Schools Should Stop Telling Kids to be "Nice"

At least in his writing, Charles Murray is not what I would consider nice. He has denounced equal opportunity, the welfare system, and the belief in the endless potential of each child. His most contentious work, The Bell Curve [2] (1994), co-written with Harvard professor Richard J. Hernstein, argues that a child’s intelligence is innate, related to race, and predictive of future economic status. That is to say, a poor black man might be that way not because of discrimination or societal obstacles but because he’s just not smart. Refutations from journalists [3], authors, professors, teachers, economists [4], and psychologists [5] came tumbling down [6] on the book. As a teacher, I can attest that if anyone believes that children can change and grow, it’s educators. We see evidence of it, and we live by the hope that there will be more. I disagree vehemently with Murray on certain points. Yet when he is right, he is awfully right.

Murray’s main gripe in Real Education [7] is with universal college education, which he sees as a waste and an injustice. We push young people to study subjects in which they do not excel, he argues, when they could be pursuing a satisfying and profitable occupation. College should be for the academically inclined, and education through high school should give students a strong background across the subject areas. After high school, students should begin work, pursue vocational training, or go to college; college should not be the default, but a place for the academically gifted. One can argue with his individual points, but the problems he addresses are real. According to the New York Times, only half of students who enroll in college wind up with a bachelor’s degrees [8]. Work could be satisfying for many young people, and some might choose to enroll in college later. Some of my middle-school students have expressed a wish to start work immediately after high school, in order to help their families. Such a wish is honorable and should not be dismissed.

But Murray’s most compelling point is one he makes in passing:

The same [moral void that we find in sports] extends throughout the curriculum and the school day. Today’s public schools (and many of today’s secular private schools) tell children to be nice but not how to be good. It tells children to be happy but does nothing to help children think about what happiness means.

Although less likely to trigger angry responses than his arguments about innate ability and college destinations, it is Murray’s distinction between “nice” and “good” that deserves the most attention, since schools do in fact place too much emphasis on being “nice.” The KIPP slogan “Work hard, be nice” comes to mind, as does “cooperative learning,” the stock phrase of many public school districts. Being “nice” comes from practiced, structured interaction with others: group activity, “Accountable Talk® [9]” (a structured—and trademarked—form of class discussion), and pleasant, uncontroversial subject matter with familiar social messages. (“We should all go for our dreams.” “We should all treat one another with respect.” “All religions are equal.”) Will Fitzhugh calls such niceness “critical likability [10].” Being good is more complex than being nice. It requires that we recognize our own faults and complexities; that we forgive each other; that we say what we think; that we make difficult decisions and face the consequences.

When we read literature and history, we begin to glean what it means to be good. We see how people with the best intentions can fail; how people struggle with conflicting desires and values and make the best choices they can; how people overcome their limitations when put to the test. From works like Antigone [11], The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [12], and Chekhov’s short stories, we learn about selfishness, cruelty, cowardice, and confusion, as well as grace, generosity, and patience. We come to see elements of all these traits in ourselves. We learn, too, from reading the likes of The Canterbury Tales [13], A Midsummer Night’s Dream [14], Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [15], and the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe or Christina Rossetti, of the delight of language—the playfulness, the ambiguities, the rhythms, the sounds. But programs such as Balanced Literacy [16] (mandated in New York City and other districts) place more emphasis on process than on works of literature, and much of the reading material lacks vitality. Tests, test preparation materials, leveled texts (books that match specific reading levels), and textbooks are filled with bland fiction and nonfiction. In The Language Police [17], Diane Ravitch shows, in relentless and astounding detail, how test-makers and textbook publishers have censored reading passages to appease various interest groups on the right and left. As a result of such censorship, children read strained, pleasant stories with predictable endings. How, under such circumstances, could students learn what it means to be good?

Murray praises the Core Knowledge curriculum [18], which provides students in grades K-8 with a rich foundation in English, history, mathematics, science, art, and music. He regards it as one way of teaching students to be good; the Core Knowledge readings “expose elementary school students to at least some of the moral instruction that has been stripped from American education.” Here Murray suggests that when the curriculum has substance, students learn not only how to behave, but how to think and feel deeply. They come to understand what humans are made of, what choices we have, and what reason, artistic gift, and imagination can do.

By contrast, when schools place overwhelming emphasis on group work, it becomes more important for students to work together than to learn something important. I have attended many professional development sessions where we were put in groups and told to fill out a chart together. The charts had little meaning—for instance, we might be asked to free-associate on the concept of literacy—but it served as “evidence” of our cooperative effort. We would then tape our rushed work to the wall and take part in a “gallery walk” to admire it. We were then supposed to apply this strategy in the classroom.

In New York City, where I taught in the public schools for four years, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein mandated a “workshop model [19],” based on the Teachers College Reader’s Workshop, across the subjects and throughout the grades in most schools. That meant abandoning whole-class instruction and focusing on group activities. Teachers were supposed to limit their lessons to 10-15 minutes and leave the rest for group work. Instead of discussing loyalty and jealousy in Hamlet [20], students might work in groups making predictions about the leveled text assigned to them. It was unlikely that any of the small groups would read Hamlet, as such a work requires more extensive instruction [21] than the workshop format allowed. As a result, children would enter high school without knowing what it means to spend time on a work of literature as a class, with a knowledgeable teacher. They would not know that there were levels of understanding beyond their own.

Granted, Murray contradicts himself. He affirms that all children can benefit from a rich curriculum, yet he attributes all poor performance to low ability, not vapid instructional programs. But whatever the contradictions in Real Education, his point about niceness and goodness deserves attention. If we only teach children to be nice, they will be at a loss when life calls for more than niceness. They will be at a loss when faced with problems—intellectual, practical, or emotional—that they have to solve on their own. And when the niceness wears out, they will reach for the next thing they know, the knee-jerk reaction. Murray is right: There is a wide gulf between being nice and being good—and while no curriculum can produce goodness, an excellent curriculum can give students a vision of what it might be.

Correction, May 3, 2010: This article originally misspelled Edgar Allan Poe's middle name.