Kids & Parenting
Schools Should Stop Telling Kids to be "Nice"
The key but overlooked argument from Charles Murray’s Real Education.
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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 (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, authors, professors, teachers, economists, and psychologists came tumbling down 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 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. 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.
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Comments
"A Critical Look at Character Education"
By: christinag503 | Tue, 09/29/2009 - 18:24
I would recommend reading Alfie Kohn's thought-provoking article entitled "How Not to Teach Values: A Critical Look at Character Education" for an excellent discussion of how we can best teach children to "be good." Mr. Kohn argues that much of the "character education" that goes on in schools today is more akin to indoctrination rather than guiding children to develop into good people. He writes, "What goes by the name of character education nowadays is, for the most part, a collection of exhortations and extrinsic inducements designed to make children work harder and do what they're told...The point is to drill students in specific behaviors rather than to engage them in deep, critical reflection about certain ways of being." To further make his point, he quotes a reader response to a NYT article about character education: "Do you suppose that if Germany had had character education at the time, it would have encouraged children to fight Nazism or support it?"
He also cites research demonstrating that extrinsic motivators erase intrinsic motivation. So if we reward children for being good, they are less likely to display the desired behavior when teachers aren't around to hand out the goodies. Mr. Kohn's essay provides a lot of food for thought for parents and educators.
For more thoughts and observations on the latest in education, please check out my blog, Confessions of a Reluctant Teacher.
British curriculum
By: ugita | Mon, 09/28/2009 - 23:57
In junior and senior year in high school, I studied English with the UK curriculum, and read Measure for measure, Frankenstein, The Caucasian chalk circle, the crucible, antigone, Jane Eyre, The Empire of the Sun, poems by Plath, Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, thomas hardy. Some were controversial, some were not, but then again, we were supposed to write essays about them, so controversy was welcome. I remember all the books I read during those two school years, cal still quote by heart at least the first lines of the poems, and enjoyed myself thoroughly. I don't know if literature taught me to "be good", but it surely introduced me to issues and topics that, living a fairly sheltered life as a teenager, I would not have faced or thought about until much later.
Schools Should Stop Telling Kids to be "Nice"
By: BonnieKay | Mon, 09/28/2009 - 13:10
The title of this post immediately caught my eye. The number one rule at my kids' middle school has been "Be Nice". Ironically in an email today to the Principal, I had suggested changing this mantra to "Do the right thing".
I had forwarded an article to her about "Bullies" from Aug. 11th on this site. I may have to forward this one as well!