character

U.S. Air Force recognizes JROTC character education programs that ‘exceed standards’

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When it comes to character and citizenship education, Lamar Consolidated High School’s Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program “exceeds standards.”

That’s the word from the U.S. Air Force, which recognized the program and 119 others across the country “that have performed well above and beyond normal expectations, and that have distinguished themselves through outstanding service to their school and community while meeting the Air Force JROTC citizen development mission for America.”

The mission, according to the Houston Chronicle, is “to educate and train high school cadets in citizenship and life skills; promote community service; instill responsibility, character and self-discipline through character education; and to provide instruction in air and space fundamentals.”

The recognition for Unit TX-172 – which includes cadets from Lamar and George Ranch high schools – is based on a formal unit evaluation in December that pointed to the “dynamic and supportive learning environment coupled with an excellent community outreach” under the leadership of Maj. Jeffrey M. Shelton and Senior Master Sgt. Jeffrey T. Moffet, the Fort Bend Independent reports.

“The instructors provide outstanding leadership in administering the cadet-centered citizenship program,” which led to cadets who “performed exceptionally well and took great pride in leading and accomplishing their unit goals,” according to the news site.

“The Lamar Consolidated High School Air Force ROTC citizenship program is making a positive impact on the cadets, the school and the community.”

According to the Air Force, “Air Force JROTC is located in close to 900 high schools across the United States and at selected schools in Europe, in the Pacific, and in Puerto Rico. Air Force JROTC enrollment includes more than 120,000 cadets who do over 1.6 million hours of community service each year.”

Lamar Consolidated JROTC’s recognition for exceeding the standard is a timely reminder of the nature of morality.

James Davison Hunter, founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, writes in his book the “Tragedy of Moral Education in America”:

Morality is a vision of moral goods shared by a community; the attitudes, aspirations, sensibilities, and dispositions that define its highest aspirations for itself, and how those moral goods find expression in every situation in daily life.

Virtue Insight, a blog by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, takes a deeper look at the virtues that support strong moral character – primarily temperance, courage, justice, and practical wisdom – through the observations of priest and theologian Aquinas.

University of Chicago professor Candace Vogler explains how “living well within reason” relies on applying practical knowledge through habitual virtuous activities.

“For those of us interested in thinking about the ways that virtuous activity allows reason to effectively guide us in leading better and more fulfilling lives, work on cultivating virtuous habits just is work on learning to live wisely,” Vogler wrote.

Teachers working on Dismantling Racism want officials to expand popular program

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Teachers, faculty and parents familiar with the Dismantling Racism curriculum at Bowman Elementary School are urging the Lexington, Massachusetts school committee to expand the program across the district.

Bowman principal Mary Anton told the committee members her staff had focused on closing the achievement gap and addressing unconscious biases in the past, but until last year “didn’t open up the spaces for children to learn how to talk about difference and across difference,” Lexington Wicked Local reports.

The change, implemented through weekly or biweekly discussions about racism with K-5 students through the Dismantling Racism curriculum, is making a big difference in how students interact, Anton said.

Second grade teacher Catie Sawka said she’s witnessed students carry on their conversations about race outside of the classroom, while first grade teacher Alicia D’Abreu contends students are more kind, empathetic and aware than in the past.

“This is something we need to bring to all schools right away,” parent Matthew Cohen, whose daughter is in Swaka’s class, told committee members.

Cohen said his daughter never wants to miss school on Wednesdays – the day her class works on Dismantling Racism.

“It’s a great program, and we need to just expand it,” he said.

The Dismantling Racism program is part of a broader effort to address racism and bias in Lexington schools that also includes a Discipline Task Force aimed at curbing high suspension rates among black and disabled students.

“The group’s goals including finding ways to identify resources, collaborate across the school district and make systemic changes,” according to the news site.

The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia points to the importance of teachers and other school officials working to create a positive moral culture for students.

In “The Death of Character,” IASC founder and UVA sociologist James Davison Hunter writes:

The Influence of moral culture cuts across the boundaries of economic circumstances, race and ethnicity, gender, age, and family structure.

With students spending the bulk of their days in school, teachers have an unparalleled opportunity to influence students to treat others with equity, acceptance and understanding, regardless of racial background.

The Jubilee Centre for Character & Virtues offers a variety of resources to help educators in that mission, including a lesson on “The Virtue of Friendliness and Civility” that delves into how the virtue fits into students’ lives.

Friendliness and civility “builds upon the basic desire to warm to others and to be accepted by them for good things – a very basic human desire,” according to the lesson. “But it also moderates our more negative emotions, especially those related to the taking of offence.”

OECD’s Schleicher: Ethics for an Age of Acceleration

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Andreas Schleicher is Director for Education and Skills, and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Secretary-General at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris.

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This is the age of acceleration, a speeding-up of human experience through the impact of disruptive forces on every aspect of our lives.

It is also a time of political contestation. For the last 72 years, the wider international community has prioritized balancing the needs and interests of individuals, communities, and nations in an equitable framework based on open borders, free markets, and a sustainable future. But where the disruptive forces of these changes have brought a sense of dislocation, political forces have emerged that offer closed borders, protection of traditional jobs, and the promise to put the interests of today’s generation over those of future generations.

How should countries equip young people to understand, engage with, and shape this changing world?

In this accelerated, politicized age, we can no longer teach people for a lifetime. In this age, education needs to help students cultivate a reliable compass and other navigational tools with which they may find their own way through an increasingly complex and volatile world.

Future jobs will pair computer intelligence with human knowledge, skills, character qualities, and values. It will be our capacity for innovation, our awareness, our ethical judgement and our sense of responsibility that will equip us to harness machines to shape the world for the better.

This is the main conclusion drawn by OECD countries working on Education 2030, a new framework for curriculum design. Not surprisingly, then, schools must increasingly recognize the need for fostering ethics, character, and citizenship. They must also develop in their students a range of social and emotional skills, such as empathy, compassion, mindfulness, purposefulness, responsibility, collaboration, and self-regulation.

At the center of the Education 2030 framework, OECD countries have placed creating new value, dealing with tensions and dilemmas, and developing responsibility as desired competencies. What do these mean? And how are they connected to ethics, and to social and emotional skills?

Young people’s agency to shape the future will partly hinge on their capacity to create new value. Creating new value is a transformative competency. It refers to the processes of creating, making, bringing into being, and formulating. It imagines outcomes from these processes that are innovative, fresh, original, and contribute something of intrinsic positive worth. It suggests entrepreneurship in the broadest sense—being ready to venture, to try, without the crippling anxiety of failure. The constructs, attributes, and virtues that underpin this competency are imagination, inquisitiveness, persistence, collaboration, and self-discipline.

Dealing with tensions, dilemmas, and trade-offs will also be necessary for young people in the age to come. In a structurally imbalanced world it is necessary for them to reconcile diverse perspectives and interests in local settings that sometimes have global implications. Striking the balance between competing demands—of equity and freedom, autonomy and community, innovation and continuity, and efficiency and democratic process—will rarely lead to a simple choice or even a single solution. Individuals will need to think in a more integrated way that avoids premature conclusions and attends to interconnections. The constructs, attributes, and virtues that underpin the competence include empathy, adaptability, and trust.

The third transformative competency—developing responsibility—is a prerequisite of the other two. Dealing with novelty, change, diversity, and ambiguity assumes that individuals can “think for themselves” with a robust moral compass. Both creativity and problem-solving require the capacity to consider the future consequences of one’s actions, to evaluate risk and reward, and to accept accountability for the products of one’s work.

These, in turn, require a sense of responsibility, and also moral and intellectual maturity.  With these, people can reflect upon and evaluate their actions in the light of their experiences, their personal  and societal goals, what they have been taught and told, and what is right or wrong.

Ethics is the thoughtful perception of what is right or wrong, good or bad, in a specific situation. It asks questions related to norms, values, meanings, and limits. Central to this competency is the concept of self-regulation, in the spheres of personal, interpersonal, and social responsibility. It rests on constructs, attributes, and virtues of self-control, self-efficacy, responsibility, problem-solving, and adaptability.

The challenge for educators is not to defer these dimensions to new school subjects, but to embed them in everything that is taught and learned at school. Supporting countries in this effort is the goal of the OECD Education 2030 project.

 

Students’ racist video sparks immediate reaction from NAACP, school officials

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When leaders of Alabama’s Russell County/ Phenix City NAACP received a tip about a video of local students chanting racist lyrics, including the phrase “to hell with the NAACP,” it didn’t go over very well.

“We are here to serve notice that this type of behavior will not be tolerated,” local NAACP president Rev. Alfonza Seldon said at a press conference in front of the Phenix City School District last month.

“A lot of the things we see on the national news today, the hate crimes, the killings … it derives, I believe, from things such as this not being immediately addressed,” he said.

Seldon told the Ledger-Enquirer and other media outlets that he received a copy of the shaky 32-second video from a source who he wouldn’t revel. He contends it was circulated among students on the messaging app Snapchat, and he immediately reported it to school officials.

“The Phenix City/Russell County NAACP has been made aware of a racist video on the social media site Snapchat. The site showed five or six teenage white males spelling out the word N.I.G.G.E.R. then shouting this word out followed by a chant/song that included: ‘… to hell with the NAACP,’” the group wrote in a prepared statement to WRBL.

School officials identified five of the males in the video as students at Central High School or Central Freshman Academy, and WRBL also identified at least one as a student athlete on the baseball team.

Seldon said the NAACP wants the students to face a “multi-tiered discipline approach that includes measures beyond suspensions,” including “sensitivity and diversity (training) for all students, faculty and staff, as well as made available to parents, community stakeholders and also representatives of the NAACP.”

Phenix City Schools superintendent Randy Wilkes told the Ledger-Enquirer that while the video is “terribly offensive,” and “not something that we can tolerate within our school system,” it’s not something he can punish students for because the video was recorded off campus.

Other than the fact that the teens are students in Phenix City Schools, he said, the incident “appears to have no affiliation with our school system.”

Wilkes said he met with the parents of the students involved, and is “working with the parents individually on” extra sensitivity training for their children, though he noted that the district already conducts sensitivity training as part of its character education program.

The incident is one example of local school and community leaders working to address racism and promote tolerance, understanding, respect, and good citizenship.

Sociologist James Davison Hunter, founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, highlights the importance of the unified message against racism and intolerance as part of effective moral education in his book “The Tragedy of Moral Education in America.”

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, unified, and consistent in articulating moral ideas and their attending virtues; and where adults maintain a ‘caring watchfulness’ over all aspects of a young person’s maturation.

These are environments where intellectual and moral virtues are not only naturally interwoven in the distinctive moral ethos, but embedded within the structure of communities.

Educators can challenge students to behave respectfully by providing examples of people who have courageously resisted their peers when they face pressure to discriminate against others. A lesson about civil rights activist Rosa Parks from the Jubilee Centre offers an excellent example that could be adapted for all ages.

GA cheating scandal highlights importance of character education

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Dozens of students at Gwinnett County, Georgia’s Dacula High School were busted for cheating after school officials discovered answers to countywide final exams posted to social media in late May.

School officials issued a statement to Fox 5:

Dacula High School addressed a cheating issue during the last week of school. It appears that answers to final exams were posted on social media and used by students. School leaders became aware of the social media postings and were able to actively review exams for potential cheating.

Based on a preponderance of evidence, it appears that approximately 80 Dacula students used the answers posted when taking their finals. The school has addressed the issue with the students, providing them with appropriate discipline consequences. As the exams involved were for 10th grade language arts, chemistry, and world history, no seniors were involved and this did not affect graduation.

Officials would not elaborate on the disciplinary action against students, but said they believe the answers likely came from a student at a different school who already took the tests. It remains unclear whether students at other schools used the answers.

The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture examined cheating in 10 types of American high schools as part of a broader look at character and citizenship summarized in “The Content of Their Character.”

Analyzing cheating in rural schools, education researcher Richard Fournier noted:

… While teachers might be fully able to articulate the moral ideals behind their disciplinary decisions, their explanations typically varied, which presumably sent mixed moral messages to students. Similarly, although teachers, students and parents offered similar examples of bad student behavior – cheating, bullying, selfishness, etc. – they either were unsure or gave different answers when pressed for insight into why these things were bad or how students should be disciplined. (Page 67)

Students often face temptations to cheat in school, and too many of them give in to it. Without a solid reason why students should put honesty ahead of their personal gratification, they struggle to resist the temptation to cheat.

But teachers have numerous opportunities every day, in every class, with every student, for every subject to infuse discussions about integrity, and the motivations for behaving honestly.

The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues offers ways to start the conversation with the guide “The Virtue of Truthfulness,” which encourages educators to prompt students to think about “the benefits of acting out” truthfulness.

“Acting truthfully guarantees social relations: we are who we say we are. This enables stability; it also enables us to think through how and where we need to improve as people,” the guide points out. “Truthful people grow in virtue much quicker than those who struggle to be truthful about who they really are.

“It’s also worth thinking through what human relationships would look like were they to be based on presenting ourselves in a false light: hypocrisy, deceit, lying and the breaking of promises would all dissolve social bonds.”

 

Positive Coaching Alliance works with schools to help students become ‘Better Athletes, Better People’

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Coaches at Verona High School in Verona, New Jersey are preparing for workshops in June aimed at helping students become “Better Athletes, Better People” – training provided through a national non-profit called the Positive Coaching Alliance.

Verona High has partnered with the Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA) for the last three years to help coaches, parents, student athletes and administrators get the most out of athletics by ensuring school sports are first and foremost an experience in character building, TapInto.net reports.

PCA’s work with the New Jersey school is one of about 3,500 partnerships with schools, conferences, youth sports groups, and parks and recreation departments aimed at creating a sports culture that develops “Better Athletes, Better People” – the PCA motto.

“Our job is to provide an amazing educational and athletic experience to our student-athletes who work so hard year round to perfect their craft,” Verona High School Director of Athletics Bob Merkler said. “By providing the life lessons that are so valuable in athletics, we believe we can help them acquire the tools and traits that will help them to be successful adults.”

That’s what the PCA is all about, and the focus of more than 1,800 free multimedia tips and tools at the group’s website, PCADevZone.org. Other resources include online courses and books by PCA Founder Jim Thompson, as well as specific lessons tailored to coaches, parents and players.

The materials are developed with the support of PCA’s National Advisory Board, which includes 11-time NBA champion coach Phil Jackson, NBA legend Joe Dumars, Cy Young Award winning pitcher Barry Zito, and numerous other current and former professional athletes, Olympians, coaches, managers and business leaders.

“We look forward to working with Verona High School to create the best possible experience for the student-athletes,” PCA Founder Jim Thompson said. “Our researched-based materials combine the latest in sports psychology, education and practical advice from top pro and college coaches and athletes that help improve athletic performance while also ensuring kids take life lessons from sports that will help them throughout the rest of their lives.”

After school activities and sports are a powerful venue to character formation. Researchers from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture suggest that such instruction needs to bear the marks of the particularity of each community. Professor James Hunter of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia writes, “Spartan and Athenian cultures prescribed different content for character, not least because they had different ideas of the common good…. In other words, moral cultures and the communities in which they are established provide the reasons, restraints, and incentives for conducting life in one way rather than another” (The Death of Character, p. 21, 22). Effective character formation works best when it is grounded in a shared community.

 

Alabama teen’s determination to graduate high school pays off in a big way

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Tarrant High School student Corey Patrick was determined to graduate, even if it meant he had to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to catch a bus across town to a Birmingham, Alabama school.

Patrick attended Tarrant City School since the fourth grade but moved to the West End before his senior year and wanted to graduate with his friends. That required the early morning walks to the bus stop, followed by an hours long commute home every day after school, WBRC reports.

“Corey was getting up at 4:30 in the morning and had to be at the bus stop at 5:41 in the morning for the last year,” his mother, Felicia White, told the news site. “Even when he would get out of school he couldn’t get from that side of town until 5:19 when the bus runs back over there. So he doesn’t make it back this way until about 6:30 or 7 o’clock.”

The 2018 graduate was making his last trip in his graduation gown in late May when the bus driver snapped a photo and posted it online, prompting an outpouring of support for the determined teen.

The photo quickly went viral, and caught the attention of local radio host and comedian Rickey Smiley, who decided Patrick’s perseverance deserved special recognition. The 95.7 JAMZ host gifted the teen a $25,000 sport utility vehicle, the first vehicle the boy’s family has ever owned, WBRC reports.

“Little buddy wasn’t doing this trying to get no hype on the internet or trying to get no hype on the radio,” Smiley said, according to Yahoo! News. “He did it because he wanted his high school diploma.”

It is interesting how the media is trying to shape this narrative according to a utilitarian calculus. Close to  ten percent of young people operate within this moral compass according to James Davison Hunter, author of The Death of Culture. He writes, “The utilitarian moral culture regards personal self-interest as the focal point for moral decision making” (p. 159). It is a measure of Corey’s character how hard he worked to dispel this narrative.

Patrick could barely speak he was so overwhelmed with emotion by the generous gift.

“I just would like to thank everybody,” he told WBRC.

Smiley said he hopes the gift will send a message to all the kids working through adversity to stay on the right track.

“Even if there is another kid who caught the bus every day that didn’t get a car, let this inspire you because your blessing is coming,” Smiley said.

Patrick is now working to get his driver’s license, with the help of Smiley, and will attend Jacksonville University on a full scholarship. A separate Go Fund Me page set up to help cover expenses has raised more than $20,000, double the initial goal of $10,000.

All teachers want their students to learn to be resilient and persevere through adversity and be purposeful in the way they spend their lives.  Similarly, teachers want their students to make sacrifices to achieve worthy goals.  Resilience, perseverance, being purposeful and making sacrifices for what is good are crucial  building blocks for becoming a good and worthy person.  The UK’s The Jubilee Centre  has an excellent resource for teacher use in its lesson plans for teaching resilience here.

 

‘Daughters of Worth’ nonprofit reaches out to engage, inspire young girls

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North Carolina mother Liz Liles is making it her life’s mission to help young girls in her community.

Liles told The Daily Reflector she was adopted as a child and struggled during her youth with questions about why her birth mother gave her up, an insecurity that had a strong impact on her life and ultimately compelled her to reach out to young girls questioning their own worth.

“A lot of that deep-rooted insecurity stays with you, and it really begins to shape the way that you see the world,” she said. “Unless you really heal from those wounds, they just go with you.”

That realization became especially clear when Liles, a mother of two boys, moved back to North Carolina after a failed marriage. She accepted a job at The Salvation Army that put her in regular contact with young girls facing serious life traumas, including one girl who was gang raped, and another who fears for her life and sleeps with a knife under her pillow.

“That really opened my eyes to the needs that are here,” Liles said. “We don’t realize the depth of the need that’s in our own backyard.”

Especially when children feel abandoned by their parents, deep psychological deficits persist. Research shows the heightened importance here of adult examples, encouragement, and mentorship. Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture state that it is “far more poignant and influential” than merely classroom instruction (The Content of Their Character, p. 285).

The situation convinced Liles to create the nonprofit Daughters of Worth in 2015. With the help of volunteers, Liles created GLAM (Girls Living A Mission) groups at area elementary schools to mentor young girls. The GLAM Girls, which have steadily grown from about a dozen to roughly 90 girls, take field trips together and work to help groups like the Community Crossroads Center, a Greenville homeless shelter.

“We try to give them experiences they may not have had outside the group,” volunteer Alyssa Hardee said.

“I guess my experience of being a school counselor, seeing what some girls are up against, I just see so many of them struggling with not having positive interactions or role models,” she said. “I just thought it was really important to be someone who could make a difference.”

In more recent years, Liles has expanded the program to offer “Notes of Hope” for first- and second-grade girls to offer regular, positive affirmations, as well as “Grace Gifts,” which offers lessons about financial management and philanthropy. In total, the Daughters of Worth programs have reached about 300 girls.

Kelli Joyner, a counselor at H.B. Sugg Elementary, said many girls at her school have received the “Notes of Hope,” and it’s obvious Daughters of Worth is making a big impact.

“They tell me, ‘I have my other ones pinned up in my room,’” she said. “It means a lot to these girls.”

When teachers and principals think about how to motivate students who have suffered setbacks and adversity in their lives, there are lesson plans at the UK’s the Jubilee Centre. These lessons plans focus on flourishing from the margins and can be found here.

Student born with no hands wins national handwriting contest

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Chesapeake third grader Anaya Ellick had her sights set on winning the 2018 Zaner-Bloser National Handwriting Contest for cursive, and the hard work payed off in May when she took home the trophy.

What makes the feat all the more amazing is Ellick was born without hands, WVEC reports.

“Anaya is a role mode to everyone,” said Sarah Cannaday, Ellick’s teacher at Greenbriar Christian Academy. “Her classmates see her and see her doing the same tasks they are and they are often amazed that she can do just as well as they do, sometimes even better.”

Ellick was honored with the Zaner-Bloser 2018 Nicholas Maxim Special Award for Excellence in Penmanship during a May 9 presentation with her teacher, parents, classmates and administrators at her school. The Nicholas Maxim Award is for students with cognitive delay or intellectual, physical or developmental disabilities.

A team of occupational therapists review entries and pick a winner. The annual award is part of the national Zaner-Bloser handwriting contest, which has recognized the outstanding penmanship of K-8 students nationwide for more than three decades, according to the news site.

Ellick, a soft-spoken and humble 9-year-old, said her key to success is simply not giving up, despite some who doubted her ability. She won a similar handwriting contest for printing two years ago.

“People said I could not do it,” she said. “I would tell them I could do it.”

What is apparent in this story is Ellick’s total lack of victimhood, of not being defined by her disability. What it also shows is that the pendulum in some schools is swinging back from self-expression to self-discipline. This research can be found in The Death of Character, written by James Davidson Hunter. Researchers at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture are encouraged by this shift.

Ellick said it felt good to be recognized for her hard work.

“I felt happy, excited, and proud of myself,” she said.

Cannaday told WVEC Ellick’s personal drive is infectious, and not just for her classmates.

“She’s just really inspired me to work harder, because I look at her and she never says ‘I can’t do it,’” Cannaday said. “She never makes an excuse.”

Teachers with younger children will find this resource, from the UK’s The Jubilee Centre helpful for teaching students about virtues they should be acquiring at a young age.

High school students spend Spring Break building home for elderly widow

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Boston College High School student Tai Thurber spent his April vacation in Belize, but he wasn’t lounging on the beach or checking out the local tourist attractions.

Instead, the Dedham, Massachusetts 17-year-old and 11 of his classmates toiled in the hot and humid Central American climate for three days to construct a new home for a 72-year-old woman who lost her husband and was left with nothing, Wicked Local reports.

The work, part of a joint program between the school and Hand In Hand Ministries, is designed to expose students to different cultures and the life-changing effect their hard work can have on folks in need, whether it’s through housing, healthcare or education.

“I’d never been to Belize and it was kind of a new experience,” Thurber told the news site. “I wanted to go because we wouldn’t be going to touristy places and we would get a feel for the real culture of the people.”

“It was 80-90 degrees with 100 percent humidity most of the time,” he said. “It was very different climate than we are used to here.”

The students hauled materials, hammered, panted the home, which was constructed on concrete slabs to keep it high and dry during flooding. As part of the Hand in Hand project, the 72-year-old widow agreed to help on two builds, and she worked alongside the students throughout the construction.

“She couldn’t really hammer, she helped paint a lot,” Thurber said. “It was cool to see that even though she couldn’t do the hammering she still wanted to contribute.”

Students also attended a house blessing on the fourth day of their trip, and bought a mattress and supplies for the new home owner, Wicked Local reports.

“When she moved in she only had a mat and some clothes,” Thurber said. “It didn’t seem like a big deal to us, but it was life changing for her.”

Catholic schools are particularly effective in promoting community service, researchers at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture found. Political scientist David Campbell found “that private school students were more likely to engage in community service than their public school counterparts and that the Catholic schools primarily drove the effects” (The Content of Their Character, p. 122).

Students paid their own way for the trip, and raised funds to give out gifts to kids at a daycare for children with HIV. Thurber said the mission work, and his experiences with the local folks in Belize, offered lessons for students, as well.

“I was surprised by the happiness of the people there despite the fact that they had so little,” he said. “They seemed happier than we are.”

“They say you get more out of these trips than you give,” Thurber said. “It’s not a cliché. It actually happens.”

An Insight Series paper titled ‘A Simple Act of Charity? The Characteristics and Complexities of Charitable Giving in the United Kingdom‘ from the UK’s The Jubilee Centre is available here for teachers and principals who share the idea that charitable giving of one’s time and effort helps develop students’ moral and citizenship formation.