Character Education

By Catherine Bell

Lately, it seems, schools are suffering a new plague--one of our own making. Administrators, eager to spur values instruction, are showering teachers with questionnaires. What formal training have you had in values education? Do you belong to organizations that propagate values? What values do you teach, what activities have you developed, and by what instruments do you measure your strategies' effectiveness? Searching questions that conveniently leave most of the searching to us.

We can be vague in our responses and simply propose some values activity of the year. Somehow, though, the big ideas--equality, truth, freedom, and the like--resist this kind of processing. Abstractions fragile as snowflakes drift across my desk and pile up in the corner, threatening to form a glacier, and I am left wondering.

Values in education cannot be simply a matter of classroom activities and evaluation. We can't teach values as we teach theorems or grammar. Is courage of the same order as run-on sentences or the causes of World War II? Values are neither skills nor content; they are not knowledge at all but more like intelligence or wisdom--which we admittedly can't impart. Students develop values by ways largely mysterious and strongly influenced by individual will. In doing so, they surely seize less upon what we teach than who we are. Values for educators, then, are not to...