Heroine in the School Yard

The slaying of five students in Arkansas has fueled another round of soul-searching in our nation. Yet instead of asking why our culture breeds young murderers, let's pose a different question, also linked to the recent tragic events: What produces heroes and heroines, such as Shannon Wright, the teacher who sacrificed her life so that a student might live?

News reports have yet to offer an in-depth profile of Wright, but her actions alone testify to her extraordinary character. Confronted with a school yard transformed into a killing field, Wright scanned the periphery to find the gunmen. She quickly realized that one of her charges was in the line of fire. Throwing her body in front of the snipers’ target, she was shot mortally in the chest. Her last words expressed her love for her husband and young son.

Parents who struggle to guide their children in difficult times, surely must hope that if their offspring's photo appears on the front page of the newspaper it will be for a similar act of bravery—not an act of homicide. But what helps to instill the type of virtue that produces a Shannon Wright? The earliest thinkers of Western civilization pondered similar questions, and they sorted out a blueprint for moral education, based on the acquisition of the cardinal virtues—wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice—outlined in Plato's Republic. The classical world also agreed on the method of inculcating virtue, primarily a matter of instilling good habits and imitating morally upright adults and great heroes.

The rigor of the classical approach underscored the fact that learning to be good was an uphill battle. “Moral virtue … is formed by habit, ethos,” wrote Aristotle, in Nichomachean Ethics. “This shows, too, that none of the moral virtues is implanted in us by nature, for nothing which exists by nature can be changed by habit.’

To sweeten the labor of learning, the ancient world developed a kind of moral curriculum based on fables, myths, and parables. Virtue was taught through stories that typically hinged on the character of the protagonist that distinguished right from wrong, and that left the student with a compelling moral vision at the close of the narrative: in short, everyone wanted to be like Odysseus—or, perhaps, the faithful Penelope.

Until the 1970s, American moral education essentially followed this blueprint. Teachers in public and private schools encouraged children to imitate the courage of St. George, the honesty of George Washington. Catholic schools, while transmitting basic doctrine, also stressed imitation of Christ, the Blessed Virgin, and the saints, whose life stories personified specific virtues.

Then the blackboard was wiped clean: schools began to embrace a new paradigm called “values clarification.’

Values clarification departed from the virtue-based model in a number of ways, shaped by a utopian rationalism that contrasted with Aristotle's tough-minded realism. Abstract, open-ended conundrums replaced parables, fables, and myths as teaching tools. An explicit moral relativism reversed past efforts to aggressively transmit basic values.

We “see values not as eternal truths, institutionalized and stable, but as instruments that help one relate to the surrounding world of people, things, and ideas,” stated an early, 1966 text, Values and Teaching: Teaching Values in the Classroom. The best-selling 1972 handbook, Values Clarification, provided an assortment of dilemmas and questionnaires designed to provoke discussions on such matters as adultery, suicide, and cheating.

Proponents of values clarification believed in the innate goodness of children, and thus rejected “the dreary watch over the ancient values.’ Teacher-facilitators were trained to respect all values and choices equally. These ideas spread to many Catholic schools, where teachers ignored the doctrine of Original Sin, skirted moral absolutes, and frequently adopted the moral dilemma approach to “clarifying” individual values.

Like many untested theories welcomed in U.S. classrooms, values clarification survived a barrage of criticism. The strongest opponents were parents. They foresaw that taboo-shattering classroom bull sessions would complicate their efforts to discourage promiscuity and drug use. Mounting opposition forced proponents of the values clarification philosophy into retreat by the early 1990s. But its ideas still attract support in educational circles, and similar “non-directive” strategies continue to surface in many classrooms. Meanwhile, experts in the academy—such as Edwin Delattre of Boston University's Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character, and William Kilpatrick of Boston College, author of Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong and What You Can Do About It—have begun to revitalize classical moral education, training teachers to promote “moral literacy,” and providing lists of books that foster a solid moral vision in children.

This “character education” movement has fueled charter school initiatives and other start-up efforts. New studies in the field of psychology underscore the wisdom of using good literature to inspire a child's embrace of virtue. Psychologist Paul Vitz of New York University cites a body of research to show that the use of abstract conundrums, as a teaching tool, makes little sense when human beings are wired to understand almost everything, including themselves, as a story.

Now that we have rediscovered what fosters virtue in the classroom, we need to eliminate attitudes and programs that impoverish the moral imagination of our children. If we retreat from this challenge, then one must ask: Is moral deviancy “defined down” to such a degree in America that we dare not impose any demanding ideals on our young? Will we seek to nurture young people like Shannon Wright? Her story strengthens a nation's confidence that we still can do what is right.

Joan Frawley Desmond, a board member of Link Institute, which promotes character and content in education, writes from Menlo Park, California.