EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK

Children are always
learning lessons on character

by Peggy Boyer Long

Nine-year-old Elaine seemed to have all the advantages. Her parents were prosperous and high achievers. She attended a private suburban school where she was a first-rate student.

Then one day Elaine was caught cheating on a test.

Psychiatrist Robert Coles describes what happened next in The Moral Intelligence of Children, his most recent book on character development in children. What happened next, in short, was — nothing.

Elaine denied cheating. She said the student who had reported her was a liar, that he and others who had seen her cheating at arithmetic and spelling were "jealous"of her achievements. The teacher didn't believe the charge, though she was "not completely surprised." She had seen Elaine "fudge a little" as an athlete. Yet she pointed to the family's good standing. The parents rallied to the girl's defense. Though the father conceded his daughter may have "peeked" a time or two, he argued Elaine was merely a perfectionist.

The school consulted Coles. "I gradually realized that a girl's cheating and lying had become a school's and a family's major moral challenge." The parents and the teacher had convinced themselves that "the whole thing will blow over," that the child would become an outstanding, accomplished adult.

Elaine was given a clean slate, a reprieve at school and at home. And Coles notes he lost track of her progress through school, so has no report on the nature of her eventual character. "She may have become an utterly decent and trustworthy person, or she may have become yet another student whose moral intelligence lags behind her intellectual accomplishments." Adults, he writes, had "signaled to a child how she ought to behave."

Coles' concern is what he calls the "moral archaeology of childhood: how values are born and get shaped moment by moment over the all-important first two decades of life." That, he argues, is the real inheritance parents and teachers give to children. "Where," he asks, "are the grownups in our life upon whom we can really rely, whom we can trust, whose values are believable, desirable, because they have been given us out of the shared experience, moment to moment, of a life together?"

He thinks of the children he has observed: "Those boys and girls are obviously different in background — rich and poor and in-between, black and white, urban and suburban, publicly and privately educated, or dropouts from schooling."

What, he asks, do these young people require that would give them a chance to be good or, indeed, better in the moral sense than now seems possible for them.

This month, two of our writers touch on that question.

In his essay on schooling (see page 18), Donald Sevener writes of the "ideal teacher," one who "represents what we want all teachers to be." He's respected and committed. He cares. But Sevener assesses the compromises that teacher must make. He outlines the debate between educators who emphasize mastery of facts and those who emphasize mastery of ideas. Theodore Sizer, who created the profile of the ideal teacher, sides with ideas: "The heart of schooling is found in relationships between students, teacher and ideas." And, Sizer argues, teachers must help children to develop "an informed imagination and the restraint to use it wisely."

Jennifer Davis' report on the preschool years (page 23) suggests ways in which families can affect a child's chances in the world. She quotes Barbara Bowman of the Erikson Institute, which offers a graduate program in child development: "All of us have a stake in how well everyone parents. ... There is no question children need love, and the parent who doesn't provide that is a danger to you and me."

That's.Coles' point. Children are always learning lessons on character. Love means teaching them how to be good people. And good citizens.

4 / April 1997 Illinois Issues