For 15 years, Cape Henry Collegiate School in Virginia Beach has sent students all over the world in pursuit of character formation and personal growth. We ran a story last week on this ambitious travel program, Nexus Global Studies. Today, we feature interviews with three participating students. While their destinations differed, they all experienced a common benefit of immersive travel: insight into their own culture, its values, and its effect on them.
Fiona Clunan
Fiona Clunan (left) with her host mom and a friend in Ollantaytambo, Peru.
Fiona Clunan graduated from Cape Henry Collegiate this past spring, and after a gap year, she will attend Stanford University in the fall of 2020. Clunan had already participated in two domestic Nexus trips—one to New York City, another to Atlanta—when she traveled with Nexus to Peru last summer. In Peru, she and her team lived with local families in two different locations and helped renovate a center for entrepreneurial women in a high-altitude village. They also biked and ziplined in the mountains.
On the difference between her expectations and reality
“It was not the easy paint-a-mural work I thought we’d do. We were mixing and pouring cement. We were laying stones. One day, we walked up a mountain, used sickles to cut hay, and brought it back on our backs. It was 40 degrees and raining. We had to carry a bunch of trees that had been cut down. We got to experience how they lived in their daily challenges.
“It was not what I was expecting—but it worked out. I expected to see Machu Picchu, use my Spanish, get a taste of the food. It was definitely much more intimate than that. The conditions were hard to adjust to in the high-altitude village, and the sustenance wasn’t very filling. It was hard to be working all day in those conditions, but I really enjoyed getting to know their culture.”
On the value of interdependence
“I learned the most in the high-altitude village. When we first arrived, we learned that the core value of the community is the Quechua word ‘ayni.’ The best translation of that word is ‘reciprocity.’ It means that whenever an individual needs help, the whole community will go help them.
“The communities are very tight-knit; it’s how they survive. I got to experience life in community and internalize their values—to think about their values compared to Western values. Individualism has its benefits, but they receive a lot of personal satisfaction—even if their lives are hard—they get a lot of their happiness from being reliant on each other. That came out for me and my group. We had to rely on each other to do work that was hard, which really strengthened our relationships. It made us better friends and better people.”
On how to approach travel
“Getting to know other cultures is the true benefit of travelling. Seeing the sights is wonderful, but when you travel, you should look to spend time in the local community getting to know how they live. That’s how you get the most out of it. There is sightseeing, and there is getting to really know people and places, and I have learned that the latter is more fulfilling.”
James Tyler
James Tyler at the King Hassan II Tower in Rabat, Morocco.
James Tyler just graduated from CHC. Through the Nexus Global Studies program, Tyler went on a 12-day trip to Norway during the spring break of his sophomore year, and he took a 17-day senior trip to Morocco after graduation. While on these journeys, Tyler attended a Norwegian school, cleaned up Moroccan hiking trails, met snake charmers in Marrakesh, and learned about the production of rosewater and carpets in Casablanca. This fall, Tyler will attend Yale University and major in math.
On cultural comparisons and insights
“We had group discussions every day about issues in Morocco and America. The goal was to build cultural understanding. In Morocco, there was a lot of interest in women’s issues and how women are treated there versus in America. There was a lot of talk about living in an Islamic culture and how strict or not strict you have to be; there was really a wide range of responses. There was a lot of talk about the king and what it’s like living in a society under a king and what people thought of him. There was also some talk about environmental issues. And they were interested in what we thought about Trump and our political situation.
“A lot of them would ask similar questions to what we asked. They’d say, ‘America isn’t perfect—you have these issues too.’ And yes, obviously America has gun issues, gender issues, race issues. They spoke good English, and they were way more informed on America than we were on Morocco.”
On the people he met during homestays
“Norway is a developed country like the US, but their society is so much more communal. There’s value placed on being equal, where in the US it’s more about individual gain. A lot of people there were content with what they had.
“In Morocco, the people seemed super happy and friendly. They weren’t anywhere as well off as we were, but they were honored to have guests and were so welcoming. We came in as total strangers, and as we were leaving, they were inviting us to come back as if we were family. It was amazing to see the impact we had on them and they had on us after just a few days.”
On cross-cultural socializing
“We [Americans, Moroccans, and Norwegians] have these cool differences in our backgrounds, but that makes it really interesting to connect. There were a lot of funny moments where you could make a joke and they would totally get it. [At other times,] you’re just speaking and don’t really understand because there’s a language barrier, and so you’re just trying to communicate in ways other than words. We were having to be nonverbal, and you end up laughing a lot, trying to make a connection. That happened a lot in Morocco, especially with older people who don’t speak as much English. People come from all different backgrounds, but we are similar in so many ways.”
On his personal highlights
“In Morocco, we drove over the Atlas Mountains out to the desert, and there we went on camels out in the Sahara Desert. We stayed the night in a camp in the Sahara, and we watched the sunset and the sunrise. It was incredible, something you never imagined you’d do.
“One other thing that was cool was that we weren’t allowed to have technology on this trip. We could have cameras, but that’s it. Not having technology was cool because you’re just together with 11 friends, having these amazing experiences and being isolated from what’s going on. You end up having these interesting conversations and moments that you wouldn’t ordinarily get.”
Grayson Bunn
Grayson Bunn (seated in blue shirt) with his classmates and a local chicken farmer in Tortola, BVI.
Grayson Bunn is a rising ninth-grader at CHC. Last summer, he travelled with Nexus to West Virginia and Idaho on white water rafting trips. In June, he visited the British Virgin Islands for 10 days to help with cleanup from Hurricanes Irma and Maria.
On helping BVI communities rebuild after hurricanes
“We painted a church, and we went to a school where I built a guinea pig cage. We sealed structures so they wouldn’t be damaged by wind. We went to a chicken farm and cleared rubble from the home. Coy, whose farm it was, told us stories from the hurricane and what he went through. He had no power for 10 months, and then he had been working for months to restore his farm.
“My favorite project was on Anegada, a flat island where the highest elevation is 24 feet. We went to a flamingo observation deck to restore it and put sealant on it. I got to go with a group of two others to a house called the Faulkner House, which is a memorial that tourists visit. It was built with such craftsmanship; the roof has no overhang, so hurricanes can’t pick it up. But a few of the stairs were too narrow, so we took them out and built wider steps. It was my favorite because we got to see a house which was built with such attention to detail. And we were all proud of the work we accomplished.”
On what he learned from visiting another country
“We got to talk to locals, live their lifestyle, see what they were going through. We hung out with kids. Immersing myself in another culture was an amazing experience. It taught me skills in construction, but more, it taught me how lucky I am to have been there. Even though there is devastation on the island, they weren’t very affected by the disarray. They were happy and content people. They have adapted, and they seem thankful for what they have.”
On traveling outside your ‘bubble’
“Doing it can give you experiences you can’t have here. I think it develops a change in perspective. When I got home, I felt more independent. My parents said there was a change in me.
“It’s perspective-changing to see other cultures and compare them to how you’re living. While you can learn things through a textbook, actually being there, hands on, living their lifestyle, really helps you to understand the world instead of the bubble you’re currently in.”
To receive a free copy of the chapter of The Content of Their Character that corresponds with this interview, please click here and sign up for our Weekly Digest.
—
Several years ago, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at UVA launched a major research project in order to better understand the moral formation of high school students. Researchers went into ten different sectors of schools, from public schools (both urban and rural) to private schools (both religious and nonreligious). Jeffrey Dill covered home schools.
When fifth-grade teacher Sharon Craig agreed to help pilot a new curriculum called The Character Formation Project at Lick Creek Elementary School in Buncombe, Illinois, she didn’t know what to expect. She had never formally taught anything related to character before. But because she had experience launching other new educational strategies, her principal asked her to take it on.
By the end of the school year, her students—previously prone to bickering and even meanness—were noticeably kinder to one another.
“I’ll never forget the day I had a student come in to me and say, ‘We were out on the playground, and one boy was being bullied, and I told that other boy he didn’t need to talk to him like that,’” Craig recalls. “She was so excited to tell me she had stuck up for someone in our classroom. It was a turning point, and I thought, ‘I really do think this is working.’”
The Character Formation Project is a resource designed to help teachers shape student character beyond the classroom and the current school year. The program uses the stories of influential people like George Washington Carver, Helen Keller, and Tecumseh to engage students’ imaginations. As the children hear and discuss the stories, they consider the exemplars’ struggles and virtues—virtues like justice, respect, responsibility, integrity, self-sacrifice, diligence, and courage. They reflect on the “greater purpose” that drove the choices of the people they learn about, and they commit themselves to emulating the person’s virtues. Lessons are short and easily accessible via the organization’s website.
The program is currently being tested in a handful of schools in rural Illinois. Craig believes that the secret to the program’s success in her classroom is twofold: its realness and its interactive nature.
“The readings, videos, and samples were very history-based, about real people they could actually relate with,” Craig says. “They really liked that it wasn’t about fake characters. And their biggest takeaway was having that time to actually have a discussion and talk about our feelings and the way things work in our own homes. They liked the way they were able to take things away from our lesson and use them in real life.”
The program’s real-life applications also stood out to Cheryl Hinkle, who teaches in Murphysboro, Illinois, at COPE Alternative School, which serves expulsion-eligible students. “There was one kid,” she says, “who had the attitude that everything was always someone else’s fault—‘It’s the principal’s fault, it’s the other kid’s fault.’ After using this program, the other kids started to say to him, ‘You have to own up to your mistakes.’”
Hinkle’s students, who spend most of their days on computers, loved the opportunity to interact with each other on more-personal topics. They especially enjoyed reflecting, she says, on the courage it took for Jackie Robinson to break the color barrier in baseball.
Jeremy Pierce is the principal of the school where Hinkle teaches. “I have been looking for more than 20 years for a curriculum like this,” he says. “I have always lived and worked in rural school districts. With the way the economics are around here, often both parents are working—sometimes even multiple jobs—and there is not a lot of family time. We have an influx of students who are not learning things they used to learn at home. They tend to be self-centered, technology driven, and don’t know how to deal with peers. Thanks to their exposure to character traits through these activities and lessons, they’re starting to get along. This is really needed.”
Nathan Emrick, a world history teacher at Cobden High School, envisions The Character Formation Project’s having a broad impact on his school community and being used across all grade levels in future years. “It will take a few years to see fruit, but for 12 years, to get character training on the same consistent virtues—there’s no way it can’t work a little bit for most kids,” he says. “We could adapt our school mission statement and vision around the virtues. All discipline could go back to the virtues. There’s the potential to be very consistent from top to bottom.”
This sort of consistency has been described by scholars James Davison Hunter and Ryan S. Olson as a “thicker” student moral ecology—a presumably stronger environment for shaping a child’s character. The project’s emphasis on someone’s “greater purpose” also recalls Hunter and Olson’s discussion of “moral discipline” and “moral attachment” in service to “a greater good.” The continuities between Hunter and Olson’s thinking and the project itself are not a coincidence, given that Olson, president of the Advanced Studies in Culture Foundation (the publisher of CultureFeed), served as an early advisor to the project.
Inevitably, goals like building a consistent school environment and helping students explore a “greater purpose” will involve different things in different schools. The Character Formation Project itself comes in three formats: Civic Character Formation (“suitable for all learning environments”), Christian Character Formation, and Homeschool Character Formation. But if the results of the project in rural Illinois prove measurable and enduring, and if they can be replicated elsewhere, the Character Formation Project may help provide common ground for students’ personal character development in America’s diverse schools.
When people think of destinations for student travel, most envision the usual European settings: Spain, Italy, France. But most people are not Willy Fluharty. Fluharty pictures students staying with Bedouins in Morocco, learning about Hinduism in Nepal, or irrigating a school garden in Zimbabwe.
Fluharty is the Director of Nexus Global Studies at Cape Henry Collegiate School (CHC) in Virginia Beach, Virginia. CHC is a private school that currently serves 950 children in grades pre-K through 12. It is long-established and well regarded, but many parents choose it because of its global focus and the opportunities it provides, starting in fourth grade, to travel with Nexus. Fluharty is happy to admit that the goals for the unconventional trips he has been organizing since 2003 have more to do with forming character than anything else.
“All travel is good, but it’s not all the same,” Fluharty says. “In Europe, the food is familiar, and the people look like them. But I want to take them out of their comfort zone and put them in a growth zone, where they are forced to adapt, to get comfortable with the risk of the unknown. I seek out adventures where there is very little western influence, where they are so far away from what they are familiar with that everything is new—new sights, smells, and people. They come back different.”
The Nexus Global Studies program has sent students to over 50 countries and to every continent but Antarctica. Some trips focus on service, such as hurricane cleanup, building schools, or helping at orphanages. Others center on science or language immersion. Fluharty has taken students to stay with the Kutump tribe in Papua New Guinea, where they participated in a bride price ceremony and a “sing-sing”—a traditional festival of singing and dancing. He also led a trip to India, where, after spending three days learning about Buddhism, students visited the Dalai Lama at his home. In 2006, CHC was the first US school to be welcomed by the government of Bhutan in South Asia.
“Visiting Bhutan at that time was like going back in time,” Fluharty says. “It is incredible to take kids to see a place that very few people have seen. It’s a unique experience. It’s like plugging their soul into a socket—they are electrified with an energy they haven’t known before.”
It is this potential for personal change that has inspired the leadership of CHC to make trips like this part of their school DNA. Last year, over 500 CHC students traveled through Nexus, which operated more than 30 programs, both domestic and international.
The travel options begin in fourth grade and continue through senior year. Most take place over the summer, and each time, there are six to eight international options, which range from 14 to 19 days in length. Last year, according to Fluharty, 61 percent of the graduating class had participated in at least one of the international programs.
Fluharty finds that cross-cultural trips stretch students mentally, physically, and spiritually. Students often stay in huts or tents. The bathing facilities are basic, and the food may be very different from what they eat at home. The kids often end up wrestling with issues like, Why do they seem happier than we do? According to Fluharty, students “question their materialism and who they are as a person.”
Fluharty also sees the children grow in courage and flexibility. “Kids who travel have higher self-confidence on so many levels because they have learned to deal with fear,” Fluharty says. “When you’re traveling, it’s unpredictable. Sometimes a bus breaks down and kids ask, What will we do? Often there’s not a lot of structure. But the kid that can thrive in an unstructured environment is a kid that’s going to thrive in life.”
Fluharty, who has joined almost every senior trip since 2004 (and other trips as well), is convinced that global exposure has a significant effect on civic engagement at home.
“My goal is to create better American citizens,” Fluharty says. “Travel makes students question who they are and American society and culture in general. I want them to come back and have a better ability to make an educated decision when they go to vote for somebody. They have become more multicultural, sensitive, and understanding. And these are all important qualities for a better American citizen.”
The examination of personal values, the development of courage, and the deeper concern for the greater good that Fluharty sees emerging from the Nexus program coincide with what sociologist James Davison Hunter refers to as “moral education.” In The Tragedy of Moral Education in America, he writes:
The purpose of moral education is to change people for the better and, in so doing, to improve the quality of life in society, so that, individually and collectively, we can become better people than we might otherwise be.
This moral education can happen in the classroom, but in the Nexus program, Fluharty and CHC have found a way to ensure it extends outside the classroom as well—even in far-flung destinations on the other side of the globe.
To receive a free copy of the chapter of The Content of Their Character that corresponds with this interview, please click here and sign up for our Weekly Digest.
This interview came about because several years ago, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at UVA conducted a major research project to better understand the moral formation of high school students. Researchers went into ten different sectors of schools, from public schools (both urban and rural) to private schools (both religious and nonreligious). Kathryn Wiens covered prestigious independent schools.
In every setting—including the classroom—conflict is inevitable. How educators navigate it can have a massive impact on the culture of a school.
Back in 2010, the early days of the Regents School of Charlottesville, located in central Virginia, Head of School Courtney Palumbo visited other classical schools to gain ideas and insight. At two of them, she observed an approach to interpersonal classroom dynamics that made a huge impression.
“They were utilizing the ‘Peacemaker’ process, and we were blown away by how effective it was,” Palumbo said. “The conversation was about how we struggle to give a model for biblical peacemaking. This book is trying to give a framework.… It gives you a map. They were using it, and I knew we needed to use it.”
The Young Peacemaker is a curriculum that was created for parents, teachers, and youth workers to use with third through seventh graders, though many schools adjust it for use with all grades. The original program is faith-based, and a secular version—called Peacemakers in Training—is promoted by the National Center for Youth Issues. Both versions teach principles related to conflict resolution, including how to take responsibility for one’s fault, accept rather than deflect blame, see conflict as an opportunity, and truly extend forgiveness. It uses a “slippery slope” illustration to show children what three different responses to conflict look like, with peace-making responses in the center and negative responses—attack and escape—on either side.
Regents parent Joy Barresi has been amazed to see how much of the program her seven-year-old daughter Vienna retains and applies at home.
“Vienna understands these three categories: peacemakers, peace breakers, and peace fakers,” Barresi said. “I can ask her questions when she is having an argument with her sibling like, What is more important—the toy you are fighting about or your relationship with your sister? What can you do to reconcile with your sister? Because they [Regents] are doing the groundwork for me, it’s much easier for me to come in with the prompt, and then she comes in with the next steps.”
Parent Fay Pariello, whose three daughters attend Regents, noticed a similar dynamic emerge in her home. While normal sibling squabbles over toys haven’t disappeared, the way her children engage each other has changed dramatically.
“Before, they would compete to make their voices heard. They would speak over each other,” Pariello said. “Now they actually give time to each other to let each other talk. The three of them speak the same language that is kind of a common language in the house now.”
Through the Peacemaker program, it seems that character is truly being formed, its expression extending beyond classroom behavior. This kind of expansive influence on the relational engagement of students seems a mark of a program’s success. If so, the obvious question is, How is this achieved?
In The Content of Their Character, James Davison Hunter and Ryan S. Olson outline five dimensions that serve as components of effective moral formation. These elements may help illuminate the success Regents has enjoyed in their use of the Peacemaker materials.
1) Sources
Hunter and Olson write that one dimension is “the actual sources that elucidate the framework of moral understanding.” These sources include texts that serve as an authority for the principles being taught; they confirm that the values being delineated are not arbitrary, but are historical and tested.
At Regents and other public and private schools that use the Peacemaker approach, the Peacemaker materials themselves are a source. In the Christian version of the program, the materials also refer back to biblical passages like Matthew 18, which outlines what to do when a fellow Christian is doing wrong. These biblical references provide additional sources of moral authority.
2) Formal Articulation
Hunter and Olson call this dimension “the degree to which a moral culture is articulated, whether formally in the classroom or informally in the relationships between teachers and students.” Put simply, values must be verbalized.
Every school year, Regents takes time during the first three weeks of class to teach students the Peacemaker principles. Even returning students receive an in-depth review of how to handle conflict—a review that increases in complexity as they move up the grades.
3) Informal Articulation
Informal articulation also occurs. Barresi remembered overhearing a teacher speaking with a handful of students in the office one day.
“The teacher said, ‘It has come to my attention that so-and-so has been hurt. Did you guys have any information about what happened? Here is a challenge that we have: Someone is our classroom is hurting right now. What can we do to help them feel better?’” Barresi recalled. “I really appreciated how she did not put blame on the girls. She put it in their court, and she just asked them, ‘How do we solve this problem? Your friend is hurting.’”
Hunter and Olson refer to this kind of informal articulation as “catching.” In describing the “catching” that had been observed in a study of American high schools, they wrote, “The moral example of teachers unquestionably complemented the formal instruction students received, but arguably, it was far more poignant to, and influential upon, the students themselves.” Students are constantly watching, and teachers serve as vital models of how to act and be.
“We want our teachers to be humble enough to ask for forgiveness,” Palumbo said. “In this contentious, super-sensitive society, teachers and administrators don’t always feel safe to admit when they are wrong. But we are all wrong, all the time! I have tried to create an environment where a teacher can say, ‘Class, I was tired this morning and was a bit grouchy. Will you forgive me?’”
4) Practices
Students are formed not just by what they hear and see, but by what they do. Hunter and Olson call these “routinized actions—some formal, some informal—all oriented toward giving tangible expression to the school’s values and beliefs.”
At Regents, part of the formal lessons in peacemaking include acting out scenarios that help students remember what they should do in the heat of conflict. They are also reminded of the Peacemaker principles by materials on the walls of every classroom.
“I have seen even the more difficult children admit where they are at on the Slippery Slope chart, whether it’s in denial or playing the blame game,” Palumbo said. “Kids can be really honest when you ask them to be and create a safe situation for them to be.”
5) Social Ecology
The final dimension Hunter and Olson discuss in The Content of Their Character is “social ecology,” or the “social support surrounding the child” outside the school. They cite evidence that a child’s moral character develops when they receive the same messages from multiple influential sources.
Palumbo confirmed the impact of this dynamic, and it’s the reason she works hard to get parents on board. Palumbo explained, “We say to the parents, ‘This is the one book we need you to read after you join Regents. We want you to understand the language your children will be using. If you really want to partner with the school, you will want to know what they are talking about.’ At least 75 percent of parents read it, and that is what makes it work.”
* * *
It seems that Peacemakers is successful in part because it is involved in all five dimensions of what Hunter and Olson call a student’s “moral ecology.” Of course, there is more to students’ character (and to their moral ecology) than how they resolve interpersonal conflicts, but resolving them well does represent a crucial element of their behavior toward others. It also promotes a more orderly and productive learning environment. And Peacemakers’ apparent success in this key area suggests that other elements of a student’s character can be more effectively formed if they span all five dimensions of a student’s moral ecology, too.
With the primary season now underway, a study has just been released finding that a network of charter schools appears to have improved students’ civic participation as adults through a focus on attitudes and activities, not just knowledge. The findings could prove valuable for schools in other sectors, from traditional public schools to religious and independent schools.
The study comes at a time of frequent pessimism over students’ proficiency in civics. Sarah Shapiro and Catherine Brown of the Center for American Progress have written:
While the 2016 election brought a renewed interest in engagement among youth, only 23 percent of eighth-graders performed at or above the proficient level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) civics exam, and achievement levels have virtually stagnated since 1998. In addition, the increased focus on math and reading in K–12 education—while critical to preparing all students for success—has pushed out civics and other important subjects.
Shapiro and Brown also note that “state civics curricula are heavy on knowledge but light on building skills and agency for civic engagement.” This omission may be contributing to low voter turnout and lean participation in local politics.
Policymakers have tried to remedy the situation through various means, including making the test for naturalization as a US citizen a high school graduation requirement. NPR.org reported,
Recently, 14 states considered bills to incorporate content from the naturalization test. Four states—Nevada, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Washington—adopted those bills into law. Twenty states already had requirements related to that test: Some require passing an exam based on it to graduate from high school; others loop it into a half-credit civics requirement.
However, there is a difference between passing a class or a test and becoming civically engaged as an adult. In Making Civics Count: Citizenship Education for a New Generation, David Campbell argues for the vital importance of a school’s “ethos” in predicting long-term civic engagement. He writes,
By ethos, I mean the norms encouraged, shared, and “enforced” within a school community—such as interpersonal trust and an expectation of public engagement. While perhaps not as easy to observe as classroom instruction, extant research indicates that a school’s ethos has a substantial, and enduring, effect on the civic engagement of its students.
The kind of ethos described by Campbell, characterized specifically by an “expectation of public engagement,” has been the stated focus of a network of open-enrollment, high-performing charter schools called Democracy Prep. Serving more than 6,500 students in five cities, mostly from low-income families of color, its mission is “to educate responsible citizen-scholars for success in the college of their choice and life of active citizenship.”
If a life of active citizenship can be at least partially measured by adult voting registration and voting rates, Democracy Prep is succeeding. Mathematica Policy Research, founded in 1968, recently conducted a study comparing Democracy Prep graduates with individuals who were not selected by the random entrance lottery. Mathematica reported that
We find a 98 percent probability that enrolling in Democracy Prep produced a positive impact on voter registration, and a 98 percent probability that enrolling produced a positive impact on voting in the 2016 election.
Democracy Prep increases the voter registration rates of its students by about 16 percentage points and increases the voting rates of its students by about 12 percentage points.
This proof of adult engagement after graduation is arresting, and it naturally prompts the question, How did they do it? According to founder Seth Andrew, learning facts about civics is not enough. Democracy Prep’s approach is threefold, emphasizing civic knowledge, civic skills, and civic dispositions in a deliberate sequence. He told Education Next:
We need more civics taught in middle and high schools, but that doesn’t mean having a boring one-semester course requirement. It means creating outcome expectations around civic skills and knowledge. Lots of states now mandate x amount of civics in high school. I think that’s the wrong way to think about it, because it focuses on input as opposed to outcomes. In the Democracy Prep civic-outcomes model, we actually don’t teach “civics.” There is no standalone “civics” course. However, there is a course on the “sociology of change,” a course on economics, and a senior seminar on American democracy. We require a “change the world” project for seniors, and we hold Election Day get-out-the-vote campaigns at least once every year … What we’re trying to do is remind the world that “civic education” is not about a specific course; it’s about the public purpose of education and putting citizenship first.
Democracy Prep’s emphasis on citizenship is unusual. But the researchers who studied its success pointed out,
its success in raising the registration and voting rates of the low-income minority students it serves provides a proof point for charter schools and conventional public schools alike: an education focused on preparation for citizenship can in fact increase students’ civic participation when they reach adulthood. Renewed attention to the foundational purpose of public schools might broadly increase civic participation across the country.
A long-term study of a school’s impact on students’ behavior post-graduation—complete with a valid control group—is a rarity, and the findings of this one are particularly encouraging. Beyond an affirmation of the efforts of Democracy Prep, they may point the way for other schools seeking to instill civic engagement. And in a country where young people are often characterized as politically apathetic, this is good news indeed.
To receive a free copy of the chapter of The Content of Their Character that corresponds with this interview, please click here and sign up for our Weekly Digest.
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of this interview, which was conducted on December 20, 2018.
Angus McBeath: Today I’m with Dr. Carol Ann MacGregor, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Loyola University in New Orleans. Dr. Carol Ann MacGregor researched a sample of Catholic high schools across the United States. That involved intense interviews, visitations, conversations, observations of what she saw in American high schools—American Catholic high schools—in terms of moral formation of young people. I’m going to ask a few questions now, Carol Ann, if I might. You studied, through your research, schools across the United States. Do you recall if there were any surprises that you encountered in your research, in your studies, in your visits? Anything you found in these high schools that you hadn’t expected?
Carol Ann MacGregor: That’s a great question. I think the literature on Catholic education suggested that these were going to be places that were very good at doing this kind of formative work—sort of a faith-based, values-based education; small schools; really caring faculty. The existing research on the topic sort of suggested that the outcomes would be positive.
But I think one of the surprises that I found on the ground is how taken for granted it sort of was. I anticipated going into schools and seeing all of this very direct evidence of this happening, you know—sort of policies and procedures and meetings where people talked about it—but for many of these schools it was much more nuanced; it was sort of baked into their culture. They were having these very positive outcomes, but it wasn’t necessarily that easy to tie it to a specific policy or overt discussion people were having.
AM: So it was in the DNA of the school culture?
CAM: Yes, that’s definitely what it seemed like for many of the schools. Particularly schools who have been around for a long time and sort of had cultivated their approach over decades and generations.
AM: Can you illuminate for us what those positive moral outcomes that you saw being generated as a result of the work of the schools?
CAM: Sure. Well, most Catholic high schools in the United States are very focused on getting students into colleges, but one thing that really stood out when I interviewed students and asked them about, sort of, What do you think your teachers want for you after you graduate? their answer was always twofold: They want me to go to a good college, but more than that, they want me to be a good person. Or, My goal here is not just to be—to go get a good job, but to treat people well throughout the course of my life.
So there was a clear message to students—or students were taking away—that there was more to education and more to living a good life than just going to college and getting a job.
AM: Okay. Now would you say that you detected a sense of altruism in the students—that they not just wanted to be a good person, but they wanted to do good to others?
CAM: Yes, definitely. You could see that in both informal and formal ways. Sort of on the informal side, many people describe this school—and this would be administrators, teachers, and students—as “like a family,” and people were very caring and selfless towards their peers; they’ve got lots of good examples of that in the study. And then in more formal ways, many students in these schools were involved in serving their local community through various types of outreach, depending on the sort of city that they were located [in].
AM: Thank you. Many principals and teachers struggle with attempting to eliminate, reduce, the incidence of bullying in schools, and after school, as well, and online bullying and Facebook bullying and social media bullying and so on, because it’s so hard and detrimental for students. Did you detect in any of these Catholic schools a sense that there was a bullying problem? Or is that something they had dealt with, you think, successfully?
CAM: There was definitely a range, but we had a question in our interview protocol that asked about this, so we did hear about this from most of the folks we interviewed, and some schools were really thinking about this: not so much about the piece that happens on school grounds, that most schools had some pretty well-established policies about what was acceptable and what was not acceptable and strategies for monitoring it. It was the after-hours and the social media aspect of it where schools were thinking through how to do that.
So some schools had actually sort of extended their scope of surveillance, if you will, to anything that a student did. So there were some schools who would give in-school disciplinary actions, like a detention or suspension, for things that happened on social media outside of the school context because they felt that was against their code of character or code of ethics—you know, it’s named different things in different places. So I think it’s an issue for all educators, but for the most part, the Catholic school administrators I spoke to were dealing with it off-site, not on-site.
AM: OK, thank you for that clarification. Now you’ve noted in your chapter in the book The Content of Their Character—available through Amazon.com—you noted that Catholic school teachers and Catholic staff tended to believe that what they were offering students was superior to what was found in other types of schools. That is something you noted in your chapter in the book. Tell me about how that works.
CAM: Yeah, so many of the teachers that I spoke with felt very strongly that what they were doing was their vocation, that it wasn’t just a job—that if it was just a job they could go get a job in the local public school that would pay them more for doing similar kinds of work. But they thought that what they did every day was very special in terms of shaping young people’s views of the world and the trajectory of their lives in a lot of ways. And so when asked kind of, What’s the difference between public school and a Catholic school?…they always had some kind of sense that what they were doing there…was a lot of what happened at public school—but a little bit extra. So, great at college prep just like a top public school, but you know, also focusing on other aspects of education beyond just straightforward academic achievement.
AM: OK, thank you. From your view, what was the position of most of the schools you studied on moral authority on social issues?
CAM: This was really interesting. You know, knowing official church teaching on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion, I was curious about how the schools approached those issues. In many cases, I would say, the general approach was an acceptance of respectful dissent. So most educators felt like it was acceptable for a student to say or to hold a position that was different than official church teaching, but they viewed it as a teachable moment. If a student was going to hold one of those views or share a view that was different than official church teaching, they should do so in an educated and respectful way. So they should have evidence to support their claims, they should convey their position in a way that was respectful of other views, and they should make a really concerted effort to at least understand what the other position was, in addition to their own.
AM: And students didn’t feel any reluctance to voice a position that was different than church doctrine?
CAM: No, not at most of the schools that I went to. You know, there were a lot of students who were agnostic on the issues, of course, but in particular, in attitudes towards homosexuality, the students I spoke to were very tolerant and often gave me examples of times where, you know, they had spoken up in class or tried to create a club at their school, and in those instances they felt like they were met with conversation with their school teachers and administrators.
AM: Thank you. Did you note in the schools whether there were any teachers or principals dealing with issues around plagiarism and cheating? Was that discussed at all with you?
CAM: Yes, definitely. You know these schools were all really caught up in the race to get students into top colleges with scholarship money…. I think a thing that I heard from parents a lot is that they were making a financial sacrifice to send their child to Catholic high school for lots of reasons, but among them [was] the idea that going to a really great school like this might help them get scholarship money to go to one of the better colleges of the United States. So a really intense academic culture at most of these places, so there was a sort of policy and discussion of cheating. Every school that I went to just said, you know, It’s zero on the test, or, It’s zero on the assignment, and so it’s not that it never happened, but there were very clear understandings of the consequences when it did.
AM: Okay, so students knew where they stood clearly.
CAM: Yes, yes.
AM: Thank you. Now, many parents send their children to Catholic schools in the belief that there’s stricter discipline in Catholic schools perhaps than in the public schools—conjecture perhaps. Do you think that’s supportable—that view that I can get better discipline if I go to a Catholic school?
CAM: The students would often talk about, Well it’s just a little bit more structure; I have friends who go to public school, and you know it’s much more structured here, or, My friends at public school get away with all kinds of stuff that I can’t get away with. And so, you know, there were lots of things—I spoke a little of this before—where Catholic students were subject to discipline even for things that they did off campus. So if they were wearing their school’s uniform on a public bus and someone observed them engaging inappropriately, that was a very serious infraction. At one school there was a party on the weekend, and it got back to the school that there had been some underage drinking at this party, and the school suspended the student for that behavior even though it wasn’t on school grounds, it was at the party.
So there definitely is some truth to that idea that Catholic schools take discipline very seriously. On the flip side, I would say most schools told me that there were very few serious disciplinary incidents, so relatively few incidents of things like fighting or drugs—those were once-every-couple-of-years kind of situations in most schools. The predominant form of infraction was uniform violations, which is something that the students like to talk a lot about and had some strong opinions about, whether there should be such enforcement over the particulars of their uniform.
AM: Did you get a sense of how urgent the Catholic schools were that you studied about engaging students to become truly committed to civic engagement and truly committed to civic understanding, and civic participation, and citizenship awareness?
CAM: So it’s kind of a mixed situation…. In terms of volunteering, that part of civic engagement, all of the schools I visited were quite strong in this area. They varied a little bit on whether it was required or whether it was just a commonplace activity. But they were all very involved in having their students be very involved in their local communities. On citizenship and voting, a little bit less so, and what I heard from the schools was mostly, it was a little harder to get students who couldn’t vote really engaged in the process. So they used to see, or they often saw, some interest amongst seniors and among people taking AP Government, but for many students, it was more of an abstraction.
But you know, they did cover it in the curriculum. Often, they tried to bring it in in terms of student government—you know, sort of having kind of a local school election and trying to encourage that to really mirror the political process. But volunteering is the real star of civic engagement at the high school level.
AM: Thank you. In many schools, teachers and principals argue that No Child Left Behind legislation and Race to the Top legislation require them to focus almost exclusively on strengthening student achievement as measured by standardized test scores, and therefore they must sacrifice taking time to strengthen student moral formation. Do you see this dichotomy in the schools you study? Did you see this yin and yang? This struggle between, I’ve got to get our scores up, I have to get students into good colleges, and I don’t really have time to really focus—we really don’t have time to really focus—on moral formation? Do you think that struggle was present in the schools you studied or not?
CAM: A little bit, but I would say less so than in the public school context. So the schools definitely had a lot of freedom to choose their curriculum in a lot of respects, and so for most teachers and administrators, I definitely heard that they wanted to emphasize balance—that they felt like academics, extracurriculars, and sports, and the spiritual side of their school were equally valuable, and they wanted students to be engaged in all three of those things, not just the academic piece. One place that was kind of an exception to this, though, is many, many of the schools were part of the AP Advanced Placement curriculum, and…I spoke to teachers who were engaged in AP or IB, International Baccalaureate work. There the curriculum is much more prescribed, and you really do have to get through a lot of material. So there, you know, it wasn’t that the teachers or principals felt that the academics were more important than the other aspects, but they really did have a kind of set of things they needed to get to.
AM: Well, that’s true, I think, in so many schools. I was going to ask you whether you observed this, for example. So, in many schools and many, many school districts in many states, there is a real desire on the part of educators and the part of legislators, state legislators in particular, to reduce the numbers of students who are being suspended or expelled from schools,…and there’s some belief that there’s a disproportionate number of students of color suspended or expelled from schools. And so what’s being done instead of a suspension is not letting students off the hook, but engaging in restorative justice practices. Restorative justice practices mean that the student who offended meets with the student who was offended against with adult mentors and there is a restitution made on the part of the offender to make things better and right for the person who was offended against. And I wondered if you noted that restorative justice was a thing they’d do rather than suspensions.
CAM: Yeah, a few principals spoke of this as their approach. There weren’t—expulsion was incredibly rare at the schools that I visited. Most principals indicated that they only had one or two expulsions a year at max, so just really not a common occurrence. And most schools were doing some sort of in-school suspension, a few were doing restorative justice, but they all definitely seem to be aware of this issue that nobody wins when a student is just…at home, not really engaging with the community or the person that was harmed, and falling behind on their academic work.
AM: Thank you. So I wondered based on your observations of these schools, and those were intense observations, whether you have any thoughts on things you might have noted that I haven’t asked you about today.
CAM: That’s a great question too. One thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about as I consider what my own next project might be, and because I work at a Catholic university, is sort of, What is the lasting impact of going to a Catholic high school?… How does that experience look five, 10, 15, 20 years out? And how does a Catholic student who went to a Catholic high school and a Catholic college look different than someone who went to a Catholic high school and a public college? Or all those sorts of different things.
So I don’t know that I would have been able to—I definitely wouldn’t have been able to—observe just at that one moment in time. But I do think an important thing to think about for all of us interested in moral formation is sort of what happens years out…. How can we make sure that we’re not just looking at what happens during those critical years, but we look at how those critical years shape people’s lives?
AM: Thank you. I just wondered if you observed…differences in terms of preparation of teachers for Catholic schools than there would be for teachers for other kinds of schools.
CAM: Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t think so, in the traditional sense. I mean, they have the same degrees from prestigious colleges and universities in education, the same credentials on paper—often, a little bit more likely to have gone to a Catholic college than a public college, but, you know, all great schools. So I don’t think [so] in terms of the formal preparation.
But informally, I think one thing that I noticed quite a bit is that Catholic schools hire back a lot of their own alumni, so when I was speaking with teachers, they’d often tell me, Oh, you know, I actually went here as a student. And there’s something to that in terms of the sort of institutional memory and continuity of the vision, and so it’s almost as though in terms of preparation, some teachers had a jump start because they were very intimately acquainted with their place of work well before they got there.
AM: Thank you. If people watching this interview or reading the transcript of this interview were interested in a full look at the work you did in observing the Catholic schools, that can be done by going to Amazon.com and purchasing The Content of Their Character….Carol Ann has certainly—she wrote the chapter on the Catholic schools in this book, which is available to educators. I want to thank you today for participating in this interview. I appreciate very much your insights, and I wish you well in your future endeavors.
To receive a free copy of the chapter of The Content of Their Character that corresponds with this interview, please click here and sign up for our Weekly Digest.
—
This is a lightly edited transcript of an interview conducted on December 20, 2018 with sociologist Carol Ann MacGregor. Dr. MacGregor is Associate Professor of Sociology at Loyola University in New Orleans. She contributed the chapter on Catholic high schools to The Content of Their Character, a major research project launched by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture in order to better understand the moral formation of high school students. The interview was conducted by CultureFeed Expert Angus McBeath.
Angus McBeath: Today I’m with Dr. Carol Ann MacGregor, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Loyola University in New Orleans. Dr. Carol Ann MacGregor researched a sample of Catholic high schools across the United States. That involved intense interviews, visitations, conversations, observations of what she saw in American high schools—American Catholic high schools—in terms of moral formation of young people. I’m going to ask a few questions now, Carol Ann, if I might. You studied, through your research, schools across the United States. Do you recall if there were any surprises that you encountered in your research, in your studies, in your visits? Anything you found in these high schools that you hadn’t expected?
Carol Ann MacGregor: That’s a great question. I think the literature on Catholic education suggested that these were going to be places that were very good at doing this kind of formative work—sort of a faith-based, values-based education; small schools; really caring faculty. The existing research on the topic sort of suggested that the outcomes would be positive.
But I think one of the surprises that I found on the ground is how taken for granted it sort of was. I anticipated going into schools and seeing all of this very direct evidence of this happening, you know—sort of policies and procedures and meetings where people talked about it—but for many of these schools it was much more nuanced; it was sort of baked into their culture. They were having these very positive outcomes, but it wasn’t necessarily that easy to tie it to a specific policy or overt discussion people were having.
AM: So it was in the DNA of the school culture?
CAM: Yes, that’s definitely what it seemed like for many of the schools. Particularly schools who have been around for a long time and sort of had cultivated their approach over decades and generations.
AM: Can you illuminate for us what those positive moral outcomes that you saw being generated as a result of the work of the schools?
CAM: Sure. Well, most Catholic high schools in the United States are very focused on getting students into colleges, but one thing that really stood out when I interviewed students and asked them about, sort of, What do you think your teachers want for you after you graduate? their answer was always twofold: They want me to go to a good college, but more than that, they want me to be a good person. Or, My goal here is not just to be—to go get a good job, but to treat people well throughout the course of my life.
So there was a clear message to students—or students were taking away—that there was more to education and more to living a good life than just going to college and getting a job.
AM: Okay. Now would you say that you detected a sense of altruism in the students—that they not just wanted to be a good person, but they wanted to do good to others?
CAM: Yes, definitely. You could see that in both informal and formal ways. Sort of on the informal side, many people describe this school—and this would be administrators, teachers, and students—as “like a family,” and people were very caring and selfless towards their peers; they’ve got lots of good examples of that in the study. And then in more formal ways, many students in these schools were involved in serving their local community through various types of outreach, depending on the sort of city that they were located [in].
AM: Thank you. Many principals and teachers struggle with attempting to eliminate, reduce, the incidence of bullying in schools, and after school, as well, and online bullying and Facebook bullying and social media bullying and so on, because it’s so hard and detrimental for students. Did you detect in any of these Catholic schools a sense that there was a bullying problem? Or is that something they had dealt with, you think, successfully?
CAM: There was definitely a range, but we had a question in our interview protocol that asked about this, so we did hear about this from most of the folks we interviewed, and some schools were really thinking about this: not so much about the piece that happens on school grounds; that, most schools had some pretty well-established policies about what was acceptable and what was not acceptable and strategies for monitoring it. It was the after-hours and the social media aspect of it where schools were thinking through how to do that.
So some schools had actually sort of extended their scope of surveillance, if you will, to anything that a student did. So there were some schools who would give in-school disciplinary actions, like a detention or suspension, for things that happened on social media outside of the school context because they felt that was against their code of character or code of ethics—you know, it’s named different things in different places. So I think it’s an issue for all educators, but for the most part, the Catholic school administrators I spoke to were dealing with it off-site, not on-site.
AM: OK, thank you for that clarification. Now you’ve noted in your chapter in the book The Content of Their Character—available through Amazon.com—you noted that Catholic school teachers and Catholic staff tended to believe that what they were offering students was superior to what was found in other types of schools. That is something you noted in your chapter in the book. Tell me about how that works.
CAM: Yeah, so many of the teachers that I spoke with felt very strongly that what they were doing was their vocation, that it wasn’t just a job—that if it was just a job they could go get a job in the local public school that would pay them more for doing similar kinds of work. But they thought that what they did every day was very special in terms of shaping young people’s views of the world and the trajectory of their lives in a lot of ways. And so when asked kind of, What’s the difference between public school and a Catholic school?…they always had some kind of sense that what they were doing there…was a lot of what happened at public school—but a little bit extra. So, great at college prep just like a top public school, but you know, also focusing on other aspects of education beyond just straightforward academic achievement.
AM: OK, thank you. From your view, what was the position of most of the schools you studied on moral authority on social issues?
CAM: This was really interesting. You know, knowing official church teaching on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion, I was curious about how the schools approached those issues. In many cases, I would say, the general approach was an acceptance of respectful dissent. So most educators felt like it was acceptable for a student to say or to hold a position that was different than official church teaching, but they viewed it as a teachable moment. If a student was going to hold one of those views or share a view that was different than official church teaching, they should do so in an educated and respectful way. So they should have evidence to support their claims, they should convey their position in a way that was respectful of other views, and they should make a really concerted effort to at least understand what the other position was, in addition to their own.
AM: And students didn’t feel any reluctance to voice a position that was different than church doctrine?
CAM: No, not at most of the schools that I went to. You know, there were a lot of students who were agnostic on the issues, of course, but in particular, in attitudes towards homosexuality, the students I spoke to were very tolerant and often gave me examples of times where, you know, they had spoken up in class or tried to create a club at their school, and in those instances they felt like they were met with conversation with their school teachers and administrators.
AM: Thank you. Did you note in the schools whether there were any teachers or principals dealing with issues around plagiarism and cheating? Was that discussed at all with you?
CAM: Yes, definitely. You know these schools were all really caught up in the race to get students into top colleges with scholarship money…. I think a thing that I heard from parents a lot is that they were making a financial sacrifice to send their child to Catholic high school for lots of reasons, but among them [was] the idea that going to a really great school like this might help them get scholarship money to go to one of the better colleges of the United States. So a really intense academic culture at most of these places, so there was a sort of policy and discussion of cheating. Every school that I went to just said, you know, It’s zero on the test, or, It’s zero on the assignment, and so it’s not that it never happened, but there were very clear understandings of the consequences when it did.
AM: Okay, so students knew where they stood clearly.
CAM: Yes, yes.
AM: Thank you. Now, many parents send their children to Catholic schools in the belief that there’s stricter discipline in Catholic schools perhaps than in the public schools—conjecture perhaps. Do you think that’s supportable—that view that I can get better discipline if I go to a Catholic school?
CAM: The students would often talk about, Well it’s just a little bit more structure; I have friends who go to public school, and you know it’s much more structured here, or, My friends at public school get away with all kinds of stuff that I can’t get away with. And so, you know, there were lots of things—I spoke a little of this before—where Catholic students were subject to discipline even for things that they did off campus. So if they were wearing their school’s uniform on a public bus and someone observed them engaging inappropriately, that was a very serious infraction. At one school there was a party on the weekend, and it got back to the school that there had been some underage drinking at this party, and the school suspended the student for that behavior even though it wasn’t on school grounds, it was at the party.
So there definitely is some truth to that idea that Catholic schools take discipline very seriously. On the flip side, I would say most schools told me that there were very few serious disciplinary incidents, so relatively few incidents of things like fighting or drugs—those were once-every-couple-of-years kind of situations in most schools. The predominant form of infraction was uniform violations, which is something that the students like to talk a lot about and had some strong opinions about, whether there should be such enforcement over the particulars of their uniform.
AM: Did you get a sense of how urgent the Catholic schools were that you studied about engaging students to become truly committed to civic engagement and truly committed to civic understanding, and civic participation, and citizenship awareness?
CAM: So it’s kind of a mixed situation…. In terms of volunteering, that part of civic engagement, all of the schools I visited were quite strong in this area. They varied a little bit on whether it was required or whether it was just a commonplace activity. But they were all very involved in having their students be very involved in their local communities. On citizenship and voting, a little bit less so, and what I heard from the schools was mostly, it was a little harder to get students who couldn’t vote really engaged in the process. So they used to see, or they often saw, some interest amongst seniors and among people taking AP Government, but for many students, it was more of an abstraction.
But you know, they did cover it in the curriculum. Often, they tried to bring it in in terms of student government—you know, sort of having kind of a local school election and trying to encourage that to really mirror the political process. But volunteering is the real star of civic engagement at the high school level.
AM: Thank you. In many schools, teachers and principals argue that No Child Left Behind legislation and Race to the Top legislation require them to focus almost exclusively on strengthening student achievement as measured by standardized test scores, and therefore they must sacrifice taking time to strengthen student moral formation. Do you see this dichotomy in the schools you study? Did you see this yin and yang? This struggle between, I’ve got to get our scores up, I have to get students into good colleges, and I don’t really have time to really focus—we really don’t have time to really focus—on moral formation? Do you think that struggle was present in the schools you studied or not?
CAM: A little bit, but I would say less so than in the public school context. So the schools definitely had a lot of freedom to choose their curriculum in a lot of respects, and so for most teachers and administrators, I definitely heard that they wanted to emphasize balance—that they felt like academics, extracurriculars, and sports, and the spiritual side of their school were equally valuable, and they wanted students to be engaged in all three of those things, not just the academic piece. One place that was kind of an exception to this, though, is many, many of the schools were part of the AP Advanced Placement curriculum, and…I spoke to teachers who were engaged in AP or IB, International Baccalaureate work. There the curriculum is much more prescribed, and you really do have to get through a lot of material. So there, you know, it wasn’t that the teachers or principals felt that the academics were more important than the other aspects, but they really did have a kind of set of things they needed to get to.
AM: Well, that’s true, I think, in so many schools. I was going to ask you whether you observed this, for example. So, in many schools and many, many school districts in many states, there is a real desire on the part of educators and the part of legislators, state legislators in particular, to reduce the numbers of students who are being suspended or expelled from schools,…and there’s some belief that there’s a disproportionate number of students of color suspended or expelled from schools. And so what’s being done instead of a suspension is not letting students off the hook, but engaging in restorative justice practices. Restorative justice practices mean that the student who offended meets with the student who was offended against with adult mentors and there is a restitution made on the part of the offender to make things better and right for the person who was offended against. And I wondered if you noted that restorative justice was a thing they’d do rather than suspensions.
CAM: Yeah, a few principals spoke of this as their approach. There weren’t—expulsion was incredibly rare at the schools that I visited. Most principals indicated that they only had one or two expulsions a year at max, so just really not a common occurrence. And most schools were doing some sort of in-school suspension, a few were doing restorative justice, but they all definitely seem to be aware of this issue that nobody wins when a student is just…at home, not really engaging with the community or the person that was harmed, and falling behind on their academic work.
AM: Thank you. So I wondered based on your observations of these schools, and those were intense observations, whether you have any thoughts on things you might have noted that I haven’t asked you about today.
CAM: That’s a great question too. One thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about as I consider what my own next project might be, and because I work at a Catholic university, is sort of, What is the lasting impact of going to a Catholic high school?… How does that experience look five, 10, 15, 20 years out? And how does a Catholic student who went to a Catholic high school and a Catholic college look different than someone who went to a Catholic high school and a public college? Or all those sorts of different things.
So I don’t know that I would have been able to—I definitely wouldn’t have been able to—observe just at that one moment in time. But I do think an important thing to think about for all of us interested in moral formation is sort of what happens years out…. How can we make sure that we’re not just looking at what happens during those critical years, but we look at how those critical years shape people’s lives?
AM: Thank you. I just wondered if you observed…differences in terms of preparation of teachers for Catholic schools than there would be for teachers for other kinds of schools.
CAM: Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t think so, in the traditional sense. I mean, they have the same degrees from prestigious colleges and universities in education, the same credentials on paper—often, a little bit more likely to have gone to a Catholic College than a public college, but, you know, all great schools. So I don’t think [so] in terms of the formal preparation.
But informally, I think one thing that I noticed quite a bit is that Catholic schools hire back a lot of their own alumni, so when I was speaking with teachers, they’d often tell me, Oh, you know, I actually went here as a student. And there’s something to that in terms of the sort of institutional memory and continuity of the vision, and so it’s almost as though in terms of preparation, some teachers had a jump start because they were very intimately acquainted with their place of work well before they got there.
AM: Thank you. If people watching this interview or reading the transcript of this interview were interested in a full look at the work you did in observing the Catholic schools, that can be done by going to Amazon.com and purchasing The Content of Their Character…. Carol Ann has certainly—she wrote the chapter on the Catholic schools in this book, which is available to educators. I want to thank you today for participating in this interview. I appreciate very much your insights, and I wish you well in your future endeavors.
