MORAL EDUCATION
Only a handful of educational theorists hold the view that if only the adult world would get out of the way, children would ripen into fully realized people. Most thinkers, educational practitioners, and parents acknowledge that children are born helpless and need the care and guidance of adults into their teens and often beyond. More specifically, children need to learn how to live harmoniously in society. Historically, the mission of schools has been to develop in the young both the intellectual and the moral virtues. Concern for the moral virtues, such as honesty, responsibility, and respect for others, is the domain of moral education.
Moral education, then, refers to helping children acquire those virtues or moral habits that will help them individually live good lives and at the same time become productive, contributing members of their communities. In this view, moral education should contribute not only to the students as individuals, but also to the social cohesion of a community. The word moral comes from a Latin root (mos, moris ) and means the code or customs of a people, the social glue that defines how individuals should live together.
Evaluation of Moral and Character Education
There are a few character education programs with encouraging evaluation results. The Character Development Project (CDP) has more than 18 years of involvement in several K–6 schools, and in those schools where teachers received staff development and on-site support over 52 percent of the student outcome variables showed significant differences. The Boy Scouts of America developed the Learning For Life Curriculum in the early 1990s for elementary schools. This commercially available, stand-alone curriculum teaches core moral values, such as honesty and responsibility. In a large-scale controlled experiment involving fifty-nine schools, students exposed to the Learning For Life materials showed significant gains on their understanding of the curriculum's core values, but they were also judged by their teachers to have gained greater self-discipline and ability to stay on a task.
Still, evaluation and assessment in character and moral education is best described as a work in progress. The field is held back by the lack of an accepted battery of reliable instruments, a lack of wide agreement on individual or school wide outcomes, and by the short-term nature of most of the existent studies. Complicating these limitations is a larger one: the lack of theoretical agreement of what character is. Human character is one of those overarching entities that is the subject of disciples from philosophy to theology, from psychology to sociology. Further, even within these disciplines there are competing and conflicting theories and understandings of the nature of human character. But although the evaluation challenges are daunting, they are dwarfed by the magnitude of the adult community's desire to see that our children possess a moral compass and the good habits basic to sound character.