Character education involves building. The question is, “What are we building?”
Some character educators are content to raise a small, ready-made tent of simple, lightweight materials: fabric, metal pole, and rope.
Other character educators insist on constructing, from the ground up, a large mansion of strong materials: rock, concrete, brick, mortar, and steel.
Tents are, of course, relatively simple to put up. Erecting a tent requires little in the way of knowledge, experience, resources, or expense. It requires little time. A tent is, in many ways, a quick and simple solution to housing needs. Decide this morning to erect a tent, and you can be living in one this afternoon.
Mansions are entirely different from tents. Building a mansion is not at all a simple matter. Even with blueprint in hand, one must possess great knowledge, a well of experience from which to draw, and abundant resources. Mansions are costly to construct, and can be completed only with months of intensive labor. A mansion is never a quick and simple solution to your housing needs. Decide this morning to erect a mansion, and you may or may not be able to move in six months from now.
So why bother? Why would anyone want to build a mansion in which to live rather than a small tent?
You are intelligent enough to think of a number of solid reasons, but I’m focusing today on just one. A mansion will endure for many more decades than a tent. We must build character that will endure throughout a person’s life.
Character education must be the building of a mansion. We must never bow to a quick-and-easy course that simulates tent-raising, giving our young people only a modicum of character education. We must hire only the best, most knowledgeable, most experienced educators for building character. We must provide them with an abundance of quality resources: a strong character education program with appropriate, purpose-written books for the youngest children, more mature books for upper elementary ages, subtle, but clear character books for teenagers, and how-to books for the adults doing the building. We must be willing not to scrimp, but to invest money in the building materials. Finally, we must make this building a priority in our schedules, devoting to it enough time that young people graduating secondary schools will do so with a strong, nearly complete mansion in each of their lives – a mansion that will endure throughout adulthood.
Too much work? Too costly? Too time-consuming? You’d rather toss a pop-up tent into the air? Then I sincerely hope you will never be asked to handle a course in character education.
Character education must be the building of a mansion. Period. Full stop. Anything less is a rip-off. If we say we are building character, we must do so. We must cheat neither the young people with whom we work nor the society into which we send them. We must give them strong, enduring mansions of character that will protect and shelter them through life – mansions that are impervious to moral decay – mansions that withstand the storms of change.
That’s the view from my chair. What’s your view?