Character education is enjoying a
resurgence. There is much talk about building perseverance, determination,
flexibility, or (the everpresent buzzword) “grit.” Educators of many stripes
are interested in character, though a good deal of the attention seems to be
focused on low-income children—the hope being that building character might be
effective in reducing the achievement gap. Journalist Paul Tough wrote a
best-selling book, How Children Succeed, that summarizes the new
character education, and University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela
Duckworth was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her research in this
area.
I certainly don’t dispute the importance
of qualities like perseverance and flexibility and, as is the case with so many
teachers, do my best to foster them, but I am also worried that we, once again,
are seeking a miracle cure for the entrenched social problems of poverty and
inequality. What follows is a kind of extended cautionary tale.
This is a chapter from the new edition of
Why School? that was printed in Valerie Strauss’ Washington Post
“Answer Sheet” column on February 6 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/02/06/the-misguided-effort-to-teach-character/).
Readers of my blog will recognize sections of it from separate pieces I posted
during February of last year.
***
One of the surest claims one could make
about how to lead a successful life, in or out of school, is that qualities
such as determination, perseverance, self-control, and a degree of flexibility
matter a lot. In American education, these qualities often get labeled as
“character,” and there is a rapidly growing interest in how to teach and
measure it. Conferences, consultants, and special issues of journals are
focusing on character, and in late 2012 journalist Paul Tough wrote a bestselling
book, How Children Succeed, that
nicely summarizes the various bodies of research and advocates behind the
current boom.
As I watch twenty-first-century
character education take off, I worry about two things, my worry born out of
decades of watching new ideas—or, often, old wine in new bottles—capture our
attention. One concern has to do with the way these qualities of character get
defined, the other with the focus of a fair amount of the discussion on the
education of low-income children.
***
There is some confusion as to what
to call qualities like perseverance or self-control. Some refer to them as
personality traits, which in psychology refers to a set of relatively stable
characteristics. Yet a quality like perseverance might change with setting,
age, and task. I am dogged in writing an essay like this but become pretty
squirrelly with tax forms or figuring out electronic devices.
A further, and I think major,
problem with terminology and definition has to do with the widespread tendency
to refer to these qualities as “noncognitive” traits or skills. To understand
the problem here, consider the definition of cognition and the way it’s been
distorted in our recent educational history.
Cognition traditionally refers to a wide
and rich range of mental processes, from memory and attention, to comprehending
and using language, to solving a difficult problem in physics or choreography
or sharing an office with someone. But over the last few decades cognition has
been reduced to a shadow of its former self. Under No Child Left Behind and
Race to the Top, cognition in education policy has increasingly come to be
defined by the skills measured by standardized tests of reading and
mathematics. And as economists have gotten more involved in education, they’ve
needed quantitative measures of cognitive ability and academic achievement for
their analytical models, so they’ve used I.Q. or other standardized test scores
(like the Armed Forces Qualification Test or AFQT) as a proxy for intelligence
or achievement. From the Latin cognoscere,
to come to know, or cogito ergo sum, I
think therefore I am, we’ve devolved to a few digits on the AFQT.
Many of those who advocate character
education believe that our nation’s educational focus on cognition has been misguided.
Rather than focusing our energies on the academic curriculum—or on academic
intervention programs for the poor—we need to turn our attention to the
development of qualities of character, for as much or more than cognition, it
is these qualities that account for success in school and life.
It is healthy to be reminded about the
fuller scope of education in our test- and grade-obsessed culture, but what
concerns me is that the advocates for character accept without question the
reductive notion of cognition that runs through our education policies, and by
accepting it, further affirm it. The problem is exacerbated by the
aforementioned way economists carve up and define mental activity. If cognition
is represented by scores on ability or achievement tests, then anything not
captured in those scores—like the desired qualities of character—is, de facto,
noncognitive. We’re now left with a skimpy notion of cognition and a reductive
dichotomy to boot. This downplaying of the cognitive and the construction of
the cognitive/noncognitive binary will have some troubling implications for
education, especially for the education of the children of the poor.
To begin with, the labeling of character
qualities as “noncognitive” misrepresents them—particularly if you use the
truer, richer notion of cognition. Self-monitoring, for example, has to involve
a consideration and analysis of one’s performance and mental state—a profoundly
cognitive activity. Flexibility demands a weighing of options and decision
making. This is not just a problem of terminology, for if you don’t have an
accurate description of something, how can you help people develop it?
Furthermore, these desired qualities are
developed over time in settings and relationships that are meaningful to the
participants, which most likely means that the settings and relationships will
have significant cognitive content. Two of the classic preschool programs that
have provided a research base for the character advocates—the Perry Preschool
and Abecedarian Projects—were cognitively rich in imaginative play, language
use, and activities that required thought and cooperation.
A very different example comes from a
study I just completed observing community college occupational programs as
varied as fashion and diesel technology. As students developed competence, they
also became more committed to doing a job well, were better able to monitor and
correct their performance, and improved their ability to communicate what they
were doing and help others do it. You could be by inclination the most
determined or communicative person in the world, but if you don’t know what
you’re doing with a garment or an engine, your tendencies won’t be realized in
a meaningful way in the classroom or the workshop.
Also, we have to consider the
consequences of this cognitive/non-cognitive binary in light of the history of
American educational practice. We have a powerful tendency toward either/or
policies—think of old math/new math or phonics/whole language. Given this
tendency, we can predict a pendulum swing away from the academic and toward
character education. And over the past fifty years attempts at character education
as a distinct pursuit have not been particularly successful—in some cases,
student behavior is not affected, or changes in beliefs and behaviors don’t
last.
Finally, the focus of the current
character education movement is on low-income children, and the cold, hard fact
is that many poor kids are already getting terrible educations in the cognitive
domain. There’s a stirring moment in Paul Tough’s book where a remarkable chess
teacher decides she’s going to try to prepare one of her star pupils for an
admissions test for New York’s selective high schools. What she found was that
this stunningly bright boy had learned pitifully little academic knowledge
during his eight years in school. It would be tragic to downplay a strong
academic education for children like him.
This example brings to the fore my second
concern about the current championing of character education. When the emphasis
on character is focused on the individual attributes of poor children as the
reason for their subpar academic performance, it can remove broader policies to
address poverty and educational inequality from public discussion.
***
One of the powerful strands in the
current discussion of character education is that it might succeed where
academic interventions have failed in reducing the achievement gap. Perhaps
psychological and educational interventions that focus on developing
perseverance, self-control, and the like will help poor children succeed in
school. Such qualities are indisputably key to a successful life, and they’ve
been part of our folk wisdom about success well before Dale Carnegie made
millions by promoting the power of positive thinking. But they’ve gained luster
via economic modeling, psychological studies, and the technological advances of
neuroscience. Because brain imaging allows us to see the frontal lobes light up
when someone weighs a decision, these claims about character seem cutting edge.
It is this aura of the new that contributes to a belief that we might have
found a potent treatment for the achievement gap.
A diverse group of players is involved in
this rediscovery and championing of character. Nobel Laureate in economics
James Heckman advocates early childhood intervention programs for poor kids.
Some charter schools, KIPP among them, infuse character education throughout
the school day. And a whole range of smaller extracurricular and after-school
programs—from Chicago’s OneGoal to a chess club in a public school in
Brooklyn—focus their efforts in helping the children of the poor develop a
range of mental strategies and shifts in perception aimed toward academic
achievement. I have worked with
economically and educationally disadvantaged children and adults for forty
years and know the importance of special programs and interventions. They need
to be funded and expanded, for poor kids carry a heavy load and have absurdly
limited access to any kind of school-related enrichment, especially as
inequality widens.
But we have to be very careful,
given the political tenor of our time, not to assume that we have the
long-awaited key to helping the poor overcome the assaults of poverty. My worry
is that we will embrace these essentially individual and technocratic
fixes—mental conditioning for the poor—and abandon broader social policy aimed
at poverty itself.
We have a long-standing shameful
tendency in America to attribute all sorts of pathologies to the poor. Writing
in the mid-nineteenth century, the authors of a report from the Boston School
Committee bemoaned the “undisciplined, uninstructed…inveterate forwardness and
obstinacy” of their working-class and immigrant students. There was much talk
in the Boston Report and elsewhere about teaching the poor “self-control,”
“discipline,” “earnestness” and “planning for the future.” This language is way
too familiar.
Some
poor families are devastated by violence, uprooting, and substance abuse, and
children are terribly affected. But some families hold together with
iron-willed determination and instill values and habits of mind that middle-class
families strive for. There’s as much variability among the poor as in any
group, and we have to keep that fact squarely in our sights, for we easily slip
into one-dimensional generalities about them.
Given a political climate that is
antagonistic toward the welfare state and has further shredded our already
compromised safety net, psychosocial intervention may be the only viable
political response to poverty available. But can you imagine the outcry if,
let’s say, an old toxic dump were discovered near Scarsdale or Beverly Hills
and the National Institutes of Health undertook a program to teach kids
strategies to lessen the effects of the toxins but didn’t do anything to
address the dump itself?
We seem willing to accept remedies
for the poor that we are not willing to accept for anyone else. We should use
our science to figure out why that is so—and then develop the character and
courage to fully address poverty when it is an unpopular cause.
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