Month: November 2017

NY elementary students thank veterans for service

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Teachers at Olean City Schools in New York want to instill good character in students, so they invited local veterans in to area schools to show their appreciation, and model the proper way to give thanks to those who fought for freedom.

“I think the word hopefully everybody took away is not only thankfulness, but pride,” East View Elementary School Principal Brian Crawford told the Olean Times Herald. “Pride in your country, pride for your service, but also pride in your school.”

Second grade teachers at East View organized an assembly shortly before Veterans Day to cap off a week-long show of appreciation for military veterans that also included hallway decorating and letters sent to VA hospitals.

The school holds monthly assemblies as part of the district’s character education program with a focus on a different virtue each month. For November, the theme is gratitude.

“It goes well with Thanksgiving at the end of the month, and with Veterans Day also being in November, the second-grade (teachers) really wanted to tie the two together,” Crawford told the news site. “They deserve all the credit because they planned a very heartfelt and meaningful assembly.”

At East View, teacher Brian Martin and volunteer Harold Linza invited local veterans to speak with students, who learned how to offer thanks with a firm handshake and a gift of cookies. U.S. Army Sgt. Geoffrey Thomas was among those who attended, and the experience at East View was rewarding in more ways than one.

“It was nice to see they did this segment on veterans and military personnel, and I was glad I as able to come in and be a part of it,” Thomas said, adding that his two children, third grader Rian and pre-kindergartner Olyvia, attend the school.

“With me being in the Army, when Rian gets to do things like this, I’m not always around,” he said. “So being able to be here and be around and a part of it was a lot of fun and good for him.”

At Washington West Elementary School, first graders shared a similar experience with World War II veteran Edward Mohr, uncle of the school’s library aide Rose Herenda. Mohr, 95, was drafted as a 20-year-old working with the Civilian Conservation Corps and rose to the rank of sergeant in the U.S. Army, the Times Herald reports.

Washington West students prodded Mohr with questions about his time in the service and examined his many service medals, which include the Good Conduct Medal, American Campaign Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, World War II Victory Medal, Philippine Liberation Medal, and the New York Medal for Merit.

Students wanted to know why he joined the military.

“They sent you a letter,” he explained. “It said, ‘Greetings, we want you in the service,’ and that’s where you went.”

“The little kids were great,” Mohr told the Times Herald. “They had some good questions.”

Intergenerational gratitude is an especially powerful way to build community bonds.

University of Virginia sociologist James Hunter writes in The Tragedy of Moral Education in America:

A morality conceptualized without basic links to a living creed and a lived community means that the espoused morality entails few if any psychic costs; it lacks, in any case, the social and spiritual sanctions that can make morality binding on our conscience and behavior.

By strengthening ties to the past through gratitude for military veterans, East View teachers and officials are binding students’ morality to a shared, lived community that clearly values the virtues of good character, while also honoring the sacrifices that paid for their freedoms.

This teen is spending time in the gym rather than jail, thanks to this cop

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Skokie police officer Mario Valenti is changing the perception of police in his community with a little compassion, and $150.

Valenti was recently called to X-Sport Fitness in Skokie, Ill., over a teen who was repeatedly sneaking into the facility without a membership, but instead of arresting 15-year-old Vincent Gonzales on trespassing charges, he opted instead to buy the boy a $150 short-term membership, the Chicago Tribune reports.

“I thought I was going to be arrested at the time,” said Gonzales, who continued to visit the facility to play basketball with his friends long after his mother’s membership expired. “I was very surprised. I want to say thank you.”

Gonzales, a sophomore at Uplift Community High School in Chicago, told the Tribune he was repeatedly busted sneaking in over several months before officials called the police. Valenti’s response, he said, was unexpected.

“It changes how I view police a lot, actually,” Gonzales said. “Now, I know there are some bad cops and some good. There’s a mixture. I used to think all cops were bad.”

His mother, Cynthia Jones, told the Tribune she was equally shocked by Valenti’s generosity.

“Oh my God, I was so surprised, so grateful, it brought tears to my eyes, that someone—a stranger—actually did something like that,” Jones said.

“I’ve had bad experiences with the police in the past—my family and people that I know,” she said. “You just never know. You have to judge somebody for that whey do and not put them in a group of people. Yeah, there are good people out there.”

Valenti said when he realized Gonzales was a “good kid” who simply wanted to play basketball, buying the boy a membership just seemed like “it was the right thing to do.”

“Honestly, I’ve been dealing with kids for over 20 years, and the worst thing for a teenager is idle time,” he said. “Obviously, he was drawn to this club, and he wanted to play basketball there, his friends were there. Having him on the street versus having him in the basketball court at X-Sport, it just seemed like the best thing to do. If it meant dip into my pocket for a little bit of money, you know, it was just the right thing to do.”

Valenti said the response from the public and the media has been “overwhelming.”

X-Sport ultimately chipped in to offer Gonzalez a full two-year membership, and news of Valenti’s kindness has since mushroomed into something much bigger.

“It’s been unbelievable so far—the output from the community and everyone who’s contacted us,” X-Sport Fitness manager Justin Pritchett told the Tribune. “We’ve had people from all across the nation, from all different states, all different media” respond.

Pritchett said a federal officer called the facility to donate a membership to another youngster who can’t afford one, and others wanted to reimburse Valenti for his contribution, though Skokie police nixed that idea.

Several callers told Pritchett “they think it’s absolutely one of the most wonderful stories they’ve heard in a long time.”

X-Sport is also now working with Skokie police to create a partnership program to help youth gain memberships at the fitness chain.

The character of public servants can have a tremendous impact on communities, and character formation takes many adults from different parts of a community focused on the formation of youth.

“Moral education can work where the community, and schools and other institutions within it, share a moral culture that is integrated and mutually reinforcing; where the social networks of adult authority are strong, united, and consistent in articulating moral ideals and their attending virtues; and where adults maintain a ‘caring watchfulness’ over all aspects of a young person’s maturation,” James Davison Hunter writes in The Tragedy of Moral Education in America.

The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues offers a framework for schools to strategize about the community building process, focusing on connections with community groups, businesses, other schools, and universities.

One school’s gift to another lifts spirits after Hurricane Irma

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Students at Woodrow Wilson Middle School in Clifton, NJ, are learning what it’s like to help others in need, a lesson on character catalyzed by a connection with a Florida school ravaged by Hurricane Irma.

Veteran Wilson teacher Fran Chiarelli learned about the plight of Pinecrest Elementary School in Immokalee, Fla. through Cindy Reinhardt Gerber, a Pinecrest teacher who worked with Chiarelli at a school in Clifton years ago, NorthJersey.com reports.

In early September, Hurricane Irma ravaged the Immokalee community, where 99 percent of the mostly migrant community lives in extreme poverty. The storm decimated trailers and wiped out the local tomato crop families in the area rely on to survive.

Pinecrest lost supplies, and local families lost their homes, clothes, and jobs in the storm.

Chiarelli relayed the situation to Woodrow Wilson Principal Maria Romeo, and the two organized a two-week fundraising drive that involved the entire school community, which also includes a high percentage of low income students.

“Even though we have many disadvantaged children right here in Clifton, they were able to give of themselves and realize the importance of helping other people,” Chiarelli told North Jersey.

Romeo said the experience is tied in with the district’s focus on character education by giving students the opportunity to learn empathy.

“A disadvantaged student here may live in an apartment with a roof over their heads,” she said, while kids in Immokalee are struggling with life in “the hull of a trailer.”

“It was a good opportunity for them to understand poverty on a completely different level,” Romeo said.

Woodrow Wilson students, parents and staff, baked and sold their goods, while students also raised money through class “penny wars”—a competition to collect the most change. After two weeks, the school raised nearly $10,000 to help Pinecrest buy cots for the community, bags of food for families, and other essentials.

Pinecrest Principal Susan Jordan told North Jersey the donation was by far the biggest the community received in the wake of Hurricane Irma, though other local communities also contributed to Immokalee’s recovery.

“It gives us a level of comfort so we can do what we want to do and what we need to do and know it will actually happen,” Jordan said.

That type of gratitude is what philosopher Laurence M. Thomas describes as “the most basic sentiment of interpersonal interaction.”

“There is no greater sign a people are socially invisible than that they not be seen as meriting gratitude for the good that they do on behalf of others,” Thomas wrote in The Hedgehog Review, a publication of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. “When a person acts with good will towards another, then she or he is acknowledging that the other has moral value. Gratitude is a natural response to being so treated.”

The gracious donation from Woodrow Wilson students also belies concerns about America’s focus on materialism that dates back to observations by French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville in 1833.

Tocqueville worried that “America was devolving into a nation of self-sufficient Robinson Crusoes,” researchers Arlie Hoschild and Sarah Garrett wrote in The Hedgehog Review. “If we are too individualistic, if we devalue moral sentiments, Tocqueville thought, our attention will then turn to materialism. Speaking of Americans in 1833, he observed that the individual arising from their relative equality ‘lays open the soul to an inordinate love of material gratification.’”

Tocqueville was concerned that Americans would become obsessed with the material, and focus less on virtues like gratitude and empathy that strengthen communities.

The Florida donation proves students in New Jersey understand gratitude and generosity, but it also goes beyond that to help to build up both communities through service to others.

Resources on helping others, like “How Would You Help?” from the Jubilee Centre, can help students understand ways they can give back to their communities.

Parents vs. administrators on cameras in the high school bathrooms

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Administrators at Colorado’s Windsor Charter Academy Early College High School are now monitoring students on surveillance cameras inside bathrooms, and parents aren’t very happy about it.

School officials frame the situation as a safety precaution, and parents are raising privacy concerns, but the issue also raises questions about the school’s ability to instill character and responsibility in students.

Parents recently learned that officials at the high school installed four cameras in student bathrooms—two in men’s rooms and two in women’s rooms—as part of a new design that also includes floor-to-ceiling stalls, the Greeley Tribune reports.

“I was floored,” parent Trevor Garrett said.

Garrett and his wife Annie, along with another parent, confronted school officials about the new cameras in October, and demanded to know why parents were not informed. Annie said her daughters contend some girls change in the bathrooms and have a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” phrasing used by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Rebecca Teeples, executive director of Windsor Charter Academy Schools, told the news site the cameras, which allegedly focus only on the bathroom wash stations, were included in a redesign of the school, which opened this year.

She confirmed that academy officials did not inform parents about the change, but noted that signs about the increased surveillance went up days before the cameras. Windsor Charter Academy attorney Bill Bethke argued that the wash stations are technically a public space, and insisted the new cameras and floor-to-ceiling stalls are designed to improve privacy.

“I would urge people to consider that the charter school is trying to improve the protection of privacy, but in doing that drawing a line between the private space and the public space that is new and that people will learn to use appropriately,” he told the Tribune.

Teeples added that the cameras are part of the school’s focus on monitoring all public spaces on campus to ensure students are safe.

“Every decision we make, we make to make sure our students are safe as possible in our school,” she said.

The Garretts, meanwhile, have vowed to pursue a lawsuit if necessary to force school officials to remove the cameras.

While much of the debate about the cameras centers on privacy, it also raises serious questions about responsibility and character.

How have we arrived at a place where we can’t trust students to use the bathroom?

In her book Adult Supervision Required, Markella Rutherford observed that, “Parents have been told [since the 1980s] that children and adolescents must be adequately supervised at all times, which has had particularly dramatic effects on how children spend their free time and engage in peer relationships. The need for constant adult supervision has also constrained children’s opportunities to demonstrate meaningful responsibility and be recognized for their independent contributions. By stressing parents’ supervisory role, the boundary line between adult and child is reinforced, and childhood is constructed as a period of dependence, irresponsibility, and incompetence.”

The ultimate goal is to cultivate moral autonomy in students, so they can make responsible decisions on their own and be held accountable for their actions.

Resources on “good sense” from the Jubilee Centre help educators assist students in cultivating a moral compass that helps them make good decisions.

Library reaches out with gratitude tree

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The Healdsburg Regional Library is offering students a unique way to show their gratitude, and it couldn’t come at a more opportune time.

Wildfires that raged through Sonoma County and Napa Valley, Calif. in October left many in the area scrambling for safety as flames devoured their homes and belongings, but the library’s new Gratitude Tree is helping some to cope with the destruction, The Healdsburg Tribune reports.

Many Healdsburg residents were lucky enough to avoid the fires, Healdsburg librarian Charity Anderson said, but children in local schools haven’t escaped the reality that’s left friends and families in dire straits.

“The tree is exactly what it sounds like,” Anderson told the news site. “It invites people in the community to say what they’re grateful for and creates a beautiful art piece.”

“This is a good way for children to say what they’re grateful for, which is really important after the fires,” she said.

The idea for the Gratitude Tree started this summer, well before several fires scorched nearly 200,000 acres, consuming roughly 8,400 structures and killing dozens of people. Four children’s librarians from around the county came up with the low commitment idea to engage children for Gratitude Month in November using a tree, with paper leaves kids can use to write what they’re thankful for and hang from its branches.

At the Healdsburg library, officials unveiled the tree, which sits near the children’s area earlier this month, and it’s already filling in with leaves expressing thanks “for the first responders of Sonoma County,” “friends and family,” and other hopeful messages.

The Tribune notes that the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) emphasizes how wildfires often leave children with fear, worry, distress, and anxiety. The damage, both physical and emotional, stems from concerns about loved ones, separation from their families, and can lead to behavior problems, as well as problems sleeping or eating.

“Even in the most difficult situations, it is important to identify some positive aspect and to stay hopeful for the future,” the NCTSN advises. “A positive and optimistic outlook helps children see the good things in the world around them. This outlook can be one way to help them through even the most challenging times.”

Robert H. Frank also observed the intersection of gratitude and behavior in The Hedgehog Review, a publication of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

Frank pointed to the “large body of research by academic psychologists who have studied how the emotion of gratitude affects people’s behavior.”

“The general finding is that gratitude makes people not only happier and healthier, but also more generous toward others,” he wrote.

In other words, gratitude is infectious, particularly in folks who acknowledge that their good fortune isn’t entirely their own making.

“Interesting enough, gratitude is often stronger in people who believe that they have been lucky rather than in those who believe that success is solely due to their own efforts,” Frank wrote. “Subjects who’d been asked to recall a good event and come up with external causes—many of whom mentioned luck explicitly, or cited factors like supportive spouses, thoughtful teachers, and financial aid—gave more than 25 percent larger donations than those who’d been asked to offer internal causes to explain the good event.”

The fires in California have undoubtedly left many in the Napa Valley region grateful to be alive, and many surely recognize that prevailing winds, an act of God, or some form of luck played a role.

The Healdsburg Gratitude Tree provides an opportunity for local students to reflect on that reality, and share their gratitude for avoiding the terrible fate that befell their neighbors.

Anderson told the Tribune that’s something worth celebrating, and she now plans to keep the Gratitude Tree up through the end of the year to continue to spread the message of hope.

“Maybe we’ll even put Christmas lights on it,” she said.

Lessons from the Jubilee Centre can help students practice the virtue of gratitude in the classroom.

Parent advice books from foreign countries big sellers

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A flood of parenting advice books are offering a wide range of foreign child-rearing models, a movement that started with the Chinese “Tiger Mom” style and morphed into a publishing genre that now includes guidance from the Dutch, Danish, Germans, Russians and others.

The Wall Street Journal highlighted the growing number of advice books from across the Atlantic hitting the shelves in numerous countries, from The Danish Way of Parenting to the Dutch title The Happiest Kids in the World.

According to the news site:

“The Danish Way of Parenting” says boys and girls thrive with skolefritidsordning—a “free-time school” where children play until dinner. Rights to the book about raising confident children have been sold to 23 countries. It hit the best-seller list in Italy and is in its ninth U.S. printing.

Another Nordic-loving book claims a different secret: friluftsliv, or “open-air living,” encouraging children to climb trees and get dirty playing outdoors in what Swedish-American author Linda Åkeson McGurk calls their “mud kitchen.” Her book, “There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather,” was just released in the U.S. and is bound for a publishing house in Poland.

“They are a familiar pitch—I say, ‘All right, what country? Got it. Send it along,” Marnie Cochran, editor at Ballantine Books, told the WSJ, adding that she’s received manuscripts from Finland and Japan, among others. “There are lots of countries left in the world that we haven’t explored, that we can perhaps learn from or exploit.”

The growing foreign parenting genre is fueled in large part by the popularity of the 2011 book by Amy Chua titled Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which stressed raising children with the type of discipline and high expectations Chinese parents employ. That book is now available in dozens of languages and spawned a sitcom in China.

Chua said she’s since received pitches from parenting writers espousing the benefits of Mormon, Brazilian, and other child-rearing styles that she forwarded to her agent.

Some titles—including The Happiest Kids in the World, which describes how laid-back Dutch parents offer chocolate sprinkles on toast for breakfast and allow teens “romantic sleepovers” at home—are taking off, with copies now published in Finnish, Italian, and Dutch, with Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Chinese versions on the horizon.

Another—Achtung Baby—which promotes the self-reliance in German children that encourages them to handle sharp knives and light matches—was recently purchased by publishers in Russia, Poland, and the U.K., where it’s expected to hit shelves in January.

Others, meanwhile, have flopped, such as Tanja Maier’s Shapka, Babuska, Kefir, which translates to Winter Hat, Grandmother, Kefir.

The only folks willing to publish the book, which dotes on Russian mothers who keep up their beauty routines despite the rigors of motherhood and push their children to excel at their interests, were Russian publishers.

“It turns out, the Russians wanted to hear somebody saying something good about them,” Maier, a 41-year-old from Arizona who moved to Moscow in the 1990s, told the WSJ.

There’s another country that’s been conspicuously absent from the expanding parent advice book market: the United States.

Publishers told the WSJ they can’t name a single parenting book from the U.S. to gain the type of international acclaim as those from Europe and Asia.

“I don’t know that anyone’s written a book about helicoptering,” Cochran said.

Why the interest in what other cultures do? Maybe it’s because over half of American parents, according to the Culture of American Families report from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, are worried that they aren’t investing enough time and energy in their children. And a similar percentage believe that there’s something wrong with their kids, whether it be obesity, or some kind of learning disability.

With such widespread anxiety, reading about how other parents cope might be a search for guidance. And while many American parents are working to apply what they learn from the foreign offerings, some are finding the unique perspectives from other countries don’t always translate to life in the U.S.

Kate Desmond, a freelance writer from Dallas, told the WSJ she’s tried to embrace the unsupervised outdoor play in The Danish Way of Parenting, but worries about her kids playing in busy city streets. She also took the book’s advice on avoiding ultimatums, but admits following the guidelines isn’t always as easy as it seems.

“Just this morning, I bribed a 3-year-old to get in the car with a piece of candy corn,” Desmond said.

So perhaps reading about Danish parents and their children ends up being a way of becoming yet more guilty, anxious, and unfulfilled.

$2.1M commitment to Georgia character education program

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Business and school leaders in Bibb County, Georgia, want to ensure every student has the tools to form the habits that form good character, and they’re putting their money where their mouth is to make it happen.

The OneMacon Business Education Partnership teamed up with Bibb County schools to launch a fundraising campaign in March, and officials announced this month that they’ve raised $2.1 million to expand a pilot “Leader in Me” character education program to all of the district’s elementary and middle schools over the next four years, The Telegraph reports.

“Believing and doing require a lot of effort, and you all have made a lot of investment in this community,” said Blake Sullivan, Business Education Partnership co-chairman, at an assembly at Vineville Academy in early November. “We’re going to have some of the best schools in Georgia.”

District officials implemented the Leader in Me program at two local elementary schools during the 2015–16 school year, and expanded the program to two others last year. The new funding means it will now roll out in the remainder of the district’s elementary and middle schools in coming years, superintendent Curtis Jones said.

The program was developed by Sean Covey, with the FranklinCovey company, in 2009, and it’s based on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, a book penned by Covey’s father, Stephen Covey. FranklinCovey also donated 10% of the $2.1 million fundraising goal, with the rest coming from other businesses and community donations.

The Leader in Me program, which concentrates on changing the culture and climate of schools, is already in place in 3,500 schools in 55 countries, according to the news site.

“It’s a systematic approach to building 21st century skills in children and in staff members and in the community,” Covey said, adding that he hopes the Bibb County program will provide a model for other communities to follow. “There’s so much instability in the world today. You need a framework of your own and a set of core principles to found yourself on and skills, like taking responsibility, goal-setting, resolving conflict. This is basic blocking and tackling of being an effective and happy person today.”

Jones said the Leader in Me program is designed to change how students think, with the hope that they’ll carry the message into the community.

“It allows our students to really learn how to display strength of character,” he told The Telegraph. “Those words are easy, but how do you do it? Students are asking, ‘What do I do?’ Now we say, ‘You can practice the seven habits and that will help you demonstrate strength of character.’”

The habit-forming approach to good character certainly isn’t anything new, but rather a tradition that dates back to the famed philosopher Aristotle.

“It makes no small difference . . . whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth,” Aristotle wrote in Nicomachean Ethics, “it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference.”

The Leader in Me program offers sample resources at TheLeaderInMe.org for educators interested in the habit-forming curriculum.

“With over 40 age-appropriate activities in each activity guide, teachers can use the activity guides to introduce and teach the 7 Habits and other foundational leadership concepts to elementary students,” according to the site. “These activities are aligned with Education Standards and with skills for the 21st Century. The lessons in the guides are flexible and can be assigned daily, semiweekly, or weekly according to the available time in each classroom.”

Storytelling for social justice in St. Louis

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Students in St. Louis are steeped in gun violence, but a nonprofit art collective is working to change the dynamic by recruiting black youth to produce music, poetry, and other art to raise awareness about social justice issues in their community.

The St. Louis Story Stitchers pair professional artists with local black youth between 15 and 24 years old to tell their stories in ways that promote strong character virtues and civic pride, intergenerational relationships, and literacy, EdSurge reports.

“Story Stitchers erase real and perceived divisions through cultural exploration and arts practice,” according to its website, “by stitching together our city.”

The goal is “to promote a better educated, more peaceful and caring region through storytelling.”

In much of The Gateway City, peace is hard to come by.

“In St. Louis in the past five years, 15,000 victims were murdered, shot or robbed at gunpoint. Over 90 percent of St. Louis residents who were killed by guns were African-American, and two-thirds were under the age of 30,” EdSurge reports. “The Circuit Attorney reports there were 2,092 shootings in 2015 and half involved youth age 25 or under.”

Story Stitchers offers local youth another way by showcasing their talents in public awareness campaigns on social justice issues including discrimination, literacy, the lack of fresh foods, and gun violence. This summer, the group launched a Pick the City UP campaign that helped students host music, poetry, and other live performances in the city’s cultural venues, parks, and neighborhoods where they live.

Some learned to craft raw and authentic messages of hope and to offer solutions through hip hop and dance, while others documented the performers to produce photos, video and other messages posted online.

With Story Stitchers, the city’s black youth are learning to “work collaboratively to generate research, rhythms, writing and recordings that eventually become live performances, PSA spots and educational videos with strong messaging,” EdSurge reports.

The young adults are paid for their efforts, through both sales of published songs, poetry, and videos, and for work on video projects and administrative tasks for Story Stitchers.

In essence, the art collective is helping St. Louis’ black youth turn their violent reality into something positive, while also improving the city’s moral ecology with real-life experiences that develop character, literacy, and a sense of purpose.

James Hunter, sociologist at the University of Virginia and founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, notes in The Tragedy of Moral Education in America that character “is a story about living for a purpose that is greater than the self.”

“These purposes, and the narrative in which they are embedded, translate character into destiny,” according to Hunter. “In so doing, they also establish the horizons of the moral imagination—the expanse of the good that can be envisioned. “

St. Louis program focuses on ‘character instead of curriculum’

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AESM Middle School in downtown St. Louis is implementing a new character education program in hopes it will make a positive impact on students’ lives well into the future.

“If you don’t have good character traits,” principal Ceandre Perry told KMOV, “students can struggle in the real world.”

“So we want to make sure we’re equipping them right now with those ideas in order for them to be successful in high school and go on into the real world,” he said.

The news site highlighted how the “new school program focuses on character instead of curriculum.”

“Instead of focusing on just math and science, it stresses nonacademic growth that will help students long after they leave school,” KMOV reports.

The three-year “Character Plus” program was funded through an unspecified grant.

KMOV provides very few details on what the program actually entails, but the news report illustrates a fundamental problem facing character education, as well as other important issues like moral formation, and social and emotional learning in schools: they’re viewed as education extras that are not necessarily elements of a “real” or traditional academic curriculum.

The fact is, whether or not educators and the media formally acknowledge character education or moral formation, students are learning both through daily life at home and at school. It’s often part of a “hidden curriculum” that will determine if students lead a flourishing life, or something else.

Plenty of students get straight As in school, but flunk life miserably.

An intentional focus on character and morality in the daily school rituals is a positive step in the right direction, but it’s only one of several important elements. Character education programs that are ultimately successful also push students and teachers to commit to a particular view of reality.

If a program is not rooted in strong particular commitments, what the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture terms “particularity,” then it will not withstand the assaults of daily life.

The Community School for Social Justice in the South Bronx and the Ron Brown High School in Washington, D.C., are two examples of public high schools with very strong particular commitments.

Virtual approaches to real-word problems

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Nevada’s Office of Safe and Respectful Learning recently launched a new website for students and parents to report bullying online, raising questions about how the virtual approach will correct real-world problems in schools.

“The legislature made the reporting system possible,” Christy McGill, director of the Office of Safe and Respectful Learning, told KOLO. “They took a real hard look at the bullying that had gone on in the past in our schools and they decided enough is enough.”

In 2015, lawmakers appropriated funds to the Nevada Department of Education to create the Office of Safe and Respectful Learning, which is tasked with maintaining a 24-hour, toll-free statewide hotline, as well as an internet site, for anyone to report bullying.

Both the hotline and the site, bullyfreezone.nv.org, are reportedly designed as avenues to report bullies without having to confront them, according to the news site.

“If you think back to when you were bullied,” McGill said, “your worst fear is to meet your bully head-on.”

According to bullyfreezone.nv.org:

The Bully Free Zone web site is designed to assist students, parents and school staff with bully prevention methods. The resources and information included in this web site are structured to be easy to use for everyone. This is not an inclusive list of resources.

The mission of the Office for a Safe and Respectful Learning Environment is to train, empower, educate, collaborate, advocate, and intervene in order to ensure that every student in Nevada, regardless of any differing characteristic or interest, feels fully protected physically, emotionally, and socially. We believe that by creating a safe environment, one which is fostered by a caring adult relationship, all children will thrive to meet their passions and aspirations. This office is responsible for the foundational four levels of a hierarchy of learning: physical needs, safety, belonging, and self-esteem.

In addition to the online reporting system, the site also offers lesson plans, an educator “share fair,” “students in the spotlight,” and bullying information by school district. There’s also tips for families, safety pledges, and advice on how to deal with bullies.

Once a bullying report is made, “a school official will promptly begin to investigate the situation,” according to EdScoop.

What’s not apparent, however, is how the reporting system will correct the underlying problems that are driving the problem in schools, particularly a lack of support for educators to take action.

Murray Milner, senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, notes in his book Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids, that “bullies have always been a problem.”

“Part of growing up is learning to deal with them,” he wrote. “But this does not mean that young people should be without assistance in this regard.”

Milner’s research shows high-schoolers do not receive much support against bullies, in part because teachers ignore cruelty unless it spills over into actual violence. The situation, Milner argues, stems from teachers’ lack of power and support from school officials to take action.

Teachers are also often tasked with monitoring hundreds of students in as many as five classes per day, which is further complicated by a lack of authority to issue sanctions against bullies.

Many parents are aware of the situation and many have struggled to convince school officials and teachers to take a more active role in policing bullies.

Increasing knowledge of the problem is good, but an online reporting system does not ensure teachers have the knowledge or authority to take action when necessary.

Virtual means cannot correct the flaws in real communities.

And it begs the question: If parents don’t feel comfortable reporting problems directly to school officials, why would they have any confidence those officials will follow through on the electronic alerts?

©2017 Advanced Studies in Culture

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