Character Education on the Cheap

By Peter R. Greer

In too many schools, character education has become a hodgepodge: drug-abuse prevention, conflict resolution, health education, social and emotional skills acquisition, athletics, and service-learning. Just about anything can be called character education these days.

But schools have a primary duty to educate students on what good character means and how to develop it. The survival of our system of government depends on it. That’s why I worry that this vital subject is being taught on the cheap, even by well-intentioned schools. Some of what is called character education is presented in ways that require little effort and have no lasting impact. Here are a few examples:

The Virtue-a-Month Strategy. Many schools select one virtue each month to emphasize, such as “respect” in September and “friendship” in January. This means that the students will probably never understand that these two virtues, and most others, are intertwined. The virtue of “friendship” involves courage at times, respect always, self-control often, and it draws on wisdom while demanding responsibility. As Aristotle said, courage is the most important virtue—without it, you cannot...