This post is excerpted from The Necessity of Character: Moral Formation and Leadership in Our Time, edited by James Mumford and Ryan S. Olson.
At the beginning of J. D. Salinger’s great novel, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield—the book’s iconic sixteen-year-old narrator and protagonist—sardonically introduces his elite high school. Of “Pencey Prep,” Holden says, “you’ve probably seen the ads, anyway, some hotshot guy on a horse jumping over a fence.” But the ad is misleading, Holden divulges: “I never even once saw a horse anywhere near the place.” And the caption, to use Holden’s favorite adjective, is just as phony:
And underneath the guy on the horse’s picture, it always says: “Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men.” Strictly for the birds. They don’t do any damn more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school. And I didn’t know anybody there that was splendid and clear-thinking and all. Maybe two guys. If that many. And they probably came to Pencey that way.
Thus does Holden (Salinger too?) puncture the pretense he takes character education to be.
One issue Holden never settles, however, is this: Why is it exactly that “they don’t do any damn more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school”? Did Pencey attempt that feat but fail? That is, did the school recognize the critical importance of molding but not manage to pull it off? Or is cultivating virtue a task that, despite its boast, Pencey always took to be a fool’s errand?
We can just as well ask that question of nonfictional formation: the theme of this volume of essays. Is “character education”—that is the sum of intentional initiatives undertaken by a variety of institutions to cultivate virtue, particularly among the young—a worthy endeavor but one, alas, too often aborted? Or does moral formation constitute from the outset a flawed ideal better left untried?
Perhaps the most sensitive answer we can give is that, whereas in the past it was widely thought to be the former, in the present, a growing consensus holds that it’s the latter.
That is, down the ages, “teaching morals” was considered a worthy endeavor, a noble enterprise, a good use of time. From Juvenal to Dickens, isn’t the history of satire littered with laments for failed efforts to make men moral? Today, by contrast, we’ve given up even attempting to “mold” character, concluding that to be a wrongheaded idea if ever there was one.
There is a historic reason for this surrender of the molding project. In America’s founding era, as James Davison Hunter observes in his programmatic essay for this volume, formation of the young was rooted in religion—not just any religion but “the particular doctrines of Puritanism.” Under the pressure of increased pluralism, however, nineteenth-century reformers sought to make character education more inclusive of diversity. At first, this meant denominational diversity—for example, accommodating Roman Catholics. But the effort culminated in John Dewey’s “reset” at the beginning of the twentieth century. Dewey ditched the idea that only an ethic derived from “a transcendent entity or historical tradition” would prove sufficiently stable to pass on to our children. Dewey turned instead to “a naturalist moral philosophy that would emerge from the workings of the democratic community itself.” This hollowed-out, largely procedural ethic has been the framework for American education ever since.
Of course, we may agree that strictly public institutions—government programs, public schools, and the like—require precisely this procedural ethic everyone can subscribe to. But in civil society (where, in terms of formation, so much of the action is) the consequence of “seeking inclusivity at the cost of evacuating the moral of all particularities” is, morally speaking, arrested development. When a youth organization apes the liberal state and offers a child a morality consisting of thin, universally affirmable platitudes—e.g., “‘Be Kind,’ said the mole”—that child is unlikely to emerge fully prepared for the duel with evil that is real life.
The death of character education would be fine, in other words, if the kids were all right. . . .
The rest of this essay is available in The Necessity of Character, available from Amazon.
