Further Reading and Links on Issues in Character Education

The independent information collected here - providing data from controlled studies and applying standard methods and theory from fields including cognitive psychology, social psychology, sociology, anthropology and research analysis - shows that there is very little "right" about character education in terms of it being socially inclusive, politically unbiased, and effective.

1) What's Wrong with Character Education? -Michael Davis, American Journal of Education, volume 110 (2003), pages 32–57.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=doi:10.1086/377672

"Character education suffers from three disadvantages that should lead us to reject it: the disadvantages are empirical (absence of evidence that it does what it claims), conceptual (a conflict between what good character is and the way that character education proposes to teach it), and moral (its failure to do the right things for the right reasons)"

2) The Many Faces of Character Education - Focus on Teachers Newsletter, August 2002
http://www.teachersmind.com/CharEd.htm

"Truth, justice, and the American Way! Because it appeals to our highest ideals, such language sometimes lulls people into unquestioned acceptance. Virtue, “good” character, respect, and responsibility are part of that language. Becoming aware of the way we can be manipulated by language is the first step in training ourselves to seek out alternative points of view, to tease the relevant information from each perspective, and to assemble the information into a workable whole."

"By attempting to “teach” or “instill” virtues, encapsulate them into easily digested pills to cure socially unacceptable behaviors, we remain at risk of adopting a cure that is too simplistic to allow for all eventualities. How will students know when it is appropriate to question authority if we demand complete obedience to authority? How will they recognize injustice if it isn’t one of the examples in the 'program'?"

3) HOW NOT TO TEACH VALUES: A Critical Look at Character Education
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/hnttv.htm

"A key tenet of the Character Counts! Coalition, which bills itself as a nonpartisan umbrella group devoid of any political agenda, is the highly debatable proposition that 'negative social influences can [be] and usually are overcome by the exercise of free will and character. What is presented as common sense is, in fact, conservative ideology." [Italics ours.]

"Politics aside, though, if a program proceeds by trying to 'fix the kids' -- as do almost all brands of character education -- it ignores the accumulated evidence from the field of social psychology demonstrating that much of how we act and who we are reflects the situations in which we find ourselves. Virtually all the landmark studies in this discipline have been variations on this theme. Set up children in an extended team competition at summer camp and you will elicit unprecedented levels of aggression. Assign adults to the roles of prisoners or guards in a mock jail, and they will start to become their roles. Move people to a small town, and they will be more likely to rescue a stranger in need. In fact, so common is the tendency to attribute to an individual's personality or character what is actually a function of the social environment that social psychologists have dubbed this the fundamental attribution error".

"A similar lesson comes to us from the movement concerned with Total Quality Management associated with the ideas of the late W. Edwards Deming. At the heart of Deming's teaching is the notion that the "system" of an organization largely determines the results. The problems experienced in a corporation, therefore, are almost always due to systemic flaws rather than to a lack of effort or ability on the part of individuals in that organization. Thus, if we are troubled by the way students are acting, Deming, along with most social psychologists, would have us transform the structure of the classroom rather than try to remake the students themselves -- precisely the opposite of the character education approach." [Italics ours.]

4) Effects of Rewards on Children's Prosocial Motivation: A Socialization Study - Richard A. Fabes et al., Developmental Psychology, vol. 25, 1989

"In a troubling study conducted by Joan Grusec at the University of Toronto, young children who were frequently praised for displays of generosity tended to be slightly less generous on an everyday basis than other children were. Every time they had heard "Good sharing!" or "I-m so proud of you for helping," they became a little less interested in sharing or helping. Those actions came to be seen not as something valuable in their own right but as something they had to do to get that reaction again from an adult. Generosity became a means to an end." [Italics ours.]

5) A Critique of Character Counts! as a Curriculum Model for Explicit Moral Instruction in Public Schools
http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwsfd/2001/Geren.PDF

"In [Character Counts!'] heavy reliance on external reinforcement, mostly in the form of social approbation for good deeds, the moral life risks trivialization: it becomes a series of unconnected acts responding to the word of the week or the citizen of the week. The moral life may become synonymous in the child's mind with obeying rules and vying for the monthly trustworthiness award. A system of character awards may also unintentionally foster self-promotion and a boastful attitude. The Character Counts! lessons repeatedly require children to recount something they did which exemplified" a pillar of character. It must also be noted that a general problem with external reinforcement is the difficulty in sustaining a behavior once the external reinforcement is removed. If a goal is to live the good for its own sake, it is hard to see how a heavy reliance on external social reinforcement promotes this internalization."

"[Children] do interpret their world and their own actions in moral terms already. What they require is protection and guidance from adults who understand their lived experience and who take it seriously and are willing to have serious conversations about it." [For example, how do you support the 10 year black girl in 1961 who goes to school guarded by Federal Marshals and helps change the world? How do you support the moral choices of children who cannot stand for the Pledge of Allegiance?]

An area of concern, which goes beyond a critique of the Character Counts! materials, is the implicit political view which positions nontraditional families and the public school bureaucracy as adversaries.

6) How Children Fail, John Holt

"Teachers and schools tend to mistake good behavior for good character. What they prize is docility, suggestibility; the child who will do what he is told; or even better, the child who will do what is wanted without even having to be told. They value most in children what children least value in themselves. Small wonder that their effort to build character is such a failure; they don't know it when they see it."

7) Leading Children Beyond Good and Evil (Thesis is that in a society that with ideals of inclusiveness, moral education is ineffectual. It can only be meaningful in closed communities "provincial, exclusive, and messy, almost always in some ways restrictive of individual freedom." Includes an amazing list of the plethora of conflicting "pillars" among the competing CE programs.)
http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft0005/articles/hunter.html

"Within professional psychology and the therapeutic establishment, the concept of character was long ago rejected in favor of the concept of personality. The problem with "character" was that it bore ethical and metaphysical implications that professional psychology could not rationally explain or justify. Character, after all, is either good or bad, whereas personality is fascinating or boring, forceful or weak, attractive or unattractive. When character was disqualified as a legitimate way of thinking about the person, our concept of the self lost a measure of moral significance."

8) The Alliance of Standards and Character: Why It Does More Harm Than Good to American Education
http://convention.allacademic.com/aera2004/AERA_papers/AERA_3120_12773a.PDF

"By overemphasizing moral decline and character decay, the leaders of character education purposefully conceal the political and social nature of violence. A crusade to attack personal moral decay diverts our attention from the more fundamental causes of violence and resists the more needed structural change in society. Therefore, the call for socialization via character education is rather political than educational. {Italics ours.]

"Under the framework of this [hypothetical] common culture, traditional knowledge and moral values, authority, standards, national identity, and market-driven principles are interwoven and emphasized. As the standards movement largely promotes the cultural politics of conservative power elites, character education reinforces their ideological control of values in American schools."

" While mere behavioral conformity is emphasized, moral reasoning and moral affect disappear. Critical thinking is smothered. The knowledge, attitudes, ability, and skills needed for making important moral decisions in complex life situations are paid little attention."

9) Character Education After the Bandwagon has Gone
http://tigger.uic.edu/~lnucci/MoralEd/articles/helwig.html

"In attempts to define character education under a virtue-centered approach is the danger of virtue hegemony and its attendant ethnocentrism. Whose virtues are to be promoted and inculcated by state-sponsored initiatives, especially in modern pluralist societies? Character education runs the danger of promoting, under a narrow conception of morality, the inculcation of the dominant culture's perceptions of those virtues deemed worthy, while denigrating or failing to give equal consideration to alternative conceptions."

"To the extent that virtue centered moralities, and by implication traditional character education approaches, situate morality in the development of personality or character, they deflect attention away from important issues of justice and fairness, virtues which cannot be reduced to or explained in terms of individual-centered concepts such as "character", "personality", or "self". Nor can they answer questions about how virtues of character such as loyalty and courage are to be applied when they conflict with other-regarding moral concerns such as justice and concern for others' welfare and rights."

" We are skeptical that the claim [the society is in moral crisis] can even be made. This is because the vast societal changes that have occurred over the past two centuries make it very difficult to document whether or not there has been decay, improvement, or simply patterns of positive and negative changes associated with different realms of social life. To cite some salient examples of morally-relevant and often viewed as positive societal shifts, there have been changes in race relations and treatment of minority groups, in the roles, burdens, and privileges of women, in the treatment of children, in the conditions of work for children, in the work force and labor relations more generally, in care of the elderly, in levels of political representation of many groups (including women), in numbers of people obtaining higher levels of education, and in relationships among those of higher and lower classes."

10) George W, Bush, National Character Counts Week Proclamation, 2001 (A chilling document wherein the conservative ideologies and politics of militarism, retributive war, churches, patriotism, faith, morality and virtue [as opposed to evil] are all conflated with character education for Character Counts! week)
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011023-23.html

11) A Critique of Research Evaluating Moral Education Interventions (A scathing critique at that.)
http://www.calpoly.edu/~echin/Ed589/StdModels/JDune.html

"Given the widespread use and support for [Character Education] programs, what are these programs accomplishing? Are students becoming better people? Better in whose eyes? This paper addresses these questions by summarizing evaluation research on moral education programs and concludes that the evaluation research, as a whole, is "a-theoretical," of poor quality, and/or too fragmented to contribute to a sound, accumulative knowledge base for academic or application purposes."

"A study by Greenberg and Fain (1981), failed to find any significant results in measures operationally defined to represent 'character'..."

"Hartshorne and May's 10,000+ student study of attitudes and behaviors...is commonly thought to have ended the character education wave of the 1920's. The report concluded that character education, as then practiced, had no positive correlation to good behavior, in fact, "...the prevailing ways of inculcating ideals probably do little good and do some harm" (cf Leming 1993)"

"The problem of confusing morality with social conformity cannot be ignored. This represents the most serious theoretical flaw in moral education: the way in which "moral" is operationally defined. Students in times of slavery, pogroms, or other prejudice would be emulating community values by participating in cruelty and social injustice. Such acts cannot be considered moral, despite social and political support. We can never assume that our society is free from such injustices, because we may be blinded ourselves by social acceptability. Therefore, true moral education must empower students with the ability to deconstruct social norms in terms of universal values of social justice-- in this way moral education can also gain a powerful ally in the multicultural education movement." [Italics ours.]

12) Review: In the Name of Morality: Character Education and Political Control. Yu, Tianlong. (2004) (Yu finds unfavorable similarities between the current character education movement in America with his own experience of Chinese cultural education and re-education.)
http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev375.htm

"Character education does not represent an encouraging direction for school reform. The overall reform agenda does not challenge the fundamental school structure and value system based on the larger capitalist political, economic, and social hierarchy; therefore it cannot bring significant and positive change to American education. Character education that promotes the cultural politics of conservative power elites only reinforces the status quo and steers school reform in the wrong direction." [Italics ours.]

"Contrary to the claims of character education leaders-a structural lack of opportunities is the main cause of deviance and crime, not individual pathology- (p.90). This is a major crux in the educational and public policy dilemma that is at issue. Certain factions see much of young people-s unsocial behavior as a result of larger societal injustices and not necessarily their lack of moral training by parents or teachers."

13) Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition (Worth noting that scientists use the term "psychological motivators" not character to measure the behavioral predispositions of individuals. Character education programs arise from a conservative mindset, in the first place. Shouldn't schools return to being politically neutral, simply providing skills and knowledge so kids can make their own political decisions?)
http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/resources_files/ConsevatismAsMotivatedSocialCognition.pdf

"According to polarity theory, there exist generalized orientations-toward the world that may be regarded as belonging either to the ideological left or to the right, and they are associated with liberty and humanism in the first case and rule following and normative concerns in the second. Those who resonate with left-wing ideologies believe that people are basically good and that the purpose of society is to facilitate human growth and experience. By contrast, those who resonate with right-wing ideologies believe that people are essentially bad and that the function of society is to set rules and limits to prevent irresponsible behavior. [Italics ours.]

"Childhood experiences arising from a parental focus on the child and his or her inner self are expected to reinforce feelings of excitement, joy, surprise, distress, and shame, in turn leading the child to gravitate toward the humanistic orientation, or left-wing perspective. In contrast, more structured, punitive parenting en-genders emotions such as anger and contempt, which reflect the normative orientation, or right-wing perspective

14) The Character Education Dilemma
http://mysite.verizon.net/lestershepard/charedudilemma.html

"Character educators want to lend their position a vaguely universal validity by maintaining that the so-called Great Tradition had its roots in many earlier societies, where the goal of teaching was the inculcation of politeness, good habits, and appropriate conduct, this educational task being originally accomplished by and large within the family and its friends. Accordingly, character educators assume that the general norm for the school should be to reinforce parental values, which in turn they take largely to coincide with religious values.

Alas, the family as well as religion, and indeed the entire culture inculcated a great variety of other values, norms, and customs in the young, such as hatred and intolerance for different ethnicities, faiths, and sexual orientations; it sanctioned - not to say glorified - murder, slavery, torture, and oppression. The social ethos in fact instilled and promoted a two-sided moral code whereby values could be readily converted into antivalues: the virtues of the individual, family, clan, group, or nation - the insiders - were seen as the vices of the other, the one or ones outside it. The same act as performed by me showed courage; by my enemy, cowardice. And so down the line, creating a jungle of contradictions."

Kohlberg: "Virtues and vices are labels by which people award praise and blame to others...."

15) Reversing the Perceived Moral Decline in American Schools:A Critical Literature Review of America’s Attempt at CharacterEducation ( Author covers the range of critiques from lack of pre-assessment and no evidence of effectiveness, to the damges of rewarding behavior and flaws in implementation.)
http://www.wm.edu/education/599/05Projects/Whitley_599.pdf

"The entire character education movement is a knee-jerk reaction of conservatives in America to the
economic situation of poor students in schools (Rossides, 2004). Unless schools tackle this very real problem, character education in its current form is pointless and an enormous waste of time and financial resources."

"Character education, as a whole, is severely lacking in any form of real, scientific evidence, greatly eroding any claims of success the movement makes. There are very few studies that scientifically measure the effectiveness of character education programs. This results largely from the inability to operationally define character. Because one cannot define character in a way that everyone can agree upon, it is difficult to measure its effectiveness, casting much doubt on most character education programs."

16) Help for Students (Based on research by the Univ of Kansas. Article explains that, unlike character education, rather than assuming a common or generic set of expectations that may be based in a set of cultural expectations largely irrelevant to the targeted school, a schoolwide approach demonstrates respect for and an awareness of individual student realities and the community in which the school is located.)
http://www.buffalonews.com/149/story/59494.html

"While some of these [character education] programs have productive components, they more often reflect ambiguous outcomes representative of a middle class, majority perception of behavior and show little respect for individual differences, unique learning styles and different lifestyles. Rather than recognizing and building upon the unique culture of the school, character education more often tries to impose the culture of one on another. "