Character in the Classroom

“Our objective in the school should not be to stock the minds of our pupils but to strengthen them; we should be concerned not only with their intellectual development but with their attitudes, their values, their relationships one to another, their courage, their tolerance, their initiative, their imagination, above all their compassion.”

So spoke an English educator to the 1966 convention of the Canadian Education Association in Vancouver, reminding the delegates that character rather than knowledge should be the primary goal of the schools. Although this was not exactly a new idea, somehow it made a greater impression than any other in those address-filled three days during which the educators conferred on the future course Canadian schools should follow.

When the country’s leading economist appealed for an expanded program of technological education to meet growing industrial needs, he was asked for his opinion on this idea that character must be education’s first goal. The economist replied at once that he agreed; his point was only, he said, that technological education could be made a part of the kind of curriculum that had been advocated.

Indeed, delegates were so ready to agree with the visiting Yorkshireman’s point of view that no one seemed aware of the great problem involved: How can the schools develop character in a society that no longer has common beliefs and values on which character development can be based?

Canada is becoming this kind of society. Its schools are being asked to do more and more things for the personality of the student but with fewer and fewer resources. Advocates of everything from safe driving to sex education blandly urge that these things be added to the curriculum; but they fail to suggest what source the schools are to draw on for the values and goals they are to teach.

It was not always so. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, when the educational system of the province of Ontario was devised, the teaching of Christian morality was made an explicit responsibility of the teacher. Canada, it should be remembered, has never had a constitutional separation of church and state; and in the dominantly Protestant and rural society of the time, Christian morality was almost universally accepted, if not so widely practiced. The biblical beliefs that provide the foundation for that morality were just as widely accepted, and they too were included in the school curriculum.

But the social situation is changing. The center of population and power in Canada is shifting from the countryside to the city and suburb, with all their pluralism and secularism. This change is bringing with it an alteration in the values that govern the way an increasing number of people live. Many of the absolutes of past times are gone or rapidly going. Church attendance, alcoholic beverages, sexual relations, and divorce—these are just some of the areas in which a significant number of people now have attitudes radically different from those that their grandparents had, and that some of their neighbors still have.

So the question arises: Just how are the schools to do the job so many think is their main job?

This question was not faced by the delegates to the Canadian Education Association, but it must be faced if the ideal of that convention is to be realized.

To answer it, educators will find it necessary to do more than plumb the depths of the obvious. They will have to discount, for example, the old assumption that if religious knowledge is imparted, moral character is bound to result. Long years of religious instruction in some of Canada’s provinces have shown there is no necessary correlation between religious knowledge and moral living.

On the other hand, they should reject the opposite belief of the humanist that morality should be taught without any religious reference. Educators should see that this approach demands as much commitment as an out-and-out Christian one and has no place in schools that claim they do not indoctrinate their students.

What educators may find worthwhile is a method of teaching moral values that avoids humanism and yet is appropriate to public education in today’s society. This approach would begin with the actual experiences of children and young people that show their need for moral values. It would then go on to show how that need can be met from various sources, one of them being the biblical tradition.

The problem of alienation, for example, is one that every human being suffers at almost every age. It clearly demands that the individual have beliefs and values that enable him to deal with it, and it is a problem to which the Bible speaks very clearly.

Admittedly, this approach is no panacea, and it is far less than the ideal that the Christian could wish for his schools. But it has great potential for helping the schools provide some of the inner resources their students need to receive from their education.

This method can enjoy maximum effectiveness, however, only if it is practiced by people committed in their own lives to the message they are trying to teach. This makes it all the more imperative that the churches consider the work of teaching as a lay ministry. If they do, they will make a much greater effort than many now do to help Christian teachers realize the great opportunity and responsibility they have.

By such means and through such people, there is hope that the schools can carry out the great obligation that today’s society seems determined to put upon them.

Reginald Stackhouse is professor of philosophy of religion at Wycliffe College (Anglican), University of Toronto. He holds the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Toronto, the L.Th. and B.D. from Wycliffe College, and the Ph.D. from Yale University. He was ordained by the Anglican Church of Canada. This year is the Canadian centennial year, and CHRISTIANITY TODAY will devote its March 31 issue to that important dominion. During the year Professor Stackhouse will contribute two more reviews of Current Religious Thought, to the April 14 and July 7 issues. The regular contributors to the feature are Addison H. Leitch, distinguished professor of philosophy and religion at Tarkio College, Tarkio, Missouri; J. D. Douglas, editor of The Christian and Christianity Today and British editorial representative of CHRISTIANITY TODAY; John Warwick Montgomery, professor of church history at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois; Harold B. Kuhn, professor of the philosophy of religion at Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky; and G. C. Berkouwer, professor of systematic theology at the Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

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