Creating a Classroom Climate of Character
By William Damon

When I was a guest on a National Public Radio show, a parent of a 5th-grade student called in to discuss an incident that was highly upsetting to her but all too familiar to me. That week her son had been sent home with a note informing her that he had been caught taking money out of fellow students' backpacks. The mother quickly got on the phone to the boy's teacher to tell her she was appalled, that she couldn't bear the thought of her son stealing from his friends. “What can we do about this?” asked the mother. To her astonishment, the teacher responded by asking her to say and do nothing. “We were obliged to inform you of what happened,” the teacher said, “but now we wish to handle this in our own professional way. And to start with, we are not calling this incident ‘stealing.' That would just give your child a bad self-image. We've decided to call what your son did ‘uncooperative behavior'—and we'll point out to him in no uncertain terms that he won't be very popular with his friends if he keeps acting this way!” The parent reported that the boy now ignored her efforts to counsel him about the matter. She worried that he had “blown the whole thing off” without learning anything from it at all.

In its “professional” judgments, the school had translated a wrongful act (stealing) into a strictly instrumental concern (losing popularity). The school did so in order to save the child from feelings (shame, guilt) that it assumed could cause the child discomfort and thereby damage the child's self-image.

The child probably would have felt embarrassed if forcefully told that he had committed a moral offense—and such an experience in firsthand shame and guilt is precisely what researchers have found to be a primary means of moral learning. There is no credible scientific evidence that supports the idea that a child's self-image can be harmed by reprimands for wrongdoing, as long as the feedback pertains to the behavior rather than to the child's own intrinsic self-worth.

The contemporary character-education movement has been misled by the trendy notion that children's positive feelings are the key to moral learning. Many educators now engage in silly activities and exercises focused on an obsessive attention to children's self-esteem, a focus that has foisted warehouses' worth of nonsense on students.

Confusing Ourselves and Our Students

Over the years I have often been asked to help resolve trouble in schools torn apart by cheating scandals. In each case, the resistance of teachers to discussing the moral meaning of the incident with students was palpable. I explain to them that the moral issues are many, but by no means hard to understand. Cheating is wrong for at least four reasons: it gives students who cheat an unfair advantage over those who do not cheat; it is dishonest; it is a violation of trust; and it undermines the academic integrity, the code of conduct, and the social order of the school.

I am still shocked at the number of teachers who say, in front of their students, that it is hard to hold students to a no-cheating standard in a society where people cheat on taxes, on their spouses, and so on. Some teachers sympathize with student cheaters because they think that the tests students take are flawed or unfair. Some pardon students because they believe that sharing schoolwork is motivated by loyalty to friends. In my experience, it can take days of intense discussion, and some arm twisting, to get a school community to develop a no-cheating standard that is solidly supported by expressions of moral concern.

In our time, a hesitancy to use a moral language remains the most stubborn and distracting problem for character education. Teachers worry that words that shame children may wound their self-esteem; that there are no words of moral truth anyway; that it is hypocritical to preach moral codes to the young when so many adults ignore them; or that in a diverse society one person's moral truth is another's moral falsehood. Yet, adult expressions of clear moral standards are precisely what guide character formation in the young.

The conviction that moral standards are not arbitrary, that they reflect basic human truths and therefore that they must be passed from generation to generation is a necessary prerequisite of all moral education.

Schools must present students with objective standards expressed in a moral language that sharply distinguishes right from wrong and directs students to behave accordingly. Sentiments such as “feeling better” cannot stand as sufficient reason for moral choice. A school must help students understand that they are expected to be honest, fair, compassionate, and respectful whether it makes them feel good or not. The character mandate that adults must pass on to children transcends time, place, or personal feelings.

Suppose that the teacher took the response, “How would it make you feel if someone did that to you?” an extra step—backward through the ages of moral tradition—the Golden Rule. The version most familiar in Western society—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—is in fact a general precept shared by most of the world's religions. While asking the child to take the perspective of another who would be hurt by a harmful act, a teacher could draw the student's attention to the great moral traditions that have proclaimed the importance of doing so, connecting the student's personal sentiments with the earlier wisdom of civilizations. The teacher could introduce students to the glorious panoply of worldwide philosophical thought that has celebrated this principle. A lively classroom discussion could ensue from exploring why so much profound thinking across so many diverse times and places has focused on this classic maxim.

Pointing out the rich religious and historical traditions behind a maxim underlines its deep importance in human life. It informs students of the universal and timeless truths underlying moral strictures. It does not imply proselytizing for a particular religious doctrine, because the universality of core moral principles can be easily demonstrated. This kind of instruction is needed pedagogically not only because it elicits historical interest, but also because it adds a dimension of moral gravity and objectivity to what otherwise would stand only as a simple statement of a child's personal feelings.

If a child's moral education is limited to stimulating self-reflection about his personal feelings, not much has been accomplished. But if the child's moral education begins with a consideration of moral feelings such as empathy and then links these feelings with the enduring elements of morality, the child's character growth will be enhanced by transforming the child's emotions—which do play a key role in behavior—into a lasting set of virtues.

We do not invent our ethical codes from scratch, nor should we expect that our children could. Our inherited moral traditions are the essential elements of civilized society. For too long, our public schools have hidden away the historical dimension, keeping the traditional foundations of moral instruction out of sight. It is time to remove this unnecessary handicap and build the moral futures of our children on the best wisdom that the past and present can offer.

William Damon is Professor of Education, Director of the Center on Adolescence at Stanford University, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.