Overview:
Education should balance academic skills with intentional character instruction, using classroom experiences and historical examples to help students learn responsibility, moral choice, and humanity.
It’s difficult to imagine an educator who would not be emotionally affected and professionally engaged by this excerpt from a letter to educators published in Teacher and Child by Haim Ginott. “I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot by high school and college graduates. So, I am suspicious of education.” Heartbreaking and, among other questions for educators, it asks us to consider the weight curriculums assign to subjects like math, science and other skills-dominated disciplines compared to those like history and literature in which lessons in character – the values that influence our decisions and behavior – abound.
Simone’s character was memorably revealed in our first tutoring session when she was in 5th grade. After the session, I complimented Simone on her math skills and asked if she always performed well in math. “No,” she said softly and told me about receiving a bad grade on an important 4th-grade math test. She recalled her father being “mad,” perhaps an unhelpful attitude, while she felt “disappointed” in herself. However, she accepted responsibility for the test results and to improve her math knowledge she began regularly visiting online math sites to study various math topics. Greatly impressed, particularly so after seeing some of Simone’s notes from her site visits, I complimented Simone for her determination, initiative, acceptance of responsibility and for working hard to improve. She modestly accepted my praise.
I suspect that when Simone was in 3rd grade, Ms Morelli was her teacher. Ms Morelli was so well thought of by her peers that, with her permission, I sat-in on one of her math sessions to observe how she created her classroom magic. It was immediately apparent that she taught with great enthusiasm, which created and nurtured enthusiastic learners. Rather than abracadabra, her magic words were, “Ready to rock?” To which her students enthusiastically and gleefully responded, “Ready to roll!” At one point a student returned to the classroom from the bathroom and stood, seemingly dumbfounded, just inside the classroom door. Ms Morelli addressed him seriously, but kindly, “What are your classmates doing, Jason?” Happy at the opportunity to answer an easy question during a math lesson, Jason replied that they were writing on whiteboards. His teacher calmly suggested that he do likewise. As Jason collected his whiteboard and marker, Ms Morelli taught us all a character lesson on personal responsibility. “Remember,” she said, “you are responsible for your own learning.”
Character is developed and nurtured from many sources: parents, peers, teachers and other people. Happily we are not even limited to living people, for we also learn from those who’ve gone before us and whose lives are remembered and recorded. History shines an imperfect but needed light on the past, so that we can better see which of many paths will lead us forward to our better selves. Of course, how we teach history matters. For example, is our focus on what happened when or why it happened and related questions? Why did the people involved act as they did? What other choices did they have and why didn’t they choose another path?
The character lessons we can learn from history are profound and numerous. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Dr Viktor Frankl wrote: “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” What a magnificent choice by those few characterful men – choosing a path that transcended those unimaginably dark and evil circumstances and to be the light of courage, compassion and sacrificial love.
So we are led to a fundamental and challenging question: What values and whose choices should we embrace and emulate? In this short essay we’ve seen examples of a 4th grader acknowledging responsibility for the results of her actions and taking steps to do better, of a holocaust survivor proposing that how we act in any given situation is always our choice, and of concentration camp inmates demonstrating courage, compassion and sacrificial love. Each example shines a light on one of many paths to take, while leaving in our own hands the choice of which path we follow.
Teachers like Ms Morelli, already weave character lessons into their classes.
- Can we do more in ours?
- Can curriculums be reviewed and revised to facilitate the goal of teaching lessons on character?
Certainly it’s a complex issue, but achieving the goal of effectively teaching character lessons by illuminating the different paths we can choose should benefit us all and may result in fewer people being “suspicious of education.”
