Moral Education

It's not easy being a kid these days — the lines between right and wrong can get awfully fuzzy. How can we help children see the difference? Karen Bohlin has a few ideas. She's the assistant director of the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University in Massachusetts, and co-author of the new book Building Character in Schools: Practical Ways to Bring Moral Instruction to Life. We talked with her about what it takes to raise and educate "good kids."

Question: What is good character?

Karen Bohlin: Character is who you are — your essential person, not just how you behave or how you appear. As my co-author Kevin Ryan puts it, the simple definition of a person with "good" character is someone who 'knows the good, loves the good, and does the good' — habitually, not just once in a while when he's in front of a camera or his boss.

Question: Do you have to learn to be a person of good character?

Bohlin: Sure. We're all born with different tendencies and temperaments. Some of us might be more melancholy, some might be more cheerful, some more social. But character is definitely something we can build through good habits. It's very easy to fall into bad habits, but it takes a lot of effort to be generous or hard-working all the time. You need to teach children to share, to put their toys away, to smile, to say please. Otherwise they'd be habitually self-centered.

Question: Whose job is it to instill good character in kids?

Bohlin: Parents are the primary moral educators of their children. There is no question about that. Even if they are traveling a lot or both working outside of the home, they have the moral and civic responsibility. But schools take up a lot of children's time, and unfortunately some children spend more time with their teachers and their classmates than they do with their parents and siblings. School is also a little world unto itself. Kids can learn on the playground the rules of survival and cruelty, or they can learn how to play fair and have fun.

Question: How should a school go about teaching character?

Bohlin: A great way to start is for a school to come together as a community: faculty, custodians, administrators, parents, older students, and local business people. The conversation should begin with the questions: What do we stand for? What kinds of people would we like our children to become? You also have to look at the whole climate of the school: Is it welcoming? Is it safe? Look for the intangibles: Are kids smiling? Do the faculty and students hold doors for each other?

Question: How do schools actually deliver the message to the students?

Bohlin: Examining the curriculum is the next step. When children read the biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, or when they study Martin Luther King, Jr. at school, their teachers should be talking about what made them great people. They should be asking kids meaningful questions: "Whom do you admire the most?" "Why?" "What sacrifices did that person have to make to lead the kind of life he led?"

There also has to be an expectation in all classes that children can achieve, and that mediocre work will not be accepted. Children pick that up. It doesn't help to say, "Good for you, you handed in your homework today," when that homework is half done on a crumpled-up piece of paper. Kids sense this insincerity.

Question: Is it harder to raise kids with good character today?

Bohlin: We currently have a real decline of moral literacy in children. Kids don't know what courage means. They don't know the difference between right and wrong. I recently read a powerful story in the American School Board Journal. After a series of murders in Baltimore, a school principal got on the PA system. He called on his students to examine their consciences and tell the police who they thought was responsible. After hearing this, one student asked his teacher, "What's a conscience?" This is in high school!

In the adolescent community we find depression, suicide, and increased abortion, not because kids are bad, but because they're lacking guidance, friendship, direction, and I would add inspiration, from adults. Kids need to hear from adults that it's worthwhile to take certain principles seriously. And that it's worthwhile to become a person others can respect and trust.

Resource: For more on raising kids with good character, pick up a copy of Raising Good Children: From Birth Through the Teenage Years, by Thomas Lickona.

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