Introduction
1 See also Hartshorne’s previous studies that gave momentum to the American character education movement of the 1920s: Studies in the Nature of Character Volumes 1–3 published in 1928, 1929, and 1930.
2 Consider, for example, James Arthur’s Education With Character (2003), William Damon’s Bringing in a New Era of Character Education (2002), Nel Noddings’
Educating Moral People (2002), James Hunter’s The Death of Character (2000), Kevin Ryan and Karen Bohlin’s Building Character in Schools (1999), R.J.Nash’s Answering the Virtuecrats (1997), Alfie Kohn’s “How Not to Teach Values: A Critical Look at Character Education” (1997), William Damon’s Greater Expectations (1996), M.Glendon and D.Blankenhorn’s (eds) Seedbeds of Virtue:
Sources of Character, Competence, and Citizenship in American Society (1995),William Kilpatrick’s Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong (1992), James Leming’s “In Search of Effective Character Education” (1993) and “Whither Goes Character Education?” (1997), James Q.Wilson’s The Moral Sense (1993), and Thomas Lickona’s Educating for Character (1991).
3 While this book does not provide a comprehensive analysis of character education, it seeks to familiarize English teachers with the various theoretical perspectives informing it, as this background can be useful in evaluating new curricula or pedagogical approaches presented at professional development training workshops.
The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in the United States and the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) in the UK have addressed the relationship between literature study and moral development only tangentially.
This book focuses on the ways secondary and post-secondary English teachers can awaken and educate the moral imagination of their students through their study of novels.
4 The National Schools of Character Awards Program is sponsored by the Character Education Partnership (CEP) in Washington DC (www.character.org).
5 See, for example, the data cited in William Damon’s Greater Expectations, James Hunter’s Death of Character, and James Arthur’s Education with Character.
6 Albeit in complex and overlapping ways, these various perspectives find their philosophical roots among three principal approaches to ethics in the Western tradition: 1) duty-based ethics that focuses on rules and originates in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1785); 2) utilitarian or consequence-based ethics inspired by Bentham (1823) and John Stuart Mill (1861); and 3) virtue- or character-based ethics stemming from the tradition of Socrates, Plato, and zv194 Aristotle and revived in
the contemporary scholarship of Alasdair MacIntyre (1984) and Charles Taylor (1989 and 1992).
7 Howard Kirschenbaum (1976) has attempted to redefine values clarification and refute its value neutrality. The pedagogy associated with values clarification continues to tend toward moral neutrality; see, for example, Simon, Howe, and Kirschenbaum’s Values Clarification (1972).
8 For more on the social and emotional learning movement in the United States, see the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL):
www.casel.org.
9 In his Sources of the Self (1989) Charles Taylor reminds us that modern philosophy has focused almost exclusively on the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life. Yet, he argues, in order to make sense of our lives orienting ourselves toward the good and determining our place in relation to it is “an inescapable requirement of human agency” (52).
10 From Specimens of Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a collection of notes jotted down as records of conversation. They were published one year after his death by his nephew, Henry Nelson Coleridge.
11 You will notice that I refer to students throughout the text. In the United States, we do not make the distinction between pupils and students as is typically made in the UK. The students referred to here are secondary and post-secondary students of literature.
12 The actual words of Kafka are as follows: “The books we read are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation—a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” (From a letter of Franz Kafka to Oskar Pollak.)
13 I do not make any distinctions between the national English curriculum in Great Britain and the national and state standards for English education in the United States. Instead I am drawing on works and curricular objectives common to both.
14 This book began as an academic study; I set out to discover the practical insights literature could shed on a long tradition of moral theory. After reading each novel several times, I carefully coded passages that signaled moral change and growth and looked for patterns both within each character’s development and across the four protagonists.
1
The schooling of desire
1 I have changed the name to mask her identity.
2 This story is part of the anecdotal research data I collected for the 1998 National Schools of Character Awards. Schools of Character: Reclaiming America’s Values for Tomorrow’s Workforce (1998:14–15). A publication sponsored by Business
Week and McGraw-Hill Educational and Professional Publishing Group in
collaboration with the Character Education Partnership and the Boston University Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character.
3 Sir John Templeton of the Templeton Foundation also speaks of the importance of tapping into the noble purpose of young people. To this end, his foundation inaugurated the Templeton Laws of Life Essay Contest, which invites adolescents from all over the world to write about experiences, individuals, and events that have helped to shape their noble purpose, the inspiration for the laws of life by which they live. The essay contest dovetails nicely with the study of literature, zv195 language, and writing in secondary English. For more information on content and planning, please visit www.lawsoflife.org.
4 Gangsta rap is a genre of rap music that tends to direct anger at authority and depict the emotional and psychological angst of disenfranchised youth. The student in this anecdote was soon after taken to the emergency room and then admitted for psychological treatment.
5 In Steven S.Tigner’s “Homer, Teacher of Teachers” (1993), he provides a fuller discussion of the three-part soul and the implications of Plato’s Analysis for teachers. I am indebted to Professor Tigner for his lectures on the relevance of Plato and Aristotle to teaching and learning. His teaching has inspired my references to these seminal works.
6 Arthur Schwartz (1997) offers a compelling overview of Blasi’s moral ideals concept and its link to considerations about the moral education of adolescents.
7 For a more comprehensive discussion of this topic, see journalist Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.
8 Alasdair MacIntyre (1984) explains the history of the Enlightenment’s breach with virtue. By focusing on human nature as it is, rather than on what “it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos,” Enlightenment philosophers have broken with Classical and Christian tradition. They have reduced morality to that which is intelligible through scientific method—the is, not the ought, of man (53). Once the concept of an overriding telos is abandoned, MacIntyre argues, we are left without any clear understanding of man’s purpose. As a consequence, he concludes that “there are and can be no valid rational justifications for any claims that objective and impersonal moral standards exist and hence, that there are no such standards” (19). And once objective moral standards are rendered null and void, the Classical understanding of virtue and the virtuous life are rendered meaningless. The pursuit of what is good is transformed into the pursuit of what I feel is good for me. Immersed in this level of subjectivism, we lack a common language and shared vision with which to engage in moral discourse or make sense of the schooling of desire. We have no means for discerning why some goals are more worthy of pursuit than others. James Davison Hunter expands this argument from a sociological perspective in his groundbreaking discourse, The Death of Character (2000).
9 Nicomachean Ethics I.8, 1098b5–28. Happiness or flourishing, then, is “the activity of soul exhibiting excellence, and if there are more than one excellence, in
accordance with the best and most complete” (Nicomachean Ethics I.7, 1098al5).
10 Aristotle identifies three types of friendship ordered hierarchically according to Notes 170
their objects (Nicomachean Ethics VIII): friendship of virtue, friendship of utility, and friendship of pleasure. Virtuous friendship is highest because it is motivated by the most noble desires for oneself and others. While it incorporates pleasure and utility, friendship of virtue is concerned with wanting the best for one’s friends.
11 See also Republic X590d–591a. Adults have a responsibility to foster dispositions in children that will enable them to govern their own souls well: “[W]e don’t allow [children] to be free until we establish a constitution in them, just as in a city, and—
by fostering their best part with our own—equip them with a guardian and ruler similar to our own to take our place. Then, and only then, we set them free.”
Similarly, we are inclined by nature, Aristotle reminds us, to pursue what is pleasurable and useful, but our desires and dispositions must be trained to pursue what is noble. Therefore, he advises, our desires must be schooled “by means of habit for noble joy and noble hatred” (Nicomachean Ethics X, 1179b4–31).
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2
Literature and the moral imagination
1 In his essay, “Art and Contemplation,” Josef Pieper (1990) asserts that “man’s ability to see is in decline” (31). That is, our capacity for contemplation, reflection,
thoughtfulness, and even careful observation has been weakened by an era that places emphasis on utility and technology over friendship and the arts, and producing and consuming over thinking and being.
2 This student is referring to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
3 In this book I do not address the research and theory on the power of students’
storytelling in their own voice. For a more thorough discussion of this view of narrative see, for example, Tappan and Brown (1989) and P.Rabinowitz and M.Smith (1998) Authorizing Readers: Resistance and Respect in the Teaching of Literature. The theory, data, and framework used in this book deal primarily with the use of literary narrative to distill insights about moral education.
3
Fostering ethical reflection in our classrooms
1 Teachers Academies sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character (CAEC) at Boston University are five- to ten-day humanities-based retreats for educators. For more information on Teachers Academies, visit www.bu.edu/education/caec.
2 Narrative is perhaps the longest standing means of education and communication in
our culture. In his book, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986), Jerome Bruner introduced the concept of “narrative thinking” as one of two modes of learning and making sense of reality. We tend to order our thoughts, he explained, by way of
“propositional thinking” and “narrative thinking.” The former has more to do with logical deductive reasoning whereas the latter is more context specific, engaged with people, events, happenings and the intentions that inform them. While we know that the development of propositional thinking, rigorous logic, and sound judgment are crucial, narrative thinking offers us a more penetrating lens on life.
3 Similarly, in his book, Psychological Seduction (1983), William Kilpatrick asserts,
“Knowing the stories to which one belongs is not a matter of narcissistic self-authoring but having a direction, a point…as well as a sense of origin and history” (107–108).
4 See also Elridge’s On Moral Personhood (1989).
5 To borrow from J.A.Jacobs, Virtue and Self-Knowledge (1989), tele are
“motivational self-conceptions” that “express ends which one (a) desires for their own sake, and (b) judges to be worthwhile…. Their joint satisfaction specifies the sense in which we identify with these conceptions; in which they are conceptions of self and not just ends” (17 and 22).
6 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II.6.
Part II
Case studies in character
1 Louise Rosenblatt made a pioneering contribution to our understanding of aesthetic reading in her seminal works, The Reader, the Text, and the Poem: The
Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978) and Literature as Exploration (1938, 1995 5th edn). In Reader, the Text, and the Poem she describes aesthetic reading as reading in which “the reader’s attention is centered directly on what he is living through during his relationship with that particular text” (25). In her first work, Rosenblatt describes the power of literature on zv197 readers this way: “The students valued literature as a means of enlarging their knowledge of the world, because through literature they acquire not so much additional information as additional experience…. Literature provides a living through, not simply knowledge about” (37–38).
2 Aristotle also explains that moral and intellectual virtue are cultivated differently—
intellectual virtue through teaching and moral virtue through habit—but in tandem:
“Virtue, then being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of
habit” (Nicomachean Ethics II.1, 1103a33–b25).
3 William Bennett’s Book of Virtues (1993) and Moral Compass (1994) have been widely criticized for reducing stories to a simplistic moral lesson. The stories in both
Notes 172
anthologies, however, appeal to a wide range of ages and readers. It is not the stories themselves but the teaching of these stories that can become reductionistic. For a good example of teaching literature effectively at university level, see Susan Resnik Parr’s The Moral of the Story (1982) and see Vigen Guroian’s Teaching the Heart of Virtue (1998) for insights on the power of fairy tales on the moral imagination of younger children.
4
Elizabeth Bennet—humbled heroine
1 All of the passages in this case study are taken from the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel (1980) based on the 1813 edition of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
2 The parallels between Darcy and Elizabeth’s moral growth merit further study. As this case study focuses more narrowly on Elizabeth, it does not explore the parallels and contrast between these two protagonists as carefully as is warranted by the text.
5
Janie Crawford—trial and transcendence
1 All of the passages in this case study are taken from the Harper and Row edition of the novel (1937/1990).
6
Sydney Carton—rekindling a sense of purpose
1 All of the passages in this case study are taken from the Everyman’s Library edition of the novel (1993) based on the 1859 edition of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.
7
Jay Gatsby—the tragedy of blind eros
1 All the passages in this case study are taken from the Macmillan edition of the novel.
2 Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep.
3 You will note that excerpts from The Great Gatsby do not always follow a neat chapter sequence as the other case studies do. Because of the novel’s plot structure, some passages are drawn from chapters before or after those designated in the sub-heading.
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8
Final considerations
1 See Steven S.Tigner’s “Homer: Teacher of Teachers” (1993).
2 See M.Knox Beran (1998) “Lincoln, Macbeth, and the Moral Imagination” in HUMANITAS, Volume XI, No. 2, National Humanities Institute, Washington, DC.
Appendix A Definitions and distinctions
1 It lies in making a habit of “find[ing] and choos[ing] that which is intermediate…
between excess…and defect.” Aristotle explains the requisite criteria for virtuous action. First, “the agent must have knowledge.” Second, “he must choose acts and choose them for their own sake.” Third, “his action must proceed from a firm and unchangeable character” (Nicomachean Ethics II.4, 1105a29).
Notes 174