positive education for the future
ethos
positive education for the future
Character Education
Howard Rodstein describes how, although many theorists
and researchers have attempted to define character
education, practitioners rarely describe how it operates in
the real lives of schools. In this article, Howard attempts
to fill in that gap
In fall, 2012, the Peak School, a small high
school devoted, in part to authentic character
education, opened, in Breckenridge,
Colorado. One of its founding staff members,
Dana Karin, is a graduate of the Scarsdale
Alternative School, a pioneering character
education program founded in 1972. As
the director of the Alternative School (the
3rd in its history), I feel a sense of pride
that graduates of the A-School often want
to pass on aspects of “the magic” of their
experience in our “Just Community” school
built on principles of democratic practice
and moral development and a commitment
to practice that actually makes use of those
principles. Increasingly, in a world of tweets
and hashtags, talk is cheap. In academia, talk,
especially of the esoteric sort, is ubiquitous
and often far removed from the real lives of
students. Adolescents can smell hypocrisy
a mile away. So the first rule of character
education must be that we must practice
what we preach. That is, the adults in the
school community, in our formal meetings, in
our informal interaction, through the process
by which we determine curricula, disciplinary
policy, schedule, and use of resources must
act toward each other as we would want our
students to interact.
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In other words, the first “we” must be the
adults. We must be kind. We must seek
to be just. We must work collaboratively.
We must make our disagreements public
and model respectful disagreement in our
deliberations. We must demonstrate how
we struggle with decision-making, how we
try to value perspective-taking as we strive
to make ethical decisions, and we must show
how summoning the courage to make tough
decisions is a necessary part of operating
as mature people in a democratic society.
Finally, we must own the consequences of
our decisions. Modeling character education
for adolescents does not insure that values
will be passed on to our students, but it
does create a culture in which norms that
foster respect, perspective-taking, resilience,
growth, care, and honesty can thrive.
Increasingly, so-called adults in public life,
whether in business, government, sports,
or entertainment make a spectacle of
“blame games” in which they offer “reasons”
why they are not responsible for the
consequences of their actions: moral, legal,
financial and otherwise. Equally absurdly,
when a celebrity adopts a child from the third
world or raises millions for a worthy cause