Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 4 · column 5 of 6 · from the scan, no model involved
faith alone the educationists believed that right behavior was a product of right reason, and in a mighty leap into illusion, they believed that children were capable of reason.
That approach has dominated the schools for two decades. Is it any wonder that they’re a mess?
It’s time to stop and do things the right way again. The experiment has failed.
Children aren’t reasonable, and even if they were, virtue isn’t innate. Virtue is learned, and the learning is very hard. Even after we’ve learned what good is, it is still very hard. Only deeply internalized restraints keep us from going at one another’s throats.
Giving children a range of moral options only leads them into a forest of ambiguity that blunts and subverts all morals. Too frequently that technique creates people who go through life looking for loopholes, and every now and then the moral uncertainty it breeds lapses over into adolescent nihilism. Then you’ve got real trouble.
To be effective, character education has to be incremental, diverse, pervasive, persistent and rigorous. There can be no ambiguity about right and wrong, and no quibbling about the correctness of imposing values on children. We must not forget again that if values are not imposed, they probably will not exist.
Our fathers understood that discipline and high standards are the core of character education. Rules must reinforce virtue, and breaking them should carry serious penalties. In short, good behavior should be rewarded, and bad punished.
High academic standards also play a role in character education. Good grades don’t indicate character, but their attainment certainly requires the exercise of character’s
93.6%