Is Character Education the good news?

You've seen them, first on TV and now on billboards: ads sponsored by The Foundation for a Better Life promoting good values. These are usually heartwarming vignettes in which someone shows ________________ (fill in the blank with your favorite pro-social virtue), and which are tagged with "Pass it On".

The very fact that these messages move us suggests that doing the right thing is somehow contrary to our human nature. But that's not how the Foundation for a Better Life sees it. According to their website, "We believe people are basically good but sometimes just need a reminder." Claiming to be "nonsectarian and apolitical" and professing no political or religious agenda, the organization relies on donated media time and space to make its appeals.

What the Foundation for a Better Life does is extremely media saavy. It's character education, perfectly packaged for the 21st century. What used to be heralded mainly in schools and after school programs has now gone mainstream. And its purpose is to make you nod your head in agreement that, yes, these are good values, and yes, it would be great if everyone lived these out.

Character education is not a new idea. Aristotle's famous "Golden Mean" encouraged people to pursue a balanced "happy medium" between extreme manifestations of character (too much self-love is vanity; too little is self-hatred; just right is self-respect). From the founding of America, character was tied in with the Protestant work ethic. Modernist thinking downplayed the necessity of religion in shaping character. It was probably helped by the 1928 publication of Studies in Deceit, which found that there was really no difference between kids who went to Sunday school and those who didn't when it came to their propensity to lie, or to cheat. If Sunday schools were failing to teach kids values, the thinking went, let's ditch the religious component and just be blunt: Kids, be good. Here's how.

Yet, there's an optimism evident in the Foundation for a Better Life's stated vision and the vision of other contemporary character ed programs that borders on utopian thinking. We've been here before. Technological progress in the late 1800s and early 1900s led the world to believe that science and industry would one day solve all of the world's problems. Then came World War I, a crushing blow to this misplaced faith in human reason and the ever-increasing goodwill and moral perfection of the human race.

I wonder how the Foundation for a Better Life would explain what causes war? Or divorce? Or crime? Its website doesn't even seem to acknowledge such knotty problems. By blandly asserting that people are "basically good", it side-steps the inconvenient reality that the 20th century saw more deaths from wars than any century prior. And what is "basically" good? Does that mean we are innocent at birth but somehow slide into poor character because of - what? - endless cultural messages urging us to be nasty, and selfish, and cruel?

In fact, the opposite is true. No one had to convince you to look out for yourself, and as a result, to fudge the truth, to cut corners, to mistreat those who stood in the way of something you wanted, or to take the easy way out. This, in spite of a steady diet of be-this and be-that, from parents, teachers, and ABC After School Specials: be ambitious, be caring, be courteous, be forgiving (to choose only four of the 103 "inspirational values" listed on FBL's website).

The ideology of the character education movement is flawed. It seems to rest on the belief that with enough pep rallies, incentives, and role-playing exercises, we can teach kids to fall in love with good behavior. Unfortunately, the Foundation puts way too much faith in ourselves to make change - personal change first, but societal change by "passing it on" second. And that's problematic for Christians. Or at least, it should be. Yet there are Sunday school curricula whose chief aim is nothing theological, but rather teaching kids character traits. And it finds welcome reception, so anxious are we that kids will otherwise grow up to be surly, reckless jerks.

But we need not fear; and even if we do fear, we need not resort to the simplistic formula so common in character education programs ("The featured character trait of the month is ___________"). Instead, we would do well to understand the true origin and nature of character - as eloquently outlined in this David Brooks piece - as well as the points where character education ideology clashes with historic, orthodox Christian belief.

As I said in last week's post, if a religious idea isn't universally true and universally applicable, it isn't true at all. "But the Foundation for a Better Life says they're not religious." They're wrong. Any sweeping, universal claim about the nature of people and their ability to self-regulate is, in fact, a religious claim, because their whole existence depends on you believing it. As more people buy into the message that humans are basically good, they just need reminders to be good, the less relevant Christian concepts like sin and atonement and conversion and repentance and regeneration become.

There's nothing wrong, particularly, with upholding and celebrating virtue. But before you plop your kid in front of the computer to watch a stream of Foundation for a Better Life PSAs, consider the following:

1. What, ultimately, is the purpose of having good character? Because for Aristotle, it was to achieve happiness (in Greek, "eudaimonia"). The Foundation for a Better Life's aim is a little fuzzier: "We inspire people to live good values, seek out positive role models, and live better lives." Character becomes an end in itself. Some of the suggestions for practicing the values make it clear that it doesn't matter if your action actually brings any sort of good result; performing it for its own sake is enough. So, for instance, to practice Responsibility you might "Use an alternative to driving this week: walk, ride a bike, take public transportation, or carpool." Or you could "Complete a chore or task you've been putting off for a while." To practice this week's featured value, Appreciating Nature: "Take a walk outside today and focus on taking deep, full bellied breaths." There's no suggestion that some values might ever take precedence over others. There's no urgency, no imperative to act. "No time to attack world hunger today - I'm too busy taking deep, full bellied breaths."

Whether you accept Aristotle's pointed objective or FBL's slippery one, character ends up being something I do for me - to have a better life. The Values.com Twitter feed is full of self-improvement tips and insights from people who've seen the ads, such as, "Just watched on ABCFamily, reminds that we should make room to enjoy life and not always be working" and "Let your rock bottom be the foundation for a better life".

But character counts most when it plays a role in human interactions. It is something inside of me, yes, but just having it isn't enough; exercising it makes it count. To a Christian, being content and happy and feeling good about life and one's self isn't enough. In fact, it's not really the purpose at all. Life satisfaction flows from giving yourself away, from self-sacrifice. So in the interest of promoting "Unity", we are exhorted to "Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love," which is other-focused and a far cry from "Accept someone's help today", which is what the Foundation for a Better Life suggests.

2. Just as true happiness is not a goal, but a byproduct of how we focus our efforts and direct our energies, in the same way character is not something deliberately built, but something that develops in the crucible of life. This is discouraging to people who wish we could turn out kids brimming with virtue by the time they reach middle school because they'd been systematically taught 12 character traits. The truth is that character gets built unevenly from one person to the next, and the opportunities to build it are brought on by life circumstances.

God's promise to sanctify us is not an invitation to sit on the couch, expecting to be transformed. Rather, it's the adventure of doing life tethered to him, drawing on all of the resources and power He has granted us by his Spirit. It's astonishing how many churches teach kids about the Fruits of the Spirit, yet completely ignore the role of the Spirit! A typical lesson will encourage kids to think about how they can "practice" one of the given "fruits" in their life. But in that case, love & joy & peace & patience & the rest are not fruits of the Spirit, but fruits of you! A better tack would be to teach kids how to pray, how to listen for the Spirit's leading and guidance - and then giving them real-world experiences are beyond their own capacity, so that they have to rely on God. Character develops around the edges of that, but it's not uniform, and you can't force it.

3. Finally, the idea that "people are basically good but sometimes need a reminder" also raises the question, "Why did Jesus have to die?" There is a theory that Christ's death supplied the moral "oomph" for all of us to live better. But that seems very thin to me. Instead, we have to reckon with the words of Paul in Galatians 2:21: "I do not set aside the grace of God, because if righteousness could be attained through the Law, Christ died for nothing!"

Well, Christ did not die for nothing. He died for you, for your sake, because you and me and everyone else were in a heap of trouble that we couldn't get ourselves out of. The necessity of Jesus' death and resurrection is an inconvenient truth for the character education movement. How do you explain it, if the cure for what ails humanity is merely the propagation of good values, not the death of the Son of God? Taking deep, full-bellied breaths is not going to bring relief to AIDS victims in Africa, any more than AIDS orphans simply need to Smile, or "Leave a bunch of extra change at the laundromat, or near the vending machine" (FBL's prescription for kindness) - as if they could.

Could it be that character education is the luxury of an affluent society in which most people's basic needs are already met? In that case, self-serving "values" make a nice toolbox for life satisfaction ("Pass It On!"). But the real world needs real good news, not the counterfeit message that naively holds that our biggest problem is the failure to believe in ourselves. "Values are more powerful than anything else," writes a commenter on the values.com website. To the extent that they can either numb us with indifference to the world's larger challenges or motivate us to live radical lives, she's probably right. But as the letter of James attests, "Faith without works is dead." And it appears the character education movement has all-to-readily resigned itself to celebrating a rather mundane, underwhelming outworking of the values it claims to treasure, to its shame.