Character counts — everywhere
Estherville News Editorial
The Robert and Billie Jo Ray
Foundation is accepting nominations
of Iowans of Character
for its annual awards. Our
newsroom hopes there will
be nominations from Emmet
County. Of all places, we might
need the boost more than anywhere
else.
The national Character Counts
Coalition identifies six pillars
of character: trustworthiness,
respect, responsibility, fairness,
caring and citizenship.
In Emmet County as with
other places, our schools teach
character alongside math, science,
history and language arts.
School should not be the only
place children learn character.
The community is an important
part of building the foundations
of being a good citizen within
it.
According to Ron Skinner,
writing in Education Week, The
formal teaching of morals and
values is not a new phenomenon;
rather, it has been part of
democratic thought throughout
history. Plato and Aristotle in
the Greece of the 4th century
B.C.E. believed the role of education
was to train good and
virtuous citizens. John Locke,
the 17th-century democratic
philosopher, believed that
learning was secondary to virtue.
“Reading and writing and
learning I allow to be necessary,
but yet not the chief business
[of education]. I imagine you
would think him a very foolish
fellow, that should not value a
virtuous or a wise man infinitely
before a great scholar.”
As public schools proliferated
in the early United States,
McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers,
which consisted of collections
of stories used to educate and
transmit moral lessons, were
“the most widely read books in
19th-century America” outside
of the King James Bible The
readers were used as school
textbooks and were designed to
instill both biblical values and
train good workers by preaching
sobriety, thrift, responsibility,
and self-restraint. But the influence
of McGuffey’s Readers
waned in the early 20th century
because of their reliance on
religious precepts and because
of changes in the way society
viewed morality.
Character education, as it is
known today, began to appear in
the early 1990s. A 1991 book
by Thomas Lickona, Educating
for Character, reintroduced the
idea that there is a set of common
beliefs and values upon
which all people can agree. A
year later, a group of educators,
ethicists, and scholars met
in Aspen, Colo., for a gathering
that resulted in the Aspen
Declaration and the beginning of
the Character Counts Coalition.
Since the early 1990s, the federal
government has embraced
the idea of offering character
education in public schools
and has made grants available
to states interested in piloting
new character education
programs in their schools. In
response, for-profit and nonprofit
organizations have developed
character programs for
schools, districts, and states.
Former first lady Laura Bush
promoted the use of character
education in schools, saying
that “reading and writing are
not all we need to teach our
children. We need to make sure
we’re teaching our children to
be responsible citizens who
have good values and ethics.”
Character education can be
instrumental in preventing
substance abuse, improving
academic performance, promoting
general health, or supporting
other social behaviors.
It’s never too late to continue
discussing what constitutes
good character and lifting each
other up to be our best selves,
even well into adulthood.
Character, courage, integrity
and morality will never go out
of style, and in Emmet County
as well as throughout the world,
it lifts us all in challenging
times.