Theory-practice and moral education

The theory-practice puppy is nipping at my heels today as I begin teaching -- for the second week in a row -- “Children’s and Adolescents’ Moral Development.” That’s the title of a workshop for P-12 educators in my region of Pennsylvania. I’m co-teaching this week with my friend and colleague developmentalist Mary Casey.

The participants in this workshop want “practice,” and eschew theory. But practice is not a how-to manual, and theory is not useless. Pedagogical practice involves socially-framed and contextually-determined, sometimes habituated, sometimes thoughtful, but always particular responses to particular sets of educational circumstances.

Particularity matters when it comes to practice and so does the community of agents within which any practice gets its meaning. And that’s why I can’t simply “deliver” specific actions, or even typical strategies, that teachers can put on the shelf and take down and use when they want to put on a “moral educator” hat. What I can do is coach teachers to richly interpret the circumstances and challenges facing them so that their responses fit – intellectually, emotionally, psychically, relationally, i.e. morally. This is a pragmatist view of moral decision-making and action that relies on the work of Christian theological H. Richard Niebuhr in The Responsible Self, one that is clearly congruent with John Dewey’s understanding of valuation and responsibility.

Interpretation is a complicated process integrating attention, cognition, imagination, anticipation, empathy, and self-understanding. Humans interpret all the time in all sorts of settings, sometimes well, often poorly. Limited or inaccurate or avoidably biased interpretation leads to ill-suited, potentially immoral response. Thorough, grounded interpretation enables fruitful, moral action.

The capacity to interpret well is grounded in experience and knowledge. What practitioners refer to as “theory” is part of that grounding. Aristotle’s emphasis on the role of habit in doing the good reinforces most educators’ intuition that modeling matters and reinforcement of constructive behavior results in “good kids,” focusing them on their own behavior and the internal and external reward for apparently good behavior. Kant’s claim that reason yields a universalizable categorical imperative to be obeyed by the well-oriented will pushes us to look for the principles at work in any circumstance. Piaget’s formulation of stages of cognitive development is really a framework for interpreting student learning, just as Erickson’s socio- crises offer a lens for recognizing some social and emotional forces shaping a youngster’s actions. Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning enable an educator to know how to talk constructively with kids about moral dilemmas. Gilligan’s emphasis on relationships in theorizing moral development introduces gender as a potentially important interpretive element. Noddings’ phenomenological analysis of caring as a relationship rather than an individual feeling calls us to scrutinize relationships as interactive.

It matters not for action that someone can accurately recite the stages or categories or principles and connect them with the correct author – but it does matter which stages and categories and principles frame one’s interpreting, even implicitly. It does matter that educators have a richly-developed theoretical sensibility; it matters that they internalize the habits of interpretation that these theories underwrite. It is here that theory is married to practice and cannot profitably be put asunder.

So I have to do more than tell them what Aristotle or Kohlberg or Noddings say. My own practice as the co-instructor of this workshop must model the ways of seeing and understanding that I deem important for their practice as moral educators – and then I have to catch them trying it out and help them recognize the payoff in understanding that will reinforce their new interpretive framework.

“Theory” and “practice” are analytic constructs, pragmatic products of emphasis and point of view. If I am laboring in the field, practice is my lens. If I am laboring in the laboratory or the library, theory is my lens. But either way, both theory and practice are present in my thinking. Dewey of course knew this and said so on numerous occasions. I have to do more than say so in my workshop this week; I have to find a way to help the teachers who are my students internalize this insight so that it shapes what they see and how they interpret the value of our work together.

Christian theologian Paul Tillich asserted that “Morality is not a subject; it is life put to the test in dozens of moments.” His claim fits neatly with Dewey’s distinction (in Moral Principles in Education) between “ideas about morality” and “moral ideas.” Moral ideas are ideas that move us to action. Moral ideas are our answers to life’s tests. Ideas about morality are the medium through which we talk about and reflect on our frames for interpretation. Those frames are central to moral action, but not, in themselves, enough.

So the theory-practice puppy deserves – and will get – my/our attention this week. But along the way, I’ll be trying to shape a concept of practice that will render the theory-practice puppy toothless.

How do children become good?

This week I begin the first of two workshops devoted to "Children's and Adolescents' Moral Development" with teachers from public, private and parochial schools.   In the course of our week-long encounter, we'll think about psychological, philosophical, pedagogical and personal perspectives on how children be and become good people.  We'll explore in depth the role of teachers and schools in fostering goodness.   

Because it's a good idea to unearth prior understandings (and misconceptions) when beginning any new learning journey,  I'm posting this to invite my student/colleagues to share their own perceptions at this point.   So have at it, folks:   How do children become good? 

Life purpose and "moral education"

The most recent issue of Education Week included a piece highlighting Bill Damon’s new book, The Path to Purpose:  Helping our Children Find Their Calling in Life.   Damon is a Stanford psychologist and long-time moral development researcher whose earlier work, The Moral Child, sets out a worthwhile vision of what makes a child good.

Damon’s work is a hermeneutically-enriched form of survey research.   He is asking large numbers of young people aged 12 through 26, through paper and pencil surveys and selected in-depth interviews, about their lack of direction in life.    The work, still in progress, has a comparative dimension in that Damon and his colleagues are trying to determine whether the youth of today differ from past generations in their ability to frame meaning and purpose in their lives.

Damon’s preliminary answer is that more than a quarter of young people are “disengaged” and about a fifth have actually found something meaningful to which they wanted to dedicate their lives.   The vast numbers in between have not given up on meaningfulness but haven’t found a way to make sense of their lives either.    Damon calls on schools and communities to address this “malaise.”

Damon’s on target here in my estimation, and this may be one of the premier ways that “moral education” can – and must – be integrated with academic purposes in schooling.   When a young person (in high school or college) learns biology, the purpose is not that he will know the difference between mitosis and meiosis.   One purpose is that he will understand himself in the world as a form of life, as a walking miraculous process, as a complex system, as an atomic unit in a much larger complex system, and so forth.   Another purpose is that she will possess the resources (knowledge, analytic skills, skills of appreciation/communication) to respond in a fitting way to the day’s practical issues re health, innovation, nourishment, etc.   And if he finds himself fascinated with either the mechanisms of biology or the issues that biological understanding illuminates, he may find a pursuit (of employment or leisure) to which he can commit large amounts of time and energy.   Each of these purposes is about life meaning, about one’s way of being in the world, and about the actions that turn meaning into meaningfulness.   This is moral education (as Damon’s background and life purpose would portend)  -- without the direct weight of  moralizing or evangelization or indoctrination.  

These are unquestionably educational issues though perhaps not narrowly academic ones.   Are our school structures, schedules and curricula designed to make it likely that this work is being done?  Are teachers willing and/or able to take up these issues even when time – and administrative fiat -- “permits”?  I’d answer no.

The role of relationship

Earlier today I read a piece in the Austin American-Statesmen (click on the title above to read the piece yourself) describing the dangers facing high school teachers who seek closer relationships with students as a means of developing smart and good kids.   A small but substantial number of middle schools and high schools throughout the country are taking advantage of "advisory" relationships in which a teacher takes primary responsibility for shepherding a finite number of students (say 18-20) through their secondary school career.   Advisor/teachers and students meet as a group on a regular basis and advisors check in frequently with individuals -- and often their parents.

This is a trend to be encouraged in my humble opinion.  And it supplements the kinds of relationships students have long had with mature and responsible coaches and other extracurricular moderators.  Students who are regularly seen, encouraged and challenged by a single significant adult in a school setting will flourish academically and personally.  They will learn how to see, encourage and challenge those around them and contribute to a learning community in the bargain.  However, there are dangers lurking when coaches and advisors don't understand the nature of their relationship with advisees.  The American-Statesman article outlines some of those dangers.

In the case described, a teacher/coach/advisor lost his job for talking with a student about sexual identity.  The male student and family sued the male teacher, arguing that the teacher convinced the young man that he was gay, inappropriately talking with him about non-academic issues.   In a move that's good news for all educators of any kind, the suit was thrown out.   It is a fine line between academic and "non-academic" matters when one is teaching adolescents.  Good teachers can make use of all kinds of material in enabling learning.

However, there are also limits to the role one can play as teacher, coach or advisor -- and that's the point.   One cannot be an effective teacher or coach when the relationship shifts to counselor or friend.   Teacher and coach must push and pull and enable and entice students in the process of learning.  They must set standards, help students to internalize those standards, and, eventually, to enact them.  Acceptance is part of the picture but not the center of focus. Counselors and friends, on the other hand, must be masters of acceptance.  In the case mentioned above,  the teacher spoke on the phone with this student late at night.  Even if, as it appears, the student initiated these calls, this is clearly not the role of teacher.  I don't know enough to hazard a guess whether or not it was "fair" that this teacher lost his job.   What I do know is that in taking late night calls (it's important that it's calls, plural) from a student, the teacher misunderstood what kind of relations serve (moral or academic) pedagogical roles and goals.

The relation (i.e. the habitual interaction between teacher and student) is, I think, central to the quality of the lesson learned in any educative experience.  A student learns to think by thinking with a teacher, to analyze by analyzing with, to judge by judging with, to wonder by wondering with, to write by writing with, to read by reading with, to calculate by calculating with, to discern by discerning with.   These "withs" are the kinds of relations appropriate to teacher-student interactions.

Teachers and advisors and coaches will construct the right kind of relation(s) with young people when they remain true to their own roles and goals -- and know when a different kind of relation, a non-pedagogical relation, is needed.   So schools must have the people to serve those roles waiting in the wings for referral, and teachers must know who those people are and how to get to them quickly.

Judgment better than "godly"?

Yesterday in the (Lancaster, PA) Sunday News, columnist Dona Fisher wrote a column about her close encounter with a traffic cop who stopped her for zooming along on a country road that had a 25 mph speed limit. In response to this "sin," she asked "why do godly people do ungodly things?" I found this question in this context incongruous.

I don't know Dona Fisher. I presume she is a "godly person" (she writes a weekly column called "Matters of Faith"), but I'm not sure I consider speeding on a country road an "ungodly" act. It may certainly be unwise or unsafe or illegal, but "ungodly."?? Fisher's view of what counts as "godly" or moral is revealing. I'm quoting at length here:

"It is unfortunate that our courts are filled with people who have broken laws. Even though laws are set for people to be wise in their actions, they lack the power to make people obedient. So how can our behavior and conduct be controlled?

God's laws never change. We need a fixed authority in whom we can follow in obedience. Those professionals God has placed over us have made the rules for us to follow. Laws are rules that take away our personal freedom and are enforced by a controlling authority and meant to be obeyed."

As an educator working in a public institution, I find this rendering of laws, obedience and morality more than a little problematic. As a citizen in a society where "those professionals" are sometimes less than professional (not to mention downright racist, sexist, homophobic or simply inconsiderate and ungodly), I am frightened at a formulation of "goodness" that removes intelligence from the picture.

But this raises a question for educators and parents that is never fully "fixed," never finally resolved: How do I teach my students/children to question when questioning is appropriate, to obey when obeying is appropriate, to resist when resisting is appropriate, to challenge when challenging is appropriate? I teach them judgment -- informed, intelligent, compassionate judgment; that's the answer. And in careful judgment, the smart and the good coexist.

We'll leave just how to do that for another day -- or many other days. For now, let me say just this: judgment is a practice and any practice is learned by having many opportunities to try it (preferably in "safe" conditions), to undergo the consequences of my try, and to connect the dots between my trying and my undergoing. But I can't (usually) do it alone; someone needs to help me see where I have neglected some important information or moved too hastily or failed to consider all perspectives. It helps to have a coach in any practice. Judgment is no exception.

Mounting a Protest

There is a fragile spirit of student activism rising up as surely as the crocuses of spring poke through in my garden. I don't know whether to thank George Bush for a misbegotten war or Barack Obama for his calculated and eloquent message of youth's possibilities, but it's popping up and taking some pretty interesting shapes. On my campus (and on more than a dozen campuses around the country), a revival of the sixties phenomenon Students for a Democratic Society is planning a Walk Out Against the War for March 20th, the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. I think it's swell. I hope lots and lots of students walk out of class – even when, especially when, they will miss something "important" – to attend the teach-in on the quad. I hope there will be a counter-protest, something that seems likely based on nasty opinion pieces in the student newspaper. I hope that any student who has a strong opinion will find a way to express that opinion without judging or demeaning any one else. They will do that if we teach them how – if we ourselves refrain from judging or demeaning. This is, of course, easier said than done.

It matters how we view the war in Iraq. Whatever your position on its original wisdom or current status, you must acknowledge that when young Americans and even younger Iraqis are in danger, that we are bound to consider carefully next steps. Careful consideration takes dialogue across difference. "Dialogue" suggests speaking and listening. Listening means hearing and wrestling with the position articulated by another.

Adults (faculty members, student affairs personnel) can model the kind of dialogue – speaking and listening – about the protest itself that we hope students can demonstrate with respect to the war issue. And university personnel seem to be doing just that. The administration and faculty union have taken a joint position that encourages free speech while reminding students that any action taken has consequences – and that it's within an instructor's rights to hold students accountable for class absence. This is a wonderful lesson in responsibility, the ability to respond in a fitting way in complicated circumstances. Young people will develop responsibility when they have the chance to practice it. This is one such chance. Whether or not an individual student walks out is not the critical element. The fact that they are confronted with this choice is a good thing. They may not succeed admirably in their decision-making, but I am quite sure they will learn something important, especially if the adults around them are listening carefully and responding thoughtfully.

"Life put to the test"

"Morality is not a subject; it is life put to the test in dozens of moments." (Paul Tillich)

What comes to your mind when "morality" is mentioned? Do you think of the Ten Commandments? Does morality evoke a sense of sin or "fear of the Lord" (in the person of Yahweh, Jesus or Allah? Do you think of right and wrong actions? Do you think of good and bad results of your actions? Are you worried about rules to be followed and broken? Do you focus on scandal, sexual or otherwise? Are you moved to shame? Hell bent on confession? Craving forgiveness?

Is morality a singular event or a plural one? Does it involve the actions of an atomistic individual careening under or out of control in a world we create by the way that we act? Or is morality a systematic representation of the relations between us?

Who decides?

Christian theologian Paul Tillich calls into question even the questions we ask about morality with the statement at the head of this post. If morality is "life put to the test," then how are our religious beliefs, social conventions and interpersonal interactions implicated in this? Put more simply, who's going to tell me what to do????

I think this good Christian and superlative theologian is telling us that nobody can tell us what "ought" to be done. It is my life that is put to the test, tested with reference to what I value, what I believe about the meaning of my life, who I love (in all the various sense of love), who I understand and express myself to be. And where does the test come from? From everywhere!!! In "dozens of moments" as Tillich puts it, dozens of moments every day.

Morality isn't primarily about scandalous behavior (consider Michael Vick's dog-fighting woes or Lindsay Lohan's addictive behavior or a garden variety extramarital affair). Scandals (micro-sized or macro-sized) occur when we have strayed far outside the frame of social convention. Sometimes we stray so far that the only things others can do is pitt us. However, the morality of particular actions cannot – and I would argue should not -- be judged from a distance.

Morality – life put to the test – is about how we respond to the driver who just cut us off, or how we answer the teacher who asks if we did our homework, or whether we provide our employer value (neither too little nor too much!) for wages through our "work ethic." It's a matter of "what's worth doing" in the context of how I make meaning out of my life. So yes, my religious faith and my political commitments and my understanding about the nature of the world will all impact my enacted and expressed morality. No surprise there.

But what do we do when "what's worth doing" is contested? That's the "everywhere" that the test is coming from. And every one of those tests is an opportunity – to be and become "moral."

Hmmm, but is that too circular? Is there no Archimedean point at which to anchor what is of value, or what is meaningful, or who should and should not be loved? Maybe not. Doesn't that complicate the process of moral education for children? Sure. But maybe it also provides the opening for moral education in a public school setting. And maybe it also supports the value of diversity within schools. And maybe it captures something important about democratic culture that we rarely experience.

No one mourns the wicked

No one mourns the wicked
No one cries: "They won't return!"
No one lays a lily on their grave
The good man scorns the wicked!
Through their lives, our children learn
What we miss
When we misbehave . . .

The Wicked Witch of the West is dead. In the original film "The Wizard of Oz," there is unmitigated joy: "Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead!? But in the contemporary musical "Wicked," a retelling from the putative witch's point of view, there is a kind of polluted glee. The delight at the downfall of this wicked person is a schadenfreude, a joy shadowed by a too-intent insistence that wickedness is easily distinguished from good by those who are themselves good. "Goodness knows" that the wicked get what they deserve and deserve what they get.

But it is, of course, not that simple. And just how complex it is develops in the course of the musical.

Is Elphaba wicked? Or wildly misunderstood and mistreated again and again? Is Glinda "the Good"? Or a whited sepulcher -- handcuffed by self-doubt, fear of failure and a slavish attention to others' opinions -- who sacrifices Elphaba to her own need to be popular? Does it matter if we can determine the goodness of the two?

It does if, as the lyric suggests, the lives of those we judge to be wicked are moral lessons to our children. What do children learn through the lives of the wicked? What do we miss when we misbehave?

If the story told in the first scene of "Wicked" is to be believed, children learn that "the wickeds' lives are lonely," that no one mourns the wicked, that the wicked die early and alone. So children learn to emulate Glinda and not Elphaba. Glinda is a hero; Elphaba is an object lesson.

Glinda is also shallow and self-centered. She readily uses others to get what she wants. She will "grovel in submission to feed [her] own ambition." And in the process, she accepts social givens. Elphaba, disfigured and dishonored by the sin of being born "green," is honest and caring with herself and others. She acts on principle. She does not tolerate foolishness or dishonesty in authority. When she encounters both in the Wizard, she experiences a moment of heightened consciousness that leads her to "defy gravity," to soar beyond the limits that others impose on her. This act of transgression is the source of her "wickedness," as she refuses to tolerate the wickedness (in the musical, the maltreatment of animals) perpetrated by others. Soon she is being accused – by those powerful others -- of lying and spreading fear. The irony of course, is that dishonesty and fear are defining characteristics for "Glinda the Good" and the "Wonderful Wizard of Oz."

Neither Glinda nor the Wizard is wicked; each is weak. But that weakness grounds the judgment that Elphaba is wicked. Wickedness is not Elphaba's trait but Glinda's and the Wizard's reflection. And others -- all of us who need to believe that wickedness is in others -- somehow separate from the one who speaks truth to power, the one who defies social expectation.

This story constitutes a meditation on principled moral action and conventional behavior. (Is adherence to convention ever really moral?) But it is more than principle that motivates Elphaba and it's important to acknowledge that. Her location as a different "other" (she is, after all, green and admittedly odd rather than blond and popular like the good witch Glinda) grounds her experience of injustice and her awareness that the "something bad" happening is not only bad; it is also unfair. And her encounter with the Wizard jars her into realizing what she values precisely by shaking her faith in the Wizard's authority. Elphaba has thought-into-action in response to a situation that shakes up her taken for granted world. She interprets what's going on in the light of her own prior experience, her beliefs about what is fair, and her solidarity with other outsiders. She recognizes the consequences of "defying gravity" but "can't" want what she wanted before anymore. And she lives out the consequences of her action in the context of the overlapping communities of action that shape – but not define – her.

Moral agency is complicated and cannot be described or understood by focusing solely on principles or on consequences or on virtues. But any theory of moral agency and action must make room for principles and consequences and virtues. Is there such a theory of everything?

What social science tells us about children's moral development

Twenty years ago, William Damon (The Moral Child, 1988) offered this set of principles for guiding a comprehensive approach to children's moral education. They were, he claimed, based on current social scientific knowledge.

1. Simply by virtue of their participation in essential social relationships, children encounter the classic moral issues facing humans everywhere: issues of fairness, honesty, responsibility, kindness, and obedience.
2. The children's moral awareness is shaped and supported by natural emotional reactions to observations and events.
3. Relations with parents, teachers, and other adults introduce the child to important social standards, rules, and conventions. Moreover, these relations generate knowledge and respect for the social order itself.
4. Relations with peers introduce children to norms of direct reciprocity and to standards of sharing, cooperation, and fairness.
5. Because children's morality is shaped (though not wholly created) through social influence, broad variations in social experience can lead to broad differences in children's moral orientations.
6. Moral growth in school settings is governed by the same developmental processes that apply to moral growth everywhere.

I suggest that Damon's principles are still valid and that research in recent decades – including new discoveries about neurological function – have supported rather than supplanted these basic principles. Note that relations and emotions constitute the medium of moral development as Damon understands it.

In other places, I have written about the centrality of relation to educational efforts and have begun to focus more recently about educating the emotions with a focus on fear as a feature of educational experience. That may explain why I think Damon has it right.

Moral Maturity?

Nearly two decades ago, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development's Panel on Moral Education published a description of the "morally mature" person. According to the panel, the morally mature person habitually:
1. Respects human dignity
2. Cares about the welfare of others
3. Integrates individual interests and social responsibilities
4. Demonstrates integrity
5. Reflects on moral choices
6. Seeks peaceful resolution of conflict.
The panel's statement closed with this: "In general, then, the morally mature person understands moral principles and accepts responsibility for applying them."

As I review this descriptive list twenty years later, I find it difficult to argue with. Who could possibly be opposed to human dignity, caring, integrity, etc.? And yet…

Note that the description is usefully composed in behavioral terms. I know that it's difficult to define some of these terms, but it's actually not as difficult to recognize a trait when it presents itself as it is to define it. I am pretty confident I can name "integrity" when I see it but I am less confident that any verbal definition will stand up unerringly to lived experience. So I find this notion of "moral maturity" helpful as a target. But still…

I do think the items on the list constitute both necessary and sufficient conditions (as philosophers like to say) for moral maturity. That is, I don't believe one can be morally mature without attending to each of the six mandates (necessary). And I don't think there is any significant mandate omitted in this listing (sufficient). And yet…

I'm sure you can tell that I have some reservations about this description of moral maturity, and maybe you also recognize that I'm having trouble expressing my reservations. My concern is not that this doesn't tell me when I (or others) have hit the target. I think it's quite useful for that purpose. But I worry that the list (even in its unabridged version with "indicators") obscures rather than illuminates the path to moral maturity. How is it that I come to understand what integrity is, to form a concept of integrity, and to appropriate it as a life goal? How do I acquire the habit of integrity? I am not convinced that integrity can be taken on in the same way that, say, table manners can be modeled, coached and practiced.

I also worry that the behavioral formulation of moral maturity obscures rather than illuminates both the cognitive and emotional dimensions of moral maturity. In a social and academic milieu where the cognitive is assumed to be critical, the emotional is suspect and to be controlled, and the two are assumed to be distinct domains – all arguable assumptions, I fret especially that we neglect the education of the emotions in any effort toward developing moral maturity.

And take a look at the summary statement with its attention to the application of principles. I don't doubt the value of moral principles but I am no Kantian. I do not view moral principles as rules to be discovered and obeyed but, like John Dewey, as generalizations about past experience to be tested in present living. Thus principles are not "applied" but "proven," that is put to the test in the here and now. So yes, responsibility must be accepted, but responsibility is more than accountability. It represents an ability to respond in a fitting way to moral challenges. More on that in another post.

And then of course there's the question of whether we should frame the goal in terms of "maturity," a term that suggests, if not implies, the possibility of completion and/or superiority. When one is morally mature, is one also somehow better than other human beings? Better how? More human? More sophisticated? Closer to God?

Puppies and moral possibilities

We just got a puppy. She is a yellow Lab (a "Dudley" version with pink nose and beautiful blue-green eyes) and her name is Bailey. And Bailey has me thinking about how the young grow to be "good."

Bailey – like any puppy and any small child – demonstrates a remarkable combination of needs that don't always – or even often – match up. First, she desperately wants affection, approval, and a sense of belonging. She opens herself to us, and almost any other adult she encounters. She craves the authority of the "top dog." She wants the security of clear guidance and good habits. She is not good when she is afraid or when the expectations are unclear. (OK, so I admit I learned that watching the "Dog Whisperer" on TV, but I think you can see it in your own puppy – or child -- even without Caesar's guidance.)

At the same time that Bailey craves structure and approval, she is forging her own sense of assertiveness and efficacy. She recognizes small children as others like her and runs to them (and at them!) in puppy-like games that have both a social and a self-testing element about them. "Yes, I am playing with you, but I am also figuring out who I am and where I fit in the animal kingdom I now inhabit." She wants her own bone and bowl and blanket. She likes her crate (as a place of security – see above), but on a daily basis drags her blanket out of the crate to a spot on the floor of her choosing as if to say "Yes, I need a space but I'll pick it." She needs a sense of efficacy -- "I can get it done" – within a context of collaboration – "you come too."

And then there is the sheer physicality of her presence and daily existence. She uses her body in new ways everyday and with boundless energy and eagerness. Her sense of taste is limited only by our discipline (we've made a commitment to feed her only dog food, but I wonder if that will go of the way of the "no TV" plan I had for my children), but her sense of touch, hearing, sight and smell are stimulated in infinite and variable ways constantly. Birds chirp, bugs fly past her nose, sun warms her coat, bunnies and squirrels offer quarry for the hunt. And then there are the physical challenges we put in her path. She learns "stupid human tricks" as much because it is a way to move in her body as because we are offering her a treat for her performance.

She learns so quickly and so willingly. But she must learn to balance the competing calls and lessons if she is to become a "good dog." And it seems to me that she needs clear and consistent direction and limits at the same time that she needs opportunities to test and assert herself and the space to flex her physical and "moral" muscles. What do these puppy needs tell us about how children grow to be good persons? And what are the adult actions and context conditions that will speed this development toward good? More on that later.

"Something Bad" is happening in Oz

I reside in Lancaster, PA, an economically prosperous, culturally diverse, remarkably safe, and geographically lovely oasis west of Philadelphia and north of Baltimore. But over the past several years, we have awakened to news of brutal murders committed by "good kids." These teenagers have killed adoptive parents, girlfriends' parents, rivals in love, best friends, and other family members. They are middle class, attend good schools and have adults who care for and about them. As Elphaba and Dr. Dillamond sing in the musical Wicked, "Something bad is happening in Oz . . ."

How do we explain this phenomenon? The tendency is to look for something "wrong" in the young person who perpetrates this act. We want to be able to blame them – or their abusive family members or their parents' divorce. If we can place blame, we can isolate the germ. It affects "them" but not "us." But to identify mental illness in this one or bullying of that one or dysfunctional family system for his one is to beg the question. For who among us doesn't experience neurotic patterns of behavior, or hasn't bullied or been bullied, or doesn't have a dysfunctional family? In and of themselves, these are not causes of murder and other violent behaviors.

And, of course, there are those who will explain our lost moral horizon by linking it to a failure of religious faith, usually of a particular brand of faith with its attendant presumptions about propriety and social organization. While I think it right to reflect on the impact of spiritual understanding and religious faith on patterns of action, I am wary of explanations that imply absolute answers to questions of meaning and action.

Instead we would do well to ask ourselves why violence is imaginable for anyone, but especially for any young person. What is it in our cultural patterns, our social interactions, our educational institutions that introduces the possibility of violence? This is, of course, a question for books, not a blog post. Here I just want to highlight a couple of things that we're doing that, in my opinion, do not close the door to violence.

We make more – and sillier -- rules. Last week I read about a Virginia middle student who put his arm around his girlfriend's shoulder (Do middle school students really have girlfriends? I know they talk about "going out" but of course they never actually go anywhere). For this offense, he ended up in the principal's office. He had violated a rule against hugging. Now the actual rule proscribes any touching, any physical contact among students. I can understand why the thought of banning touching occurred to the administration. Middle schoolers, like puppies, utilize touch as a form of communication. And sometimes that touching is inappropriate and they are not mature enough to tell when or to control every response. But middle schoolers' immaturity is not a justification for adults' idiocy. Rules cannot do the hard work of relationships. Efficiency of apprehension, adjudication and punishment will not replace the painstaking (and time-consuming) process of discriminating between touch that is appropriate (and needed and welcome!) and touch that is inappropriate. We have developed all kinds of zero tolerance policies over the past decade in the name of security, authority, consistency, rigor, etc. and none deserve to stand. Such policies defeat their own goals. Security is lost because trust is defeated. Authority is undermined because order outweighs human flourishing.

We create "programs" to fix "the problem." Policy-makers and educators (administrators and teachers) are problem-solvers who have been trained to make problems go away. We want to identify the problem and then fix it. So we create a program and declare the problem fixed. Think here of Head Start or CHIPS (the PA children's health care program) or various remedial reading efforts. These may well be excellent programs but, for a variety of reasons – limited funding, inadequate outreach, inappropriate application or a simple failure of will. the strong strategy doesn't fully address the issue at hand. It does however "fix" the problem; that is, it identifies a problem and sets it in stone as "the problem." This means that the phenomenon that prompted our concern and consideration can be set aside as identified and solved when, in fact, there may be more facets and features to the phenomenon that require our continued attention. Given the nature of human behavior and growth, I suggest that such "problems" are never exhaustively identified and require on-going definition and re-thinking. We not only need new solutions to old problems; we need new formulations of the problem in order to generate novel responses.

I was thinking about this when I read about the United States Golf Association's First Tee Program. It's a good program, one that contributes to what we might call the moral formation of young people. It's also a marvelous example of marketing meeting moral education. Public golf courses make tee times (and fees) and coaching available to youngsters at times when the course is not crowded. Youngsters learn the rules of golf (a "whiff" counts as a stroke) and the values that implementing the rules require (honesty). The program involves connections to life outside the golf course and parental communication. It's all good. And it's good for the golf course owners who are grooming future paying customers.

This is a good program. But any program like this is dangerous because it allows us to think that we have identified the problem (kids don't have the right values) and offered a "fix" (teach them values through participation in sport). We congratulate ourselves because we have these programs – in schools, in churches, and in community settings. And it seems likely that almost all kids have some experience with some kind of program like this. But still we wake up to news of murder by children.

I have some thoughts about what we can do to excise violent reaction as an imaginable response. And I will write about those over time. But those things are more complicated than making rules and developing programs. They involve changing hearts and minds and habits. I better start with my own.

“Doing better”in grammar school or middle school?

For the better part of a decade, urban districts (Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York – and my own Lancaster, Pa.) have been pondering, planning and, in some cases, implementing a shift back to the grammar school (K-8) model and away from the middle school that has become the educational home of choice for 6th, 7th and 8th graders since the early 80s. Into this policy playground comes a new study by respected Johns Hopkins middle school researchers Douglas and Martha MacIver that claims “No benefit to eliminating middle school,” according to the headline in my morning paper.

I haven’t yet gotten my hands on the MacIver study; my comment here should not be read as a critique of their research. The study seems to be well-conceived to determine whether students experience learning growth – as measured by test scores -- over the three years of a middle school stay. The data support the view that children in middle schools score as well as students in K-8 schools, at least when other variables like teaching quality, curriculum, etc. remain constant.

I don’t doubt the MacIvers research findings but I do question what it means to “do better.” And I do want to question the assumption that we should put students of a certain age either into a middle school or a grammar school. Why not both/and? Before explaining what I mean, a bit of school history:

The middle school was, as those over 40 know, the successor to the junior high school. In 1989, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century, a report that took the developmental profile of young adolescents seriously and designed a school around them. The middle school, already in place in some districts (more because of demographic demand than developmental focus), found its philosophical underpinnings: to strengthen academic demands and to create a caring environmental in which those academic demands could be prosecuted.

And the middle school made sense, at least more sense than its predecessor, the junior high school. In the junior high school, a universe of growing hormone levels, independence needs, and shaky identities came together in a blend that was toxic for many. Shifting the age range and locating learners in teams where a finite number of teachers and students could establish on-going relationships made lots of sense. It still does.

But we forgot something. In the grammar school, big kids could be big kids to little kids. They were in a position to be someone’s role model and to live up to that task. They could reach down and help a smaller child tie a shoe or hang a sign or find the right room. And this aspect of doing better is not as easily addressed in a middle school. Sources as various as philosopher Nel Noddings and recent research on recidivist adolescent offenders tells us that one learns to care by take the role of the carer as well as by being cared for. Middle school children need to experience caring for another regularly, even systematically. I am not talking about the emotions that go with the act of caring for; I mean the habitual mode of attending to and providing for the needs of another. Now, one can care for one’s books and one’s pets and one’s other possessions, of course. But not even pets will respond as the “cared for” (to use Noddings’ phrasing) in the same way that a younger child will. Adolescents need younger children in their lives to play the role of the “cared for” to their “carer.” The grammar school can provide that. Whether or not test scores go up, a grammar school arrangement offers opportunities that middle school structures cannot.

But what of the problems? Don’t young adolescents need something more challenging and more independent than the self-contained classroom? Might big kids not bully little kids? Might little kids not annoy big kids to distraction? Sure. And that’s why we should be thinking both/and, not either/or, when it comes to middle school and grammar school. Why can’t 6th, 7th and 8th graders live in their own section or wing of a grammar school, remaining segregated for many functions but emerging to act as reading buddies, tutors, mentors, guides for younger children and ushers for adult visitors in planned ways? And while we’re at it, why can’t we blur grade and curricular lines to allow those children to move at their own academic pace within the “middle school” that is within the “grammar school”?

The MacIver study is a careful and well-designed study that provides interesting data about a real policy question. Should children of a certain age be in this kind of school structure or that one? Are grammar schools “better” for kids than middle schools? Well, it depends on how you define “better,” what it means to “do better” educationally. If “doing better” is a matter of test scores, as the MacIvers apparently maintain, then teaching quality and curriculum are the critical variables and school structure may be aperipheral concern. But if “doing better” is also a moral matter, if we are concerned with what adolescents do as well as what they know, then we would do well to consider placing middle schools within a grammar school structure. There younger adolescents can learn first-hand what it means to be “older and wiser.” They can practice their wisdom and their caring on the young children in their midst. Then we will all do better.

Welcome to "Smart and Good"!

This is the opening installment in a discussion that will range far and wide in considering all the ways educational institutions (especially but not only schools) are intended to shape learners as both smart and good. In this age of standards and testing, the focus is -- inordinately -- on what it means to be "smart." But any educators, any parents, who take a moment to ponder what they are doing will find that the images of development they have for the young people in their lives incorporate both the academic (what's worth knowing) and the moral (what's worth doing). In other words, they are always focused on both the smart and the good.