Educating the Mind and the Morals 589.2
Blessed with the opportunities and obligations of raising four young daughters, my wife Anne and I are profoundly aware of the importance of instilling good values that will help them become capable, honorable, and happy adults.
I think we’re doing a pretty good job, but we know that isn’t enough. We’re worried about the values and character of other kids who may befriend, date, or marry our girls. And we worry about what our kids will learn in classrooms, playgrounds, and sports fields about things like honesty and honor, respect and responsibility, kindness and compassion, and service and self-discipline.
Although conscientious parents attentive to the moral education of their children can do a great deal to lay a solid foundation of positive values, the lessons taught at home can be either reinforced or undermined by teachers, coaches, and others who interact with their children.
Sure, I want my kids to be smart and successful, but that’s not enough. As Teddy Roosevelt said, “To educate a person in the mind but not the morals is to educate a menace to society.”
That’s why I’m such an ardent advocate of purposeful and pervasive character education. I want all adults who help shape the attitudes and habits of my children to consciously and competently teach, enforce, advocate, and model positive character traits like trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship – the Six Pillars of Character.
Since this is National CHARACTER COUNTS! Week, it’s a great opportunity for you to consider whether schools in your area, or organizations you’re involved with, could be more directly involved in this vital effort.
This is Michael Josephson reminding you that character counts.
Comments
Raising a child is the most exciting, yet scariest thing. As the father of a 3-year- old, I am comfortable with the surroundings my wife and I have created for him as well as opportunities to fall, but we know we can limit who he surrounds himself with only to a point.
As a high school educator, I see good kids make poor choices all the time. Rarely is the result of poor judgment catastrophic, but it could have entirely been avoided.
You hit a subtle, but KEY part to the success of children - "lessons learned at home." I think parents are expecting public school teachers to do the parenting for them now. Parents have a job that they are forgetting - it's called PARENTING and showing your children what responsibilty is all about. Don't make excuses when your children aren't doing what they're supposed to. Support the teachers, don't fight them. When I was a kid, the teacher was always right (I'm only 34). Even when the teacher was truly wrong, in the eyes of my parents, they were right. School punishment was easy compared to the lectures my father gave.
Posted by: Andy | October 21, 2008 10:07 AM
While a teacher, my school district arranged to have every single employee go through the Character Counts program. That included custodians, school bus drivers, support staff, as well as every teacher. Of course, students later were included in the program. Though I am a Christian, the class was life-changing for me. It looked at the everyday things we do with a magnifying glass and I saw things in me that could use changing. It appealed to so many of the others because it separated character teaching from religious preaching. I never heard anyone who resented the fact that attendance in this progam was required by each of us.
I believe every business, every profession, every service provider would profit beyond measure from Character Counts.
Posted by: Dolores Armo | October 22, 2008 11:11 AM
I am a Baby Boomer. As I enter my last year of teaching and reflect on how the character of students has changed since the seventies, I see that it is still the responsibility of the parent to establish a positive, morally sound child. I'm thrilled to see that there are many parents working diligently toward this goal. I am saddened by less-concerned parents who stop short and allow their child to be influenced by their peers and lose control of him or her. Your Character Counts efforts are profoundly needed everywhere and appreciated here in my home.
Posted by: Edward Grageda | October 25, 2008 9:47 PM
I just received this from a friend and would like your opinion regarding Microsoft's Bill Gates. Love him or hate him, he sure hits the nail on the head with this!
He recently gave a speech at a high school about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.
Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it.
Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes. Learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you think you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one. If you agree, pass it on. If you can read this, thank a teacher.
Posted by: Paul | October 29, 2008 10:00 AM
Paul, although this list is frequently cited on the Internet as having come from Bill Gates (either from his book Business @ the Speed of Thought or from a commencement speech to Mt. Whitney High School in Visalia, CA), neither are correct.
Nor is it from Kurt Vonnegut, another person often credited with creating it.
It is, in fact, from Charles J. Sykes's 2007 book 50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School: Real-World Antidotes to Feel-Good Education.
For more information, see:
http://www.snopes.com/language/document/liferule.asp
Posted by: Josephson Institute editor | October 30, 2008 10:19 AM