encourage a classmate who is causing trouble.
In the next scene, Hardie commiserates with Maria about her stressful day. “Your punishment of Tony was entirely appropriate,” her colleague assures her. “Your mistake was in not cracking down sooner.”
Maria contends that a bit of unruliness is not “a very high price to pay for the opportunity to work out social and moral issues collectively. Wouldn’t it have been great if the kids had turned Tony’s antics off—better yet if they had figured out a way to include him as a peer so he didn’t have to resort to clowning? Instead I forced obedience by shaming him.”
Hardie, on the other hand, insists that “Children acquire virtues by experiencing rightful conduct. That means living in an ordered classroom with reasonable rules, regularly enforced.”
Goodman identifies with both teachers. Lesnick personally finds himself the most critical of Hardie, but admits that both Maria and Hardie care deeply about children. “In a sense,” he says, “they’re both equally good and equally ineffective.” Should teachers insist on students’ compliance with conventional rules? Or should they concern themselves more with the process of moral
decision-making? The authors don’t suggest there are simple answers, but warn that schools that demand obedience to lists of virtues are but scratching the surface of morality. Goodman says she doesn’t even care for the popular term “character education,” because it’s associated with “the acquisition of virtues” and has a “clubby” connotation.
The Internet abounds with Web sites advertising the latest character-education curriculums. One of them, as a teaching device, likens specific body parts such as the mouth and the stomach with desirable character traits like integrity and perseverance. Another sells colorful buttons and stickers to reward and publicize students’ virtuous deeds. A third promotes a plan to reduce cussing. Even state legislatures have gotten into the act of promoting character: Louisiana adopted a “Respect Bill” last year, requiring students to address their teachers with the words sir and ma’am.
Such programs, warns Goodman, are “shallow” and have “an underbelly of being dangerous. What do you mean byrespectful? It can be doing what you’re told, minding authority, never questioning. I don’t think you should always question authority, but to be a moral person means to take issue, to resist as well as to conform.
“That’s another thing I don’t like about the virtues,” she says. “They’re devoid of context. And moral behavior to me has a lot to do with where do you find yourself, what are the trade-offs here, what are the value conflicts?
“Moral education to me,” she adds, “is helping kids to develop a moral identity that competes with all of their other identities so the lives they lead will not just be ‘What can I do to make the most money, to have the most power, to have the most prestige?’ it will also be ‘What can I do that will be most morally significant or most morally right?’”
There is no need for a separate “morality class” to raise these issues, Goodman says. In some cases they might be broached through participation in meaningful service-learning projects. (Philadelphia schools are testing one such program.) Or they could even be introduced through the literature students read or the science curriculum.
Though he identifies moral education as “critically important,” Lesnick says he’s “much less sanguine” than the characters in their book “about the possibility of doing anything constructive in the classroom. I think the problems of public schools are created outside the schools in our broader society.” Schools striving to teach moral education “have to make sure they don’t compound [those problems] by transmitting the same, success-oriented, ends-justifies-the-means values,” Lesnick says. Yet that’s what happens so often, he notes, when schools take time out from education to prepare students for standardized tests in an attempt to generate higher scores that will make them look good.
Crusader that she is, Goodman admits that creating a meaningful moral-education program, even in a cooperative environment, is a challenge. “At its best, it’s really tough going.”
Dr. Audrey Jarmas, a clinical psychologist, stood on the playground at Merion Elementary School a couple of years ago and watched in amazement as 100 first-graders, including her own son, tried to fend for themselves. It was a disturbing scene, full of exclusion, bullying, intimidation and name-calling.
“I was really quite stunned,” she says. “It became clear to me that whatever we try at home to teach children has to be put into play when they’re in social situations.” Without reinforcement from adults, “it’s very hard for six-year-olds to maintain anything they’ve learned in the face of 100 peers. There’s a kid culture and they’re all scrambling because none of them knows the rules.”
She decided to get involved in a lunch-recess committee at school and became co-chair of that group with another mother, Joyce Krajian, who is a Presbyterian minister. They began talking with the school principal, Anne Heffron, about their desire to develop a “a schoolwide approach to helping kids develop socially and emotionally,” as well as a parent-education series, Krajian recalls.
“We felt strongly that we didn’t want to run some kind of kindness campaign,” Jarmas says. They found pre-packaged programs being shopped around their school district to be too narrow and “top-down” for their school’s needs. So with support from the principal and superintendent, they formed a small group of parents and teachers to create their own program. Krajian lined up speakers for the parent-education series and contacted Joan Goodman, who shared her own goals for moral development in public education. “She said to me, ‘I have a dream of working with a school to make this happen,’ and I said, ‘I know just the school.’”
Goodman has been helping teachers and parents at Merion Elementary for more than a year. They’ve been talking, among other things, about how to expand “circle time,” traditionally a sharing, show-and-tell hour at the school, to include discussion of moral issues. Another idea is to get more student participation in school service projects, which typically have drawn on the time and resources of parents.
Goodman applauds the school’s motivation to create a moral-education program from scratch. “It’s all been a very interesting and delicate process,” she observes. The teachers and parents are “in somewhat different places. The parents have a long-term perspective and they very much want to see their children develop a moral core or moral identity, becoming self-regulated people.” On the other hand, she says, “The teachers have a short time with the kids” and many expectations to fulfill each school day. “They are much more concerned about control, order and preventing rowdiness, aggression, bullying. It’s natural from where they sit.”
Suppose Johnny and Bobby are engaged in a shoving match on the playground. Convention says the teacher should step in immediately and break it up. Media reports of tragedies such as Columbine reinforce the idea that early intervention is essential to prevent low-grade violence from escalating to serious injury, or worse.
Not so fast, say Goodman and Lesnick.
“I would stretch a guess that there has never been a first-grade or eighth-grade classroom without some bullying,” says Lesnick. “And the idea that it has got to be stopped [by school authorities] is just childish. There’s bullying in most workplaces.”
Lesnick likened schools’ obsessions with violence-prevention to his and his wife’s attempt to ban “war toys” in their household when his son was growing up. “We thought we’d draw the line between intergalactic weapons, which would be okay because that’s such fantasy, and guns like the cowboys used,” he explains. “Then one day my son took a piece of white bread, untoasted. He cut one square out of one corner and held the short piece like the butt of a gun. He went bang bang bang! So, now we’re not going to buy bread?
“There’s a certain amount of aggression which is inevitable and okay, and there’s a certain amount of aggression which is somewhat inevitable and not too okay, and there’s a certain amount of aggression which should be responded to,” Lesnick says.
“If there is a kid who is shy or small and not good at fighting, and he is getting victimized, you should grab that guy who’s roughhousing with him, but if two other kids are roughhousing and they’re perfectly able to do it, [you] should leave them alone.”
Goodman says schools shouldn’t try to silence the kid who thinks “might makes right. There is merit to that, and cultures and subcultures believe it. Our judicial system believes it: a victim has rights to get even, to punish, and who’s to say ‘No, that’s out; that’s not part of the debate.’ That all sense of retribution is evil? To me, that’s selling children short. They don’t need to be as repressed and rule-driven as we think.
“I’m not talking about a big fight,” she hastens to add. “I’m talking about turning your head a bit if there’s a little pushing and shoving, or talking to the kids about it before you immediately clamp down on them, and finding out what they feel about the fighting.”
Lesnick and Goodman also believe schools are misguided in their attempts to force inclusion rather than letting students work out problems with each other. Though she sees opportunities for sensitizing students to the consequences of their exclusionary behavior, Goodman says, “I think people have to experience being picked on. It’s a part of life. I’m against that notion that ‘you can’t say you can’t play.’”
Another trap that schools fall into, they believe is “values lumping”—assigning moral heft to rules of convention, such as “no running in the halls,” “no chewing gum,” and “no talking out of turn.” It’s reasonable to set and enforce such rules, they say, but schools shouldn’t mistake them for moral education. “You can talk very politely to people and be a rat,” Goodman observes. In the Values and Education class, for instance, Goodman teaches her graduate students to understand that from the perspective of some subcultures, talking out of turn may not be a sign of disrespect. Teachers need to ask themselves, “Is it necessarily bad to have this buzz in these classrooms?” Then there needs to be some negotiation between the teacher and students on these issues, Goodman says, “because if you don’t get student commitment and involvement, you haven’t accomplished much.”
Two inspirational sculptures, an upstretched hand and an open book, rise up on columns at the foot of the steps to University City High School. Inside the building hangs a banner that proclaims, “No place for hate.” To read those words, one must walk through a metal detector and pass bags through an x-ray machine. A cell phone tucked inside a visitor’s purse causes suspicion. As he examines it, the security guard explains politely that some of the guns made today look like cell phones.
Lesnick argues that strict security measures adopted by many urban and suburban school systems treat students like criminals and encourage them “to think the world really is a dangerous place and you have to be constantly looking over your shoulder. In that environment,” he asks, “how can you teach respect and responsibility?”
Tricia Bagamasbad, the student teacher, is trying to do just that. This afternoon she is telling her fourth-period English class that many of them are not doing well this grading period because of incomplete assignments. She wants their input on how to change and enforce the homework policy so students will become more conscientious about making up work. This issue seems to fire them up—most of them, that is, except a boy who has disappeared into the quilted armor of a navy ski jacket, pulled up over his head and shoulders.
“You should give them two days” to make up work, one girl insists. “If they don’t come back, then say, ‘Oh well, give them a zero.’”
“We’ve got all this work [to make up] for our other classes!” another protests. “How are we going to catch up?”
One student suggests following the practice used in her math class, where the teacher hands out an assignment sheet for the whole week on Monday.
“Explain why you like it,” Bagamasbad says.
“Because [even if absent] you can’t say you missed anything, because you had your worksheet.”
“I like the way we do it now.”
“They’re too lazy to do the work.”
The boy in the jacket falls off his chair onto the floor, pretends to look dazed, and picks himself up. Bagamasbad says she needs to see his face and gives him an opportunity to go the nurse if he’s not feeling well.
The class decides that students should be given a week to make up their assignments before they start getting points taken off their grades. “And then,” the teacher asks, “is there a time when we can’t get credit anymore?”
“Yeah, after that second week.”
“Now can I have a volunteer to write up the homework plan that we just talked about?”
At first this exchange may seem to have little to do with moral education. But Bagamasbad, who took Goodman’s Values and Education class last fall, is trying through gradual steps to encourage responsibility and give her own students a taste of democratic decision-making. Moral education is also imbedded in the respect she shows them. “Making them respect you as a teacher and someone who’s on their side, who cares about them, that’s a prerequisite before you can do anything in moral ed,” she says.
Collectively the students may sound boisterous, but individually, some of them seem to get the point of the class meetings. Lakeeta praises her teacher, known as “Ms. B.,” for seeking input on the homework policy. “That’s a good thing. If more teachers did that, more kids would be doing their homework.”
Aaliyah says students do complain about the school but she believes they can do more. “We can change the way the [security guards] look at us. All we’ve got to do is show respect and they’ll respect us back. We can change the way the school looks. Like walking around and picking up trash here and there. The kids could also do their part by trying to understand and not always giving up or just saying they don’t care. We need to treat the teachers with respect.”
Bagamasbad says it’s challenging to work with adolescents on moral education “because they come to the school with pre-set values that they hold and believe, and they’re already hardened against schools.” Getting the students to trust one another is one of the biggest struggles, as was evidenced by a discussion on the possibility of assigning class monitors to take turns keeping track of misbehavior.
“They were intrigued by it,” Bagamasbad says, “but when it came down to it, they said it wouldn’t work because people don’t respect each other in the class. They think the monitors would be corrupt and would report on someone just because they don’t like them.”
So she is trying to slowly remove the barriers and get the students to assume responsibility for improving their school experience: taking turns marking the attendance book, organizing a class trip, creating a “moral code” for the class, and coming up with constructive solutions to gripes about the school, with the possibility of presenting their ideas to an administrator. To demonstrate how they appear when they’re making outbursts or withdrawing under their ski jackets, Bagamasbad plans to videotape them one day—with their knowledge—and play back the tape during a class meeting.
One thing she won’t do is throw a student out of her classroom. “It’s really against everything I believe in as a teacher,” she explains. “I believe that every student, no matter how they’re acting up, wants to be in the class or they wouldn’t have come to the class in the first place.” Bagamasbad told a student who refused to get in the circle one day that she could write him a pass to do work out in the hall if he didn’t want to join the group. He balked but eventually pulled up his desk to be with the others.
“I see the kids mostly as good people who sometimes need attention and don’t get it and want someone to notice,” she says. “ Leaving is not the answer. Staying and fixing it is the answer. Sometimes they can stay and be a nuisance, but after a while they’re going to start to regulate their own [and their classmates’] behavior.”
Her fifth-period class, a smaller group that happens to be all girls, has a calmer atmosphere. The students take it upon themselves to come up with topics to talk about during class meetings: racism, attitudes toward homosexuality, another student’s truancy, and on this particular day, teen pregnancy.
“Probably she was thinking real fast,” says one student of the teen who killed her newborn baby.
“She probably thought everybody would be disappointed in her.”
“She knew right from wrong,” argues the girl who knew the teen. “She could have told someone. Probably they would have taken her to counseling or something.”
One girl just shakes her head and says, “This world is crazy.”
“What do you mean?” Bagamasbad asks. “What has changed?”
The students talk about how parents used to make teenagers marry when they got pregnant. One girl marvels at her grandparents’ 40-year-long marriage.
“I wish it was cool to get married,” a student sighs.
Though at times it seems like the walls—partitions quaking in the hands of practical jokers from an adjoining classroom—are about to come in on the group, Bagamasbad’s students speak freely, knowing that what gets talked about in her room stays there.
“Ms. B. lets us talk about things we want to talk about—like boys, lifestyles, and how society is,” says a student. “We show her a lot of respect because she shows us a lot of respect.”
“It’s a way to let stress out,” another student says of the class meetings. “Sometimes we have conflict and it’s a way to prevent fights.”
Goodman says Bagamasbad is “quite an inspiring exemplar” as a new teacher “in a challenging situation. I think what Trish is trying to do is get kids to buy in to their own schooling.”
The class meetings are not for every teacher, however. Jennifer Felton GEd’01, another student teacher in English at the high school, also took Goodman’s Values and Education class. But while she recognizes the benefits of moral education—such as the positive rapport it seems to build between students and adults—she has opted not to hold the meetings, citing differences in personality and in the goals she has set for her students. By holding the meetings, “It seems like I would be detracting from learning time when they should be acquiring [academic] skills.” Another of her concerns is that it might get out of hand, with “a couple of dominant personalities taking over everything. I think I would have to be too much of a mediator.”
The walk to Merion Elementary School from the local train station winds past stone farmhouses and ivy-bearded mansions with alarm-system signs prominently posted along the driveways. The school grounds are immaculate, save one dropped peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich being pecked away by a crow. There is no metal detector at the entrance, but the school doors are locked during the day for security reasons and visitors must be buzzed in.
Madeleine Antonelli GEd’87 teaches second grade here in a classroom whose entrance is decorated like a gingerbread house. At 9:45 she tells her students to gather in a circle on the floor and asks if anyone has an issue they would like to discuss. One boy raises his hand.
“Two of my friends aren’t friends” with each other, he says. “How can I get them to be friends?”
“Tell us a little bit more about what’s going on,” Antonelli says.
“Both of them are on my bus. They say things [to each other] like, ‘Get away from me.’ And they don’t like the same games.”
“Why is it so important to you that they become friends?” Antonelli asks.
“Because they’re both really good friends and I don’t want to see them fight.”
“And you feel like you’re in the middle of it, then—like whose side am I on and who to help?”
“Yeah.”
Antonelli asks the other students if they have any advice for their classmate.
One girl suggests writing a note to one friend saying that the other person wants to be their friend. Another suggests playing with the friends at different times of the day.
“I’d like to talk about something for a minute,” Antonelli says. “Is it okay not to want to be friends with somebody? Raise your hands if you think yes.”
Most of the second-graders agree. “I don’t think you need to be friends with a certain person,” says one boy. “You just have to be nice to them.”
“Is being nice the same as being friends with someone?” Antonelli wonders.
“Sort of.”
“I’m not so sure it is. I think you have a really interesting point. Are you saying when you say to be nice that you need to be respectful and treat that person kindly?”
“Yeah.”
One girl isn’t convinced. “If you don’t want to play a game, you might hurt that person’s feelings.”
Antonelli asks, “Is it your job to make sure not to hurt other people’s feelings, so then you should be friends with everybody?”
“Well,” says another girl, “not everybody has to be everybody’s friend, because nobody’s perfect.”
“We should never try on purpose to hurt someone’s feelings,” Antonelli says. “That’s wrong. But if you hurt somebody’s feelings because you don’t want to play with them, I’m wondering if that’s wrong or right, and how you feel about that.” They all conclude that sometimes people get on each other’s nerves for the things that they do, and that’s, as Antonelli puts it, “one of those human things.”
Finally one girl suggests that her classmate “get your two friends together to play one game that they both might like,” and then see if they get along.
The boy considers this idea and thinks it might work. “They both kind of like racing cars. So maybe I can get them to play a game.” The teacher asks him to report back to the class on what happens.
Antonelli has been holding circle time since she became a teacher 13 years ago, but working with the school’s moral-education committee has expanded her vision of how to use that time and challenged some of her own ideas about fairness.
“Probably when I first walked into these meetings,” she says, “I would have said that a child should never be excluded. But we read some stories that showed when it could be appropriate to exclude somebody. If a child is being a real pest to you, you don’t want to include that child. There was another story we read about a child who just wants to be alone. He has the right say, ‘I don’t feel like [playing] right now.’”
She also has used the class meetings to encourage children to be positive role models for each other rather than simply ignoring their classmates who misbehave. “I think you can do more than that,” she told them one day. “You can take responsibility to help other kids and help the classroom be a calmer class.”
Antonelli has some reservations, however, about Goodman’s ideas on fighting. “We live in a world that has rules and we live in a country that has laws. I’m not comfortable” letting fights run their course, she says. She does agree, however, that it can be useful to discuss the motives for—and fallout from—fighting, “turning it into a learning experience for the children who are involved in a fight as well as the other children in the class.” When recurring troubles among six students escalated into a fight on the playground, for instance, Antonelli asked classmates who were not involved in the incident to share their feelings about it. Some felt very angry that discipline problems were taking up class time. Those students also helped to determine the “consequence” for the fighters: giving up indoor recess for a week.
While Antonelli isn’t interested in creating a classroom which is museum quiet, she does believe there is a “bigger picture” to teachers’ attempts to keep order. “That’s part of living in society and working with other people and learning how to treat people.”
This and many other ideas continue to be debated at the moral-education committee meetings. Jarmas, one of the parent leaders, says, “I do think kids need some freedom to work out the rules without someone interfering. I feel, however, that they can go too far and someone would get hurt or behavior would get really mean, because they don’t have the skills yet to sort it out.”
She has mixed feelings about exclusion. “What we would hope to teach kids is to be sensitive to exclusion, whether they are the excluded or the excluder. Can we help the victim to be less of a victim?”
Differences of opinion persist, even among the parents, on such issues as to what extent inappropriate language should be tolerated, she says. “My own take is that if a school wants you to wear blue, that’s okay, because I want my kids to learn they’re not the center of the universe. When you grow up you have to follow rules. But I don’t think any of us wants to create automatons. One view is that standards should be enforced [in whatever way] each teacher [thinks is] effective, but that talking through things should take place, too.”
Regardless of their particular philosophies, Goodman wishes that more parents would be advocates for moral education in their children’s schools. “Right now, schools, if they’re interested in doing moral education, feel that parents are something to work around and not to offend rather than supporters of it.” In particular, there’s a concern that when parents hear the word moral, they will assume—falsely—their school is going to embark on a program of religious instruction. “So we need to get collaboration between home and school.”
As the meetings at Merion Elementary prove, moral education is “very complex and can’t be reduced to a series of moral rules or pedagogical rules,” Lesnick says. “And it can only be done successfully if teachers are given both the discretion and the support they need to do it.” Lesnick criticizes President Bush’s plan to increase federal funding for character education “[so Washington can] send money to Harrisburg and Albany and Trenton, who will then hire consultants and come up with programs and mail them to local school districts. But if the president gave every school district money to give teachers a certain amount of time off so they could go to seminars and prepare in their own classrooms what they’re going to do, thatwould be a terrific thing.”
Though he doesn’t know Bagamasbad, the student teacher, Lesnick says her story shows “there’s a lot you can accomplish as an individual.” She’s not trying to save the Philadelphia school system or the country, he observes. “She’s just trying to do something in her classroom that’s going to affect some of her students a lot—and that’s great. I’m not pessimistic about that.”
SIDEBAR
Who’s in Charge?
“The only way you can create morally responsible human beings,” says Dr. Joan Goodman, “is to give them responsibility and to let them see the consequences of their behavior.” The education professor, who has been working with parents and teachers at Merion Elementary School in suburban Philadelphia on a moral-development program, has devised guidelines for six “levels of authority,” ranging from total control by the teacher to total authority in the children.
She says, “I want [teachers] to think about those areas in which they want to take control and have no student input whatsoever: At Level 1, for example, ‘It is a rule in this class that if there is a child in a wheelchair, you cannot come and tip that child out and throw him down the stairs.’” End of story. But on the other side of the spectrum, at Level 6: “‘Do you think we should have graham crackers for a snack or Ritz crackers for a snack?’” A teacher might leave that choice entirely up to the youngest children, with older children having gradually greater input in how their classrooms are run, Goodman says. She has asked teachers to create their own lists using each of the six levels:
Level 1 Rule imposition by authority.
Level 2 Rule imposition with attempt at moral persuasion.
Level 3 Rule imposition with encouragement of children’s moral engagement.
Level 4 Modify adult rules slightly by listening to disagreements, finding common ground.
Level 5 Jointly construct rules or ways of being, foster disagreement, value opposing positions, invite continued ongoing discussion.
Level 6 Child construction of rules. Topics generated by children as well as resolved by them.
“Very few teachers in my experience get beyond those first three levels,” Goodman says. “It’s amazing to me when we talk about one of the purposes of education [is preparing children] for democracy, for citizenship. What does it mean to educate for citizenship if you never practice any kind of democracy?”
