Entrevista con William Damon, profesor de educación de la Universidad de Stanford, quien aboga por una formación centrada en el carácter y el cultivo de los valores.
Helping Students Find a Sense of Purpose
A Q&A With William Damon
By SUSANNAH TULLY
The Chronicle Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 13, 2009
William Damon, a professor of education at Stanford University, has long advocated “character education” as a key component of school reform. The author of several books on the subject, his latest is The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find Their Calling in Life (Free Press, 2008). The Chronicle Review asked him to discuss the role of schools in moral development and how they can encourage students to define their goals and aspirations.
Q: How do you define character education?
Character education is a term that covers a broad range of efforts to promote positive values and virtues in students through explicit instruction. Of course just being in school has some effect on character development. For example, almost all schools require that students attend classes, do homework, sit quietly in class, and respect their teachers. But schools are not always aware of the developmental implications of what they are doing — or not doing. When a school launches special programs dedicated to promoting positive values and virtues, that school is engaged in character education.
A clear focus on moral behavior is what makes character education essential for schooling at every level. It is also what has made this effort controversial, at least in some postmodern educational circles.
Q: Why?
It’s a fascinating question as to how character education became controversial in our time. For the first hundred years or so of public schooling in the United States, it was universally assumed that schools had a responsibility for the moral character of students. Consider, for example, the McGuffey’s readers, by far the most widely used texts in U.S. schools from 1836 to 1922. Those texts taught the code of values that virtually all parents and teachers believed essential for all students to learn: respect, honesty, diligence, kindness, fair-mindedness, temperance, and so on.
But during the 20th century, public schooling turned almost single-mindedly to cognitive skills and academic knowledge. Schools became places specializing in “the three R’s.” The assumption was that students should figure out for themselves what to do with the skills that they learned in school.
More recently the pendulum has swung back in the other direction, perhaps because of widely publicized accounts of student misbehavior that have alarmed educators and community members (Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, a host of prominent cheating and substance-abuse incidents). A reinvigorated character-education movement is now part of the educational landscape. Eight percent of the states now have mandates requiring character education.
In fact, the most searing criticism these days has come from the other direction — the concern that character educators fail to promote moral standards strongly enough. One critic has complained that the programs do not deal sufficiently with matters of good and evil and thus are actually leading to “the death of character”! Although such claims seem hyperbolic, they do suggest that the field of education as a whole has now returned to its traditional assumption that education must have a moral as well as an intellectual agenda.
Q: How do you see your work in the context of the school-reform movement?
The message of my work is that schools need to give students a better understanding of why they are in school in the first place — that is, how the skills students are learning can help them accomplish their life goals. That is the only way to really motivate students in a lasting way. And if you ask any teacher what the major problems in schooling these days are, I’m sure that student motivation will be at the top of the list.
Now in order to help students understand what schooling can help them accomplish, they must be given opportunities to reflect on what they want to do with their lives. What are their ultimate concerns, their highest purposes? What kinds of people do they want to be? Those questions should not be asked or answered in a vacuum. Good schools can provide students with rich historical and literary knowledge about how such questions have been addressed by thoughtful people throughout the ages.
Present-day school-reform movements tend to focus on basic skills, especially ones that can be measured by standardized tests. The skills are important, and the test scores can be useful as indicators of learning. But the skills and the scores are means to an end and not ends in themselves, and they should be presented to students in that way.
Students learn bits of knowledge that they may see little use for; and from time to time someone at a school assembly urges them to go and do great things in the world. When it comes to drawing connections between the two — that is, showing students how a math formula or a history lesson could be important for some purpose that a student may wish to pursue — schools too often leave their students flat.
If you visit a typical classroom and listen for the teacher’s reasons for why the students should do their schoolwork, you will hear a host of narrow, instrumental goals, such as doing well in the course, getting good grades, and avoiding failure, or perhaps — if the students are lucky — the value of learning a specific skill for its own sake. But rarely (if ever) will you hear the teacher discuss with students broader purposes that any of these goals might lead to. Why do people read or write poetry? Why do scientists split genes? Why did I work hard to become a teacher? How can schools expect that young people will find meaning in what they are doing if they so rarely draw their attention to considerations of the personal meaning and purpose of the work others do?
Q: How has your work changed over the past 30 years, and how does your most recent book fit into the evolution of your research?
The Path to Purpose is the third book that I have written about youth development with a broad audience in mind. Looking back, I can see that each book has been a product of its time. In the 1980s, I was troubled about the ethic of moral relativism that was swaying the intellectual currents of American culture and that was beginning to trickle down to schools, the media, and other places that shape the values of our children.
In The Moral Child: Nurturing Children’s Natural Moral Growth (Free Press, 1988), I made a case for the universality of core moral values and clarity in moral education. But by the end of that decade, the culture of child rearing had become dominated by approaches that looked askance at standards of any kind as vestiges of insensitive traditionalism. Self-esteem had become the holy grail of child rearing, and parents were advised to avoid “traumatizing” their (supposedly) fragile children by asserting authority and urging children to strive for excellence, take on challenges, and control their behavior according to ethical strictures. So I wrote Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in America’s Homes and Schools (Free Press, 1995) in the mid-1990s, arguing that kids actually thrive on high standards and challenges.
By now, thankfully, phrases such as “high standards” and “character education” can be heard on the tongues of educators and public officials alike. But the present time, too, has its hazards, and they are serious. The most pervasive is a sense of emptiness that has ensnared many young people in long periods of drift during a time in their lives when they should be defining aspirations and making progress toward their fulfillment.
For too many young people today, apathy and anxiety have become the dominant moods, and disengagement or even cynicism has replaced the natural hopefulness of youth. That is not a problem that can be addressed by solutions advanced in the past. The message that young people do best when they are challenged to strive must be expanded to include an answer to the question: For what purpose?
In my earlier work, I had encountered the notion of purpose many times, but dimly and indirectly. In a series of studies of men and women who have done exceptionally good work in their careers — studies I did with Howard Gardner and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — I was struck by how vividly those people answered our questions about what they were trying to accomplish and why. It became apparent that there was an elevated purpose, always on their minds, that drove their daily efforts.
So my current studies have a purpose of their own: to make a case for the importance of purpose in youth development.
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Copyright © 2009 by The Chronicle of Higher Education