Page 1.3: Sections 13-17
13. CHARACTER EXCELLENCE: 101
In this and the following 5 sections we continue describing Dewey's very important educational idea of character excellence. It, as well as useful knowledge and skills, form the 3 philosophic pillars of his liberal educational model.
Character kinds of ideas and habits, like working intelligently, respecting others and just laws, and also helping those less well off than ourselves, were a very important part of liberal education in Greek, Roman, and even medieval times. Hospitals were often a part of Christian monasteries where priests and nuns practiced caring for others. However, with the growth of modern scientific facts and public education in the 1800s, character excellence became a less important part of education as schools focused more on teaching just book-facts and a few useful business skills. Such conservative schools wanted their workers more obedient than intelligent. To democratic Dewey, of course, that was a huge educational mistake. Community centers like Hull House in Chicago simply couldn’t teach all the incoming immigrants the character habits needed to continue making our nation a more powerful democracy. And so in these sections about character development I'll try to explain more of what we mean by liberal education as teaching useful knowledge, skills AND character habit-arts; in general, conservative public schools formally teach only knowledge and skills. No doubt, much has already been said about character habits, so I’ll try to keep repetition to a minimum.
Sooner or later everyone gets their character habits tested. The 1960s classic film The Hustler shows how even pool players have their characters tested, and such testing continues on throughout life on every social level, especially for those with power, like politicians, CEOs, and educators. Such testing helps identify those with excellent character habits, like helpfulness, and thus makes society a safer place to live.
Often both conservative and liberal educators talk about how character training should be a part of public education. Unfortunately such talk is often merely good public relations. As we’ve been seeing, for the most part conservative laws like No Child Left Behind, programs like Common Core Standards, and even Democratic economic programs like Race to the Top simply ignore formally teaching character habits in our public and charter schools. Many liberals now even believe there's a racial element in the obsession to make students learn more and more academic facts; poorer Africans and Latinos often simply don't put the same emphasis on learning such facts as whites and Asians do. For we progressive Deweyan liberals, however, no educational system can be judged excellent if it doesn’t formally teach excellent character habit-arts to its students! Conservative schools ignore their social responsibility to keep increasing the public good with more democratic and kind actions. Such learning in schools, homes, and churches are the best way to keep building a human-centered, vibrant, and growing democracy, where people enjoy respecting fair and just laws, law-abiding people, and share their civil and human rights freely! In other words, not actively teaching with role-playing exercises WHAT character excellence actually feels like, and HOW such habits can best be practiced, merely makes our democracy more of a divided and feudalistic sham. Only by formally teaching such character habit-arts can peoples’ lives become more easily satisfying, and make our democracy stronger. What's more, simply because our public schools are tax supported, people have a right and duty to demand they start formally teaching such habits. The more they don’t, the more feudalistic our society remains.
Different Kinds of Character Habits
Conservative Plato shows us how important character development was for his future leaders. For over 30 years he says they should be watched closely, to make sure they don’t have any character flaws making their rule much less than excellent; flaws like independent religious thinking and patriotism. Both their patriotism and wisdom should be tested before they’re given ruling power. So, naturally, what helped define the difference between liberal democratic Greek character habits celebrated by people like Pericles and the Sophist Protagoras, and conservatives like Plato, were different kinds of habits. For liberals, young folks should be taught to think and act intelligently on their own, rather than merely keep submitting to those in authority. Without those kinds of character habits focusing on producing constructive future democratic results, the entire fabric of democracy is weakened. For conservatives like Plato, however, obedience and faithfulness were most important.
So, for liberals today, our public schools have a duty to teach such democratic habits of intelligent thinking and acting. If they can help guide students to intelligently learn how to build excellent habits, like how to build an excellent diet habit, then they can use the same learning technique to teach themselves any kind of habit, including excellent character habits! They’ll already know any kind of character excellence is best built with actively intelligent experimental practice, one small baby-step at a time. That way it’ll be easier to keep strengthening any of their weaknesses by building a little plan of action, and then start testing it. It really doesn't matter what knowledge and skill a student is most interested in, as long as it's legal, constructive, and meaningful to the student!
That kind of intelligent learning is also at the heart of building excellent character habits. After all, even if a young student wants, say, to learn about model airplane building, and even offer flying demonstrations to other students, they can also begin learning about character habits like honesty, fairness, helpfulness, concentration, and community involvement. What elderly person wouldn’t want to have a little model for their own, or even be taught how to build the models they’re interested in? These are all important character habits and the more our public schools are forced by law to keep teaching useless academic knowledge and facts, the easier it becomes for a feudalistic, class-based, profits-driven society to stay in place. Can’t such knowledge about models also be used to open a little hobby shop even at school, helping disabled students enjoy life more? Aren't those kinds of excellent habit-arts what the adult world needs more of? If so, then why shouldn't a liberal public school motto be something like this: Let No One Leave Here Without Having At Least One Excellent Character Habit. If not, the greedy quest for more and more profits will keep growing stronger.
With such humane and considerate character habits as an on-going study throughout their 12 year schooling career, more than one such habit will be learned. Also equally important are habits like working intelligently, pacing one’s self, enjoying one's work, self-control, logical thinking, persevering, thoroughness, humor, and also how to intelligently help others with what's learned. What young student doesn't want to become an excellent person in some way?
No doubt, many conservative and moderate people will argue all children must be, so to speak, academically well-rounded; they must know a few ideas about everything. If they’re lucky, however, many children come out of public schools not even knowing who Columbus was, what he did, and when he did it! In fact, for us Deweyan liberals the phrase ‘well-rounded student’ is merely a justification for demanding students keep learning more and more disconnected, abstract, and soon forgotten academic ideas and facts. And it also justifies universities for teaching such facts to English, History, Science, and Math majors. To us liberals it's merely an artificial educational model. After all, the real world is full of people who specialize in one field of study, like finance, banking, construction, and so on. So, why shouldn’t our schools start preparing students for that world, rather than teach facts largely useless in that world? If adults want to learn more about Shakespeare or American literature, they can teach themselves later on. So, the more parents, students, and teachers feel the common sense in such logical thinking, the easier it becomes for more liberal schools to continue growing and evolving; good private schools like The Dalton School and Groton already teach their wealthy students such character habits, but no doubt our public schools could teach the same kinds of habits for much less than $50K a year per student!
We've already seen many examples of the weak and unhealthful social results leading us liberals to focus more on teaching excellent character habits to all students. Unintelligent character habits like law breaking, for example, at already causing much social distress and anxiety in many urban neighborhoods, even at the teenage level! Drug gangs are already recruiting teens into their ranks, and they're helping wreck lives as the adult world is just opening up to them. Thus, especially people in those neighborhoods are challenged today more than ever before to demand their schools start formally teaching intelligent character habits, and not just with books and reading assignments, but with active and holistic role-playing activities. Why shouldn’t even young students learn how to safely report law breakers to the police? It would not only help make their own neighborhoods safer, but it would also increase their own respect for the law too; they would realize the same might happen to them if they too break the law. Active situations could even be set up with older students to play the part of a law breaker, say, a drug dealer, so students could really feel what reporting them feels like. Who knows? Some might even get involved in questioning more of our unfair drug laws, and also helping students learn how to make some honest money even before they graduate! They might see how unintelligent the results of such laws are, and how they help keep people confined to poverty and run-down neighborhoods. If alcoholism is now seen as an addiction, then why shouldn't drug addiction too be seen as a medical problem, rather than a criminal problem? Why shouldn't people be able to get drugs, and then slowly learn to live more joyful and productive lives without them? Is there any valuable idea in such reasoning, and if so, then why not start intelligently experimenting? Why have some states voted to legalize marijuana? Are they wrong or are there some good reasons for those ideas? How many young folks would learn how to better relax with that drug?
There's another very important result from such character studies. More students would feel their schools are helping them become a smarter and more excellent person, and so they'll want to spend more time in them. Sadly, however, it seems too many undereducated parents and conservative educators are standing in the way of formally teaching such character habits. For a number of different reasons they're convinced public education, all financed with socialized tax money, should ignore teaching character excellence; no doubt some of them want to preserve the social status quo, and keep minorities out of power positions. But we Deweyan liberals like to ask: why shouldn't students learn how to intelligently use their knowledge and skills in honest and helpful ways? That humane and kind result is much of what we mean by character excellence. After all, what's the sense of teaching young folks how to repair cars, heal others, or write our laws, and then not teach them how stupid it is to cheat or exploit as many innocent people as they can with those skills, or greedily keep increasing their own personal fortunes?
More About Different Models of Character Excellence
For conservative Plato, one's character habits were important. He saw long ago, it's good to have medical knowledge, for example, but it's also important to ask this character question: should this or that patient be cured? No doubt, he was criticizing the liberal Hippocratic Oath, which obliged doctors to heal, not harm, all people. But in today's world, where medical science has ways of keeping people alive for years, aren’t such ethical character questions becoming more and more important? It's one thing, for example, to know how to fix a broken drainage pipe, or build a chest of drawers, but it's also important to know which people should have good pipes or a well-made chest of drawers. That knowledge too is part of an intelligent character. Also, should such work merely become another way to selfishly keep building a larger bank account for people, or help build a more caring and concerned public? As our most recent financial meltdown continues showing us, greedy character habits on Wall Street are as harmful and dangerous to the public good as is uncontrolled disease and ignorance.
So, the idea of excellent character habits has been a part of education philosophy at least since Plato’s Republic and Aristotle's Politics, Book 7; the opening quote from Socrates too shows how important character excellence was to him: Are you not ashamed, he asked people, to care for your bank account more than you care for your psychological health? So, in general terms, we can begin seeing one very important difference between conservative and liberal models of character. Liberal democratic character habits are broader and more democratic than conservative models; the latter are simply more concerned about one's own economic well-being and power, or for religious conservatives, saving one's psyche from sin and corruption. Plato felt such character habits like knowing eternal and unchanging kinds of Truth would save him from being re-born again, and suffering through another life of ignorance and pain.
For us liberal Deweyan Humanists, however, the conservative character model should be broadened to help all people build a more peaceful, helpful, democratic world, where social forms of power are shared equally! Ancient liberals since Democritus taught themselves to feel more sympathy for all people, rather than just the well-being of a wealthy upper class. Only those kind of humane character habits would best produce the kind of world in which people live peacefully with one another, rather than dividing people into groups and warring between them. So for us liberals, character excellence means more than having a spotless personal psyche, believing our own habits somehow reflect nature's absolute Truth so we won't go to a lower level of hell after death or be born again into our always dangerous world, or in today's version -- having billions of dollars in one's personal account. Liberal and humane character habits aim simply at making life better for everyone here and now; we are all people, and so all law-abiding folks deserve the same equal rights to an excellent education as everyone else. Without that humane democratic base for a character model, our old class-based feudalistic institutions will continue on; as Dewey rightly said, habits are propulsive. And the more that happens, the more likely life will remain what Thomas Hobbes said it had once been for everyone: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Another part of conservative character excellence, existing even today, is based on the old philosophic quest for certainty. For Plato excellent character includes practicing a great respect for religious ideas, and that kind of conservative excellence continues to this day. Many people around the world still believe the religious habits they practice reflect nature's absolute Truth, and so people must continue making other people accept such habits. Therein lies their great social danger, as the Crusades and present religious wars continue teaching us. As we've seen, the leaders in Plato's best state are basically an intolerant ruling elite, and such habits remain alive even today. Even in the US many still believe their own religious habits are eternal and unchanging Truth, thus helping make life a little more dangerous from all those who have built more liberal character values of respect and tolerance.
For Plato, then, the religious leaders in Iran, for example, would be a good example of excellent character habits. They work to keep citizens loyal to one religious point of view, as do also many conservative Muslims and Christians around the world. Many of our US Founders too were solidly within that feudal mode of religiously dominated character excellence, like Christian Alexander Hamilton to name but one. For such people, children should be educated to simply accept and preserve such systems, and their moral ideas as well. As we've seen, even democratic Thomas Jefferson would not have agreed with equal rights for gays and lesbians!
Moderate Aristotle too embraced many of the same conservative character habits, while increasing respect for democracy and de-emphasizing religious habits. For him god cared nothing about life on earth and so all forms of worship are basically useless for fulfilling our needs and wants. However, he also felt such religious habits do fulfill a useful social function; they help people accept the social status quo as well as decrease the chances for destructive and anti-social behavior. And, again, for him the highest kind of character habit was basically a contemplative one: only it could produce the highest kinds of happiness, similar to god's own thinking itself. Like many conservatives, the social status quo should be maintained above if at all possible. Thus some people are slaves by nature and women should have few, if any, rights and freedoms. Then after him, a mystical Catholic religion continued teaching much the same kinds of character habits to its followers, creating what are now called the feudalistic Middle Ages. Dissent and disagreement were not to be tolerated, and young folks were taught to obey and accept a feudal social and personal status quo. They did, however, also give women in their nunneries more independent habits of living and also helped those less well off with their hospitals.
Since 1600, however, such religious-based character habits have become much less powerful and widespread, at least in Western civilization. More democratic and scientific character habits have become much more important and easier to grow. The result is our modern world itself, where the clash between conservative and liberal character habits is creating what is now called modern cultural warfare. Conservatives continue wanting to keep their own un-democratic character habits in place, like denying equal racial and sexual rights to others. Liberal democrats, however, keep working to end all forms of discrimination against all law-abiding people. And as we've already seen many times before, such liberal habits depend on our new experimental learning habits. If all knowledge and habits are learned with experimental trial-and-error, then how can anyone's own habits really reflect any kind of eternal and unchanging objects or Truth? And so, for us liberals, each of us still has a right to guide our own growth and learn how it's best accomplished with intelligent kinds of experimental character habits. Those differences are basically the cause of much modern tension and stress around the world today. Much of the violent Muslim world today reflects Western religious history in the 1500s, where different religious versions battled each other. In general, however, conservatives still want to keep people as uneducated as possible about liberal habit-arts, like democratic equality, while liberals keep working to educate the next generation about how they can be used.
Education Professor Lois Weiner points out some of these struggles around the world in her article Neoliberalism, Teacher Unions, and the Future of Education. Even the conservatively-run World Bank has been insisting countries adopt a radically conservative educational model based on so-called free market economics; it’s a necessary condition for getting any kind of investment funds from the bank! She calls such reforms neoliberal, but for the life of me I cannot agree with her about that. To me any such conservative educational law like No Child Left Behind, the Common Core academic study and testing program, as well as the World Bank demands mentioned above are anything but neoliberal! They share none of the traditional 4 liberal values mentioned earlier, like political control of the economy and equal rights for all law-abiding people. So, I would much prefer them called what they in fact are: yet more examples of a radically conservative education program, often resulting in keeping society divided into rich and poor classes, and educated and uneducated classes. They are thus best seen as yet more versions of feudalistic conservatism. Their philosophic roots go back to centralized mercantile economic policies of the 1600s, and to Plato for their rigid class divisions. In any case, however, we liberals have a duty to keep encouraging our schools, homes, politicians, and church leaders to teach more democratic character habits in locally controlled schools. Our African slave class has been liberated, but our political and student populations have yet to be equally free. Politicians are still often paid for and supported by wealthy campaign donors and corporations. And if so, then in what sense are politicians free to keep building a more equal and democratic world for everyone? In short, character excellence for we Deweyan liberals means working to increase equal rights, equal opportunities, social helpfulness, respect for just laws, and democratic educational rights for students at the local level.
Even at the beginning of a new 3rd millennium CE, the growth of such liberal character habits are still great challenges not only for young folks here in the US, but also for most young folks on earth. In truth, democratic habit-arts are still in a young stage of development. Even in supposedly liberal communist countries, like Russia and China, such democratic habits are far from widespread; they have long traditions of autocratic rule, and so have little interest in teaching more power-sharing democratic ones. Even in supposedly democratic India too, most women are still openly denied their equal rights and freedoms. They all point to less than liberal schools and their character habit-arts. In the US many of our schools, like many conservative churches, still almost totally neglect teaching such democratic character habits. As a result we continue seeing the weak, excessive, and dangerous social results. So, the more our young folks learn to act as intelligently as possible while demanding the freedom to guide their own education, and also have an equal voice on decision-making boards, the stronger their liberal character habits become, and the more democratic our nation becomes as well. Obviously, unintelligent character habits like crime and drug abuse will probably never be completely wiped out, but no one really knows how much they might be reduced by teaching more liberal character kinds of habits in our public schools, learned of course with active and intelligent role-playing. The more one simply looks around today at our social scene of high unemployment and prison overcrowding, the more evidence is seen for teaching just such habits, at least as much as practical math and useful business skills.
Some Real Life Examples
Such abstract ideas can be humanized with some real examples. Not long ago I found another very moving and poignant example of how depressive and frustrating life can become with merely one serious character weakness: greediness. Millions of people here in the US still feel it’s perfectly ok to keep making and keeping as much money as possible, even if it’s earned illegally or immorally!
In her autobiography the movie star Ava Gardner once described this sad feeling towards the end of her life: she felt cheated because she never got an excellent education. Her story is a touchingly sad, frustrating, and largely joyless one. She tells about her very poor southern rural childhood amongst very undereducated tobacco farmers, the discovery of her great facial beauty, her stumbling around Hollywood trying to make lots of money, her often violent and humiliating 3 marriages, and eventually leaving the US and living a lonely, loveless, and alcohol-dependent life in Spain and England. Thinking back on such a life, she then helps explain it by saying she never got a good education, as if merely an academic college degree or 2 would have saved her a lot of pain and frustration. It’s understandable. People who don't practice liberal kinds of character habits like helping those less well off, must look for other reasons why their life turned out like it did.
No doubt, without such helpful character habit-arts, one's life-options become more limited, but the point is, why shouldn’t our public schools be formally teaching such important character habits? Have you ever thought about this? How can many young actors and performers live long, full, joyful, and rewarding lives without even going to college, while making millions of dollars on top of it? To us liberals, Ms. Gardner’s greatest flaw was a character weakness; she simply didn’t teach herself what's most important about money -- it’s best used to provide for one’s needs, like food, shelter, and clothing, but after those needs are modestly satisfied, helping others with money becomes the highest good! Spencer Tracy said as much in the movie Tortilla Flats. That liberal character habit-art may be the most important one of all!
In Hollywood great sums of money are available for very easy work. Movie-making may even be described as a kind of vacation; people there go out of the way to make them fun, enjoyable, rewarding, and fulfilling. However, it’s also an enforced rule to keep at most only 10% of one's salary, live modestly, and of course use the rest to help others! The great singer/actor Ethel Merman said pretty much the same thing in the movie It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. In fact, there's a world of needy people out there. Thus, such a helping and caring character habit explains the fact high school drop-outs can become and remain Hollywood successes? No doubt being tolerant of those with different sexual habits is important too, but economic greed is definitely discouraged. Having myself worked many years in Hollywood as a TV and film extra while putting together a series of books, and of course watching many movies, it’s almost certain Ava never much practiced the excellent habit-art of using one’s natural and learned talents to help those less fortunate. It might be called Hollywood’s Form of the Good: the highest good is helping others! So, in Hollywood there’s absolutely no reason to keep any more than 10% of your earning to satisfy basic needs. In other words, it’s highly recommended to pick a worthy cause, or causes, and support them, as long as they’re peaceful and helpful; Doctors Without Borders is a favorite cause. For us liberals, then, without that one crucial highest habit-art, the greatest genius on earth, the most beautiful woman, the handsomest man, the most gifted athlete, the smartest scientists, are still less than a fully excellent person.
Many other examples may be cited -- Marilyn Monroe being one of them. She sang of diamonds being a girl’s best friend, and even bragged about making $70,000 one year in the early 1950s when that was a lot of money, but the RESULTS of keeping it to herself are shown in her movie work. They mark that goal not only as empty and meaningless, but frustrating and dangerous as well; she died at just 37! What best endures, said Dewey, is usually the good done for OTHERS! So, if we’re right, then the character habit-art of wise and intelligent kindness and helpfulness is the greatest single habit anyone can practice. It both lessens one's greedy actions, and also increases the public good. Seeing millions of homeless people living on the streets, while billionaires ride around in expensive cars, shows us such character habits are far from widespread.
Obeying just laws is another important character habit, as we've already seen before. Why should anyone expect to live a peaceful life while continuing to break just laws? Certainly our schools continue encouraging such weak and unintelligent habits when they keep ignoring teaching them with active and intelligent kinds of role playing. Thus, without too much exaggeration it may be said: those 2 character habits become the foundation, the core, and the centerpiece of this liberal Deweyan model of character excellence. The earlier we teach children what such habit-arts feel like, and reward their practice, the better their chances become of living a long, enjoyable, and productive life; what better educational gift can we possibly give to anyone and our nation other than such useful knowledge?
Again, the best way of energizing those most enjoy-ABLE character habit-arts is actively experimenting with them! How else can anyone feel in their muscles what any idea means? The Catholic Church has known this for thousands of years, and thus created a number of active rituals for people. And here’s another great example from Hollywood. In the very funny movie Bedtime Story the great and kind David Niven tells the young, greedy, and self-centered Marlon Brando much the same thing. “Like an arrow”, he tells Marlon, “money must have a target.” And then he takes Marlon around to some of the causes his money is supporting, like an old silversmith artist who can’t compete with mass production, and a ballet school helping children learn how to move gracefully and confidently. Not only is the movie comedic story telling at its best, but at the same time it's also touchingly human; to be fully excellent, people also need to feel for and help those in need.
For us Deweyan humanists, in and outside of Hollywood, helping others is the highest good. Two other sad examples are James Dean and Natalie Wood, who made the movie Rebel Without a Cause. However, what happened in real life to those rebels without a cause? I leave it to the reader to do a little independent research and answer that question.
For those, and so many other reasons, liberal Deweyan education is based on 3 pillars. Besides learning useful factual knowledge, and gaining some useful skills, there is also intelligent character-building! They’re similar to Zen Buddhism’s 3 pillars: teaching, practice, and enlightenment. In fact, for us liberals, intelligent character habits are the keys for making life better in any field we may choose, from Hollywood to Wall Street, and from farming to space flight! Thus, the more schools, homes, and churches consciously teach ALL THREE habits – useful knowledge, skills, and character excellence -- the greater the chances are for not only living a long, enjoyable, and productive life, but for also making our nation a truly fit place for civilized people to live. Without all three of those habit-arts, however, the strongest military, the tallest buildings, the best looking schools, churches, mosques, and synagogues, and the largest corporations on earth are simply no guarantee against a life of fear, frustration, and attack. Just look at how fearful and paranoid our government has become, thanks in large part because for many people money and profits have become the be-all and end-all of life. As we've already seen, our government has finally admitted to actually recording all phone calls and other electronic communications of completely innocent people, and been forced to create some regulations it probably never would have if a whistleblower didn't leak the information to the public! And yet that whistleblower is wanted for breaking the law! Instead of making our corporations keep only a small profit while helping increase the living standards of terribly poor and uneducated people around the world, it continues increasing hatred of the government. As the life of President John Kennedy too so poignantly shows us, morals count, especially at that level of power; no one is above the moral laws of respect for others. Respecting others, especially women, is simply too important a habit to ignore, and yet, sadly, our conservative public schools all but do ignore formally teaching such habit-arts.
As a result, however, even pre-teens will continue remaining vulnerable to neighborhood gangs promising wealth for simply breaking drug and racketeering laws. Pay us some money or we’ll wreck your business! So, better character habits even at the primary level will both challenge and inspire teachers and parents to build such learning programs into their own neighborhood schools. For us liberals it's perhaps the most challenging part of American education reform today. Why? There are laws stating what schools should teach, and if they don’t they may lose their accreditation. Thus parents, students, and teachers must learn to stand up and say enough; we want our children to also learn about intelligent character habits! We want to teach them how to intelligently help re-educate those who keep breaking just laws, and also making our jails places where such re-education is the main agenda. Such habits thus help answer one of this book's very important opening philosophic questions: What am I to do?
Because many urban kids today are not taught to love books and their academic facts, like many white and Asian students are, and because federal laws like No Child Left Behind, and the Common Core Standards program lashes most all students to learning such facts, many inner city young folks quickly become law-breaking gang members even before they’re teenagers! No doubt, many of those who run our jails and prisons make a living cycling those kids through the system year after year, but if we had liberal schools teaching such character habits, more people would become available to help teach the next generation more about what counts most in life – excellent character habits! To ignore that idea merely perpetuates the class differences we already have and student weaknesses, not to mention more tax wastefulness.
Why shouldn’t such training begin in kindergarten, with community-improving activities like flower-growing, painting, and park-building kinds of character-building experiments? Not only would it help students feel in their muscles what active and constructive character habits are like, but they would also provide a real intelligent alternative to gang violence, arrest, imprisonment, more unlawfulness, more prison, and so on! And what's equally important, wouldn’t such schools also be a great way to teach children how their book knowledge should be used in real life – as an aid to building intelligent plans of action? If we want to build a better democracy, where all peoples live in safety and learn to intelligently express their creative instincts and energies, then shouldn't our public schools be teaching young children what such habits feel like? Don't we all owe the next generation at least an equal start in life? And if not, then how can we expect people to keep building a safe and growing democracy, where improving any kind of social and personal weakness and excess is an on-going process?
Imitation vs. Intelligent Experimentation
Only within the past 4 centuries has intelligent experimentation become generally accepted as our most powerful learning habit-art and tool. As Dewey was fond of pointing out, it’s much more powerful a learning tool than what our feudal and ancient ancestors practiced – mere logical contemplation. The ability to wisely use accurate knowledge to make an intelligent plan for improving some weakness, and then actively test it experimentally, is now the worldwide standard for learning excellent and reliable knowledge, no matter what work we do or where we live. However, demanding students merely keep reading about book-facts keeps the habit-art of intelligent experimental learning weak and inactive, and thus keep adult life weak and routine. And so the growth of modern experimental learning habits has led more and more people to question such conservative learning habits, perhaps John Dewey most of all.
Slowly, in the 1800s, more and more liberal educators began seeing the unhealthful results of teaching students to merely imitate teacher actions for solving book problems. Such imitative learning often blocked students from building more powerful experimental habits in all subjects. After all, all mathematical improvements were the result of intelligent experimentation with different ideas! In conservative schools students simply learn to imitate teacher actions. Young folks and students are simply expected to merely imitate the adults and teachers around them, rather than being shown how to intelligently experiment on their own, and thus develop their own creative and imaginative habits.
Today, however, with change happening so rapidly, such imitative learning is rapidly becoming much less useful, while creative experimentation is becoming more useful. The growth of experimental learning is now empowering people to more confidently work at, say, improving not their own weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-arts, but social weaknesses as well. Little wonder, then, that those kinds of intelligent experimental habit-arts are also at the heart of learning excellent character habits too.
Again, however, many, if not most, of our conservative public schools are still allowed to ignore formally teaching both character habits and experimental learning! For us liberals the reason seems obvious: ignoring such habit-arts decreases the threat to keep liberalizing all our feudal political, economic, and educational systems. No doubt, powerful corporations want to keep their power to say what food we should eat, what kind of housing we should have, what salaries we should accept, what kinds of cars we should drive, where we should live, and how our children should be educated. For them, teaching such liberal character habits would merely help weaken their power. They would also greatly chance our neighborhood schools as well. Imagine a math class in which teachers gave students the freedom to first make a list of math ideas they'd like to learn more about, help them create intelligent plans to learn about them, experimentally test the plans, and also ask them to orally share their results with other students on a regular basis. Wouldn’t most students discover it’s best to learn such ideas as they’re needed in the real world? Why study algebra and geometry when you want to be a reporter or a masseuse?
As Dewey pointed out, by making students learn more and more book facts imitatively, conservative schools continue committing a huge learning mistake going back to ancient times: learning is merely a mental event. With that conservative and moderate assumption alone schools have remained places where books and teachers are most important, rather than children and their needs. In them the mind is more important than the body. Edward Devere (a. k. a. William Shakespeare), echoed the same idea in his Taming of the Shrew: "... tis the mind that makes the body great". We liberal Deweyan Behaviorists, however, have been liberated from that false conservative and moderate assumption. Devere wrote before the scientific revolution even started, and so his own feelings for active intelligent body-mind experimentation were weak. Today, for us liberals, only intelligent experimentation and active testing makes the body-mind great, whether it’s learning about knowledge, skills, or character excellence! Thus active role-playing becomes a major educational tool.
A conservative learning habit also lives on today in making New Year’s Resolutions. How many times have you told yourself things will be different next year? However, the fact simple such resolutions are so hard to keep shows us learning excellence is much more than merely thinking and reading about something; it also requires muscular experimental practice, as any infant can teach us. For us Deweyan liberals, then, mere imitation-based book-learning in fact helps keep students divided from their own active bodies and senses, and builds a warped feeling for learning itself. How many people feel they can change their decades-old eating habits by simply enrolling in a diet program? And what’s more, imitative learning also helps explain why as many as 50% of students in some districts find school a bore and thus drop-out before they graduate? For us liberal Deweyans, then, mere imitation of teacher actions is one of conservative education's greatest weaknesses.
The foundational idea in Dewey’s Functional Behaviorism says knowledge is in the body’s muscles too! Until you feel better eating habits with your muscles, the old ones stay in place. So, if that’s true, then only active intelligent experimentation can end the old conservative ancient and feudal confining of learning merely to the mind. As we’ve seen, separating mental ideas from their actual physical results, like many religions and philosophies have done, has encouraged the belief in absolute Truth. And as a result, has justified dividing our human race into religious, economic, and political tribes, each with their own forms of absolute Truth. It's been a model of learning excellence used at least since Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, helping justify status quo warfare, slavery, and discrimination against women. We liberals will have none of it. We all learn our character habits with active practice and experimentation, and so the challenge is to make such learning intelligent, rather than routine. To us liberals, then, the conclusion seems obvious: the less children actually experimentally role-play with democratic kinds of character ideas, the weaker such knowledge will be, and the weaker our nation will be as well.
Today, around the world, the conservative philosophic ground is being cleared for reuniting mind and body in all learning processes, political, economic, religious, and educational! It’s being cleared with the growth of intelligent experimental learning and testing habits. With such thoughts it’s easy to see why Dewey wanted to include liberal character habit-arts as part of the public school mission. Only with them can a more vibrant and energetic democracy best keep growing. Conservatives, on the other hand, knew full well how dangerous that idea was to their feudalistic power, and so they have continued ignoring such ideas and focusing on anchoring students to their books and obeying their teachers, all justified with producing the famed ‘well-rounded’ student. Democratic habits themselves threatened conservative power by connecting students to their communities, learning more about what’s happening in them here and now, and then experimenting to them independent of greedy actions! With such schools learning important habits like seeing the humorous side of events, and building feelings of community solidarity, helps replace the greedy quest for more and more profits with increasing the public good for all. With such a greedy economic model life quickly becomes a giant free-for-all where wealthy folks have all the advantages. Thus not teaching such liberal character habits gave a great advantage to those lucky kids whose parents already practiced them, and who taught them to their children. It helped perpetuate feudal class differences. So, the more homes, schools, and churches promote activities linking students to improving their character habits with intelligently constructive community actions, the more students learn what a sense of community feels like, and also how it can be preserved. Without those kinds of character habits, city life itself remains at the mercy of powerful corporations and banks seeking merely to make more and more money, as has happening around the country in cities like Detroit and Chicago.
Such character building can become active and vibrant in medical, hygienic, carpentry, welding, masonry, painting, plumbing, and computer-using school shops. In them useful community ties are built and forged into student muscles, and making academic facts secondary to social results. Students would also learn to practice a can-do habit as well as what honest, intelligent, thoughtful, creative, caring, joyful, and humorous habits feel like. Indeed, there can be so much more to our public schools than merely making teachers get students ready for the next standardized test, which is exactly what conservatives want schools reduced to. Many greedy people simply want as much freedom as possible to keep making more and more money wherever they can.
How Big is Your Endowment?
Another sign of educational character weakness can be seen at the elite university level in the US, as a Los Angeles Times article of March 22, 2000 shows. It described what many of our universities are now focusing on -- growing billion dollar endowment bank accounts. Sports programs, especially football, have also been an important way to keep the money rolling in, as are skyrocketing tuition fees at many elite schools. They're simply taking advantage of cheap athletic labor before they turn professional. In fact, for many decades now college stadiums housing 100,000 fans have become common. As a result, the role of college president itself has been reduced to a largely fund-raising job; the more a person is socially connected to the wealthy upper class, the better their qualifications for college president becomes.
As a result, many universities are now using their many BILLIONS of endowment funds for Wall Street investments rather than for lowering student fees and tuition, and connecting students to their own communities with constructive experimental projects in the real world. Many elite universities have become major corporations themselves! It was estimated at the time of the article Harvard had a $14 billion endowment fund; Yale -- $9 billion; Princeton and Stanford --$6 billion! No doubt since then they've only grown larger, as have salaries for administrators and teachers, and tuition for students. Such big-business oriented, undemocratic feudalistic schools continue to be run by a small, often unelected board of trustees. For decades now they’ve been free to keep tuition costs skyrocketing, along with student fees, thus helping deny deserving and capable poorer students of a college education without accumulating huge amounts of debt! Like the monopolistic oil and banking industries, some universities too have eliminated some competition by paying famous teachers huge amounts to join their faculties, even though many rarely teach undergraduates.
Thus the free market in elite higher education too is becoming a province of the ruling upper class, just like Adam Smith's free market economics has become dominated by a few huge and wealthy corporations. Both also remain feudalistic and undemocratic in structure, dominated by a small group of people who aim mainly at increasing the endowment funds. Without students and teachers having an equal voice on such small decision-making boards of trustees, such schools look like feudal corporations -- from the top down. In such systems students remain at the mercy of such boards. It’s either borrow more money to pay for classes, or leave.
While I write student debt is skyrocketing simply because students are out of the economic decision-making loop, just as feudalistic corporations keep workers out of the salary-deciding loop! Already in the 1980s economist John Galbraith said in the US economy fully 50% was controlled by monopolies and thus beyond all market forces of supply and demand. Many elite universities have also become free to charge students whatever they want. For sure, some endowment funds weren't just invested around the world for making more money with cheap labor. Sometimes funds were withdrawn for example, to pressure racist governments like South Africa to end its apartheid policies. But the relative isolation of students from sharing their knowledge with their communities still remains a character weakness of many universities.
Henry Hansmann, a Yale law professor who wrote the article, believes “all the (endowment) hoarding diverts universities from their core mission of educating students and making breakthroughs in science and other fields.” Not to mention connecting students to useful work in their communities. New York University, however, was cited as a notable progressive exception to this endowment-obsessed trend. Instead of merely playing the markets with their modest $2 billion endowment, its more enlightened trustees chose to spend 85% of it on, of all things, educating students! Oh those lovely liberal New Yorkers!
So, what what’s all this ranting got to do with liberal character habits not being taught in elementary schools? Well, a lot really. The more students aren’t allowed to intelligently guide their own growth and development, the more difficult it becomes to demand more intelligent control in their workplace and in politics! In short, the more students learn to control their own schools, the easier it becomes to demand more equal decision-making power on their corporate boards of directors, and that’s exactly what conservatives generally want. Such a democratic economic system would be a great threat to their profits and obscenely high salaries. With such examples, it becomes easier than ever to see how important our local neighborhood schools are in a life-improving equation; they’re crucially important, and conservatives know it too. Their campaign funding has helped build the undemocratic public school system we now have, where academic facts and testing now dominate!
Liberal challenges should be clear. If enough dedicated and united students, parents, and teachers demand intelligent character habits be taught on an on-going basis, it will happen. Otherwise feudalistic universities and corporations will continue doing whatever they can to merely keep increasing their profits and economic power, rather than also working for the public good. It all can start with teaching democratic kinds of character habits. Without them a medieval-like educational status quo will remain in place, which is exactly what most conservatives want. For thousands of years they have wanted power concentrated and limited; it made dominating others easier for them. Recently the University of Southern California Dental School received a $30 million donation, and yet they kept charging poor folks the same amounts for student-based dental work! What kinds of community feelings are they generating?
Again, it should be said. Liberal public schools where democratic character habits are a normal and continuing part of learning are a crucially important part of a healthy, vibrant, and growing democratic society. In effect, they continue challenging all our feudalistic institutions and organizations still working today to create social dangers like recessions and slave-wages. A big part of that character program is simply to teach children what’s going on out there politically and economically in the world they're about to enter, rather than focusing on knowing what happened thousand and hundreds of years ago. Because democracy is an active political system, its growth will continue only with actions challenging such systems.
Needless to say, such democratic improvements can apply to our feudalistic universities as well as our small neighborhood public schools. In them, students, parents, and teachers can begin organizing to simply demand more democratic decision-making power! And what if those in power refuse to grant such power? Students should be prepared to peacefully walk out, shut the system down, and keep it shut until they do get their democratic equal rights! As history shows in countless examples, conservatives are generally unwilling to give up any of their power until enough people want it. Luckily, in a democratic society, such tactics are effective. After all, why should any public-supported system affecting the lives of many thousands remain controlled by merely a few people? If nothing else it’s undemocratic and feudalistic?
What’s more, in today’s increasingly feudalistic world, millions are feeling the socially disruptive and chaotic results of such systems. Such organizations are free to aim merely at increasing their own power, not the public democratic good, and that goes for both corporations and some labor unions! So, the more students are allowed to practice those peaceful and intelligent kinds of liberal character habits, the easier it'll be to create AND MAINTAIN a more democratic society. It's either that or continue accepting the educational and social status quo, where students are almost forced to learn facts and skills often useless in the real world, suffer high drop-out rates in high school, endure more student boredom in schools, and at the university level continue being loaded down with huge educational debts for decades after school! Even many college grads are seeing how difficult it is to get a well-paying job, and are moving back home.
No doubt parents, students, and alumni at all educational levels would benefit if they were simply better educated about what liberal kinds of schools would look like. Such important knowledge makes it easier to improve any feudalistic system with organizing and coordinating people-power.
Equally important is refusing to accept any kind of defeatist and cynical feelings about their mission, like, for example, nothing will ever change; improvement is hopeless; we must not even try to improve the status quo. Such feelings can easily grow when conservative control of our institutions is so widespread and strong. Ancient Greek cynics and many atomists too sheepishly dropped out of social life rather than organize and peacefully protest, thus making it easier for people like Alexander of Macedon to march his army out to Iran, destroy it, and thus take revenge on the Persians for warring against the Greeks 150 years earlier. Patient, peaceful, and intelligent kinds of character habits is the best way to overcome and weaken such cynical feelings. Either we keep allowing conservative control of our institutions to continue creating enemies at home and abroad, and thus keep wagging war after war and spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, of we continue building a more peaceful and democratic society. Liberal neighborhood schools are an important organic part of that program. A solid democratic foundation is already in place in the US; millions now regularly vote in general elections, and many are very involved at the local level. What’s more, a new and powerful communication system has recently evolved, making it much easier for people to stay in touch with others on a daily basis, and thus making it easier to organize and coordinate democratic power. The challenge remains, however, to keep such liberal habits growing, rather than leaving them weak and powerless.
In Los Angeles, for example, Neighborhood Councils are already a fact of life, and it's also easier to begin educational improvements at that level. People are already in the area, and so it's easy to keep talking with local parents, students, and teachers about what experiments would help make students more intelligent, and build more democratic habits. From such small democratic acorns mighty oaks can grow, and we liberals say that is one of the best causes to be a rebel FOR! Why wait until the social situation becomes dangerously explosive again, and frustrated people begin filling the streets and causing unintelligent violence? Why not learn how to begin making small educational improvements here and now, so as to avoid dangerously explosive situations later? Without those excellent kinds of intelligent character baby-step actions, life itself remains more frustrating, potentially dangerous, and leaves in place our still too-feudal conservative political, economic, and educational systems.
14. CHARACTER EXCELLENCE: 102
In this section we look more closely at another important character building idea -- intelligent community service work. Also I'll mention some more useful personal and social results of such work. As we've seen, democratic, economic, and social stability depend on such work! For example, the more students practice such intelligent and active kinds of work, the less they'll feel a need to depend on government help to solve their personal and social challenges. Why wait for years for the local government to, say, fix street potholes when people can readily use a local supply of paving material for the purpose?
To some this subject of community service work and character development may seem worn out by now, but to hundreds of millions of people who've gone to conservative public schools and never learned such valuable character habits, or who don’t even practice their democratic voting rights as much as possible, there's much more to be said for teaching them. And of course, many millions around the world still feel conservative character habits are best, but are they? What kinds of results are they producing on both a personal and social level? In fact, for us liberal Deweyans, every idea is best judged by the results it helps produce.
We'll also see some more of US educational history. Conservative book-centered schools have monopolized the educational system for much of that history, beginning in colonial times in the 1600s. Since the 1950s that control has only grown stronger, thanks in large part to our conservative corporate capitalist system. We’ve also been seeing some of the social results of that economic model. With the continued growth of corporate wealth since then, it's only become easier to keep their educational model in place. Today even many non-union, for-profit charter schools still operate with a conservative book-centered model of learning, called the Common Core Standards model. So, the important question becomes: what results are they producing, I mean besides drop-out rates in the 30%-50% range in some areas? In truth, most parents are simply too busy working to make ends meet to even think about improving neighborhood public schools, thus making students less educated as well. What's more, as we’ll see a little later, conservative teachers themselves have often been a major obstacle to building more liberal schools where students get more character building activities like community service projects.
In the US today, as more and more money gets controlled by a few large corporations and individuals, millions are now losing their trust in such a feudalistic capitalist economy. Monopoly power has always been the most dangerous part of that system. More and more people are realizing much of our economic and educational systems aim at training students to accept what supervisors give them, allow upper management to keep making huge salaries, and support schools where teaching is relatively easy work. In such systems student and the public good are generally ignored.
Young folks can come out of high school these days with practically no earning power or strong and intelligent character habits; often less than 50% voter turnout is normal. In such an education system it becomes easy to tell high school students they simply need more education to get a good job, though even that idea has become much less reliable lately. So, it’s natural for us liberals to ask, shouldn’t our public schools be doing more than merely filling all student heads with useless knowledge and skills for 12 years? Can't our valuable education tax dollars be used more wisely than merely to maintain class differences and postpone useful employment for 4 more years? Can't we teach all students the knowledge, skills, AND character habits useful in our democratic society, so much more of them can start contributing to the economy in positive ways after high school? Why shouldn’t every student from kindergarten to senior year see pictures of workers from a variety of professions on classroom walls, so even young students can not only begin thinking about building useful work habits, but also actually get some hands-on experience for such habits? Is that really too much to ask of our public schools? The more people don't ask such questions, the longer feudalistic social systems will live on.
Again, and again, the main social challenge for building such schools becomes educating parents, students, and teachers about how liberal student-centered character habits can be built in our schools. Without them, the roughly 70% of students who don't go to college will find it more difficult to start contributing to the public good, rather than joining more violent neighborhood gangs, and start practicing social unhealthful actions. And even if they go to college, many students face going into some serious debt, increased personal stress, prolonged poverty, and thus a weakened tax base. A more liberal character-building educational model for our public schools may not completely end those results, but they can certainly make them less dangerous for everyone. The more community service work projects are practiced, the more intelligent and confident students become to keep intelligently growing their knowledge and skills. And once they start working, then they can take the college classes helping broaden and deepen their knowledge. The stronger those kinds of liberal character habits become, the more confidence they’ll also have for improving any un-democratic system.
Conservative Character Habits: Some History
For much of civilized history subjects like astronomy, mathematics, history, logic, and especially politics were useful for building upper class character habits. Later in Roman times literature subjects were added. To be able to talk about such ideas was the mark of a truly educated gentlemanly character, whereas to use one's hands for making a living was still seen as base and vulgar, rather than socially useful, personally liberating, and psychically creative. Even the word school originally meant a place of leisure, as Dewey describes in Schools of Tomorrow.
Thus, leisurely discussing philosophic questions of life and nature was leisured upper class work well into the 1800s, and so wealthy folks continued hiring private tutors to teach such subjects to wealthy male children, and also use educated people to help grow their economic power. However, with such conservative character habits and learning, the huge economic divide between rich and poor continued! For wealthy folks today, ideas like higher taxes for the wealthy, and political democratic equal rights are often rejected as being harmful to business and even unnatural, as if the public doesn't help build the roads, bridges, ships, railroads, and airplanes business people use to move their products and make their fortunes.
American schools have, in fact, a long history of teaching character habits. Unfortunately such habits were based on similar conservative feudalistic ideas and values. Students of recent American education history, like principals, already know about Dewey's ideas for teaching liberal democratic character habits in schools, like simply giving students and parents more freedom to learn more practical knowledge and skills. But that liberal model of character excellence grew only slowly in America, as did democracy itself.
At first conservative character habits were stressed all through the colonial 1600s and 1700s. What's more, in those days Locke and Hume's faculty psychology was the classical liberal model of human nature: students have a number of more or less separate mental atom-like faculties, like reasoning, creating, memorizing, and so on. So, with only the right learning experiences they would grow stronger; mathematics would strengthen one's reasoning faculty, thus increasing the need for math teachers. Even French conservatives like Rene Descartes (d. 1649) pictured the soul as a spiritual faculty needing to be developed with religious ideas. The good news, however, was their agreeing most all students could be educated, trained, and improved, and that was an important educational baby-step away from a conservative medieval model of human nature. However, the bad news was this: conservative church leaders still felt children were inherently evil and corrupted by original sin, and thus must learn religious rituals of salvation, often taught by making students feel pain when they disobeyed. Thus, much of their character training rested on learning religious habits. After all, even the Bible recommended beating disobedient children.
Conservative US Puritans, for example, continued seeing children as Augustine saw them, as basically corrupt and full of original sin. Thus their character training aimed at building fearful feelings about disobedience while emphasizing habits like acceptance and meekness. Obviously, such character habits helped keep the still-feudal religious status quo in place, at least for a while in New England. Teachers, for example, would often ask the class what would happen if children disobeyed their parents. Then children would be made to answer: They would make their parents sick and die. To us liberals such character habits are not only based on a outmoded faculty psychology, but also a harmful religious psychology as well. No doubt, such training continued in many still-feudal countries to this day, sometimes even supported by the fine-sounding World Bank.
Sadly, in many conservative schools, such guilt-heavy character training went right on into the Jackson era of the 1830s and 40s, even though Ben Franklin helped turn an important liberal educational corner in the 1750s. Even while many conservative character habits remained an important part of education, Franklin suggested some more progressive habits of character building, like scientific studies and experimental learning. Decades before a public educational bureaucracy was in place, such ideas were easier to talk about. Like forward-looking Francis Bacon before him, Franklin saw the great character potential and liberating power in constructive and active kinds of experimental learning. He knew they would, in fact, help create a much more intelligent democratic society. Instead of merely accepting what students were told was absolute Truth, students would learn to experimentally test ideas themselves, and see their results. And to support such progressive ideas he also built a much more positive model of child psychology; children would, say, best learn how to read, write, and spell by actively working in a print shop at school, as he had done. In short, the whole emphasis on active learning projects would help build more intelligent character habits and a more democratic government as well.
Such progressively liberal ideas of character excellence were just beginning to grow and spread at that time, thanks also to all those European Enlightenment liberals talking about similar ideas. However, such ideas had a long conservative tradition to challenge, and progress was anything but easy. Conservative political, economic, and educational habits were still quite strong even at our republic's founding. For example, the first political form was called the Articles of Confederation, but businessmen had many complaints about it. Colonies were printing their own money and making their own business laws, and so business was quite difficult to conduct. By the 1780s, however, many conservatives like Alexander Hamilton knew the type of feudalistic government they wanted; one with a strong central government making it easier for wealthy people and corporations to control and use to help them make more money, and thus build a wealthy aristocratic class. As they saw so clearly, the more institutions are run from a small controlling group, the easier it is to control an entire country, and so they built such a federal system. It made increasing their wealthy that much easier.
Many Constitution framers also wanted to keep labor costs low with slave labor, have the power to levy and collect taxes on all the states their representatives passed, establish one money system for all states, and also make the government support building projects, like roads and canals so goods could be easily hauled to market. Obviously, in such a weak democratic system, many conservative character habits remained useful, like accepting the money workers were offered, and of course obeying what they were told. Some workers were even told who to vote for, or else lose their jobs.
So, it should be no surprise today, many liberals don't revere and honor the Constitution the same way many conservatives do. For them, the most important political character habit is to obey the Constitution as it's written, rather than as a tool for improving life here and now. Thus school children were normally taught to revere and praise the document as a work of political genius, but for us liberals it might better be called A Constitution for Wealthy White Men; for many decades now it's worked quite well for them. By the end of the 1800s, for example, it helped produce a very wealthy upper class, dubbed the Robber Barons by the popular press. The economic monopolies they built, like railroads and oil, often operated largely beyond competitive market forces, and so they often charged people whatever they wanted. In the 1880s Congress finally showed some liberal character aimed at increasing the public good; they passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act forbidding such monopolies, but what good did it do when even presidents didn't enforce it then or now? And, as we've seen, wealthy folks also built a very conservative Supreme Court, called the Lockner Court, to both justify and maintain their economic and racially undemocratic character habits; an income tax law was ruled unconstitutional in the 1890s, and the Court said separate but equal public facilities for racial minorities were legal. What's more, the centralized republican form of government the framers built also gave the all-important education powers to the states, thus making it easier for local conservative anti-democratic and racially discriminating character habits to remain firmly in place. As a result, such conservative habits like even killing Africans were easily passed from one generation to the next, as well as the control and domination of women and their quest for equal rights.
For most of the 1800s, and after 1960, a conservative model of character excellence was in place in most public schools. Again, the core character habit taught was obedience to teachers and their academic book assignments. Everyone was to sit at their desk, read quietly, and answer the questions the teacher or book asked. For the most part only Deweyan progressive schools in the early 1900s included more liberal kinds of character training, like active experimental learning, physically testing ideas for their results, and learning some business skills useful when they left school. On the other hand, many conservative teachers said such training should be part of the religious or private systems, and so many helped found scouting troops to teach such character habits; scouts should be loyal, faithful, obedient, helpful, morally straight, and so on.
As a result, many conservatives felt god had created their white race to rule over other peoples, just as many of the founders did, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Jay, and James Madison. With conservative schools and organizations teaching such character habits, if not openly then by example, they've been active ever since, helping keep our economy feudalistic and unstable, our political system favoring wealthy white males, and our public schools conservative as well. Stressful economic recessions have been a recurring event throughout American history for the masses, politicians now regularly go to work lobbying for corporations once they’re out of office, and children keep learning un-democratic character habits. In effect, then, even during the 1800s student character habits of docility and obedience continued allowing society to remain economically and socially divided, highly unstable, and especially dangerous for people of color. In fact most of the conservative land-owning founders did not have democratic character habits; after all, nothing in the Constitution said anything about equal rights and opportunities for everyone, or democracy; only a small minority of land-owning white males could even vote at first. And because all character habits are propulsive, most of them wanted an unequal feudalistic system to continue on, based on slave labor and run by themselves rather than what many called the mob. Hamilton's contempt for the people was even openly stated. As a result, then, of such conservative character habits, economic, political, and educational power continued being controlled and monopolized by small groups of wealthy white males.
Even a hundred years after the Civil War the country was still basically segregated into Caucasian and African communities, with whites still dominating them, often with terrorizing brute force. Because democratic character habits were still ignored in conservative public schools, minorities and women continued being denied equal rights and opportunities well into the 1900s. In such schools, liberal character habits were ignored, like learning to think intelligently for one's self, feeling what equal rights are like, helping those less fortunate with community service work, and in general actively building a more peaceful, stable, and humane society. Character excellence in conservative schools often meant reading what you were told to read, being psychically abused and threatened with failure if you didn't, and just looking out for yourself and your grades. Conservatives knew full well, democratic habits of equal power-sharing would make their own social power more difficult to keep. And what’s more, similar feelings of superiority still live in the minds of many wealthy folks who often justify their inherited wealth by believing they deserve to be rich simply because they’re superior. Even in the 1800s politicians, religious leaders, and the courts encouraged such character habits with mythical ideas like manifest destiny: god had destined Christians to rule from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and even all other races! Such conservative feelings also helped justify treating Native Americans like animals wherever they found them, and when not killing them, at least herding them onto desolate and dreary reservations. Teddy Roosevelt enjoyed hearing US soldiers were killing Filipinos by the thousands.
Since the Constitution was written, restricting minority (mob) voting rights was another important conservative character habit, and remains so to this day with restrictive voting rights laws. When, for example, Quaker feminist Susan Anthony voted in the national election of 1872 she was promptly arrested, convicted, and then refused to pay any fine no matter how small it was. Naturally replacing such conservative character habits with more liberal democratic ones took time and also a great amount of intelligently active social organizing.
Slowly, a Progressive Democratic movement began seeing some important democratic improvements in the early 1900s with the help of some new Constitutional amendments and state laws. After World War 2, however, conservatives began fighting back under the name of Senator Joe McCarthy’s communist hunt. For many years during the late 1940s and ‘50s even many liberals were labeled as communists, and even forbidden to work at their chosen profession. Many teachers too were made to take oaths supporting the Constitution; some that didn’t were even fired. Such conservative character habits were old indeed; Plato too felt atheists, skeptics, and non-believers were a threat to the public good. As a result of these different conservative and liberal character habits, ever since the conservative McCarthy era, life in the US has been a continuing kind of cultural warfare, with democrats demanding more equal rights and opportunities for all law-abiding people, even in education, and conservatives working against all such democratic forms of change.
Also, conservative newspapers added their support, helping elect more conservative politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Business corporations were already operating on a worldwide scale, and so economic organizations like the Trilateral Commission were created, making it easier to keep planning and working for more profits around the world. They were all supported by conservative character habits encouraged in our public schools, where students were still required to obey their teachers above all else. Again, in such schools sharing educational power democratically with students and parents was to be avoided as much as possible. Since Plato's time conservatives have known such liberal democratic character habits weaken conservative monopolistic economic, political, educational, and religious power, and after World War 2 atheists and agnostics were becoming a growing force. In the early 1960s atheist Madeline Murray O'Hare won a famous court case banning all payer in public schools! What need have skeptics for religious character habits like obedience? They know how to build excellent character habits without religious ideas; intelligent and enjoyable practice is all that’s needed to build habits of honesty, joyfulness, equal rights, and helpfulness. Small wonder, then, many conservatives today still see democratic character habits of equality as an attack on religion itself, and thus work to keep such habits of equality as weak as possible.
In the late 1950s and 60s conservative character habits were still being built in our public schools. Academic math and science facts became more important after the Russians launched Sputnik, even while segregated schools often needed to be integrated with federal troops. Wealthy folks, however, merely continued sending their children to the best private schools, where character habits like honesty and obedience to just laws were emphasized. Most poor folks, however, probably felt lucky their kids learned how to even read and write a little English while not be attacked for even going to all-white schools.
Since the 1960s, conservatives have kept working to promote their own educational model of character excellence, based mainly on learning more and more book-facts, and lately openly trying to break up teacher union power. Such unions often support Democratic candidates, and so make life more difficult for conservatives who want as few public institutions as possible. After all, the more public non-profit institutions we have, the less profit can be made from them. For example, in Louisiana this year (2012) wealthy out-of-state conservatives poured big money into local school board races, helping elect more people to grow their non-union, for-profit, conservative model of educational excellence with more so-called charter schools. Around the world such schools may be taking as much as $1 billion dollars from taxpayers, and often not making students any better prepared for life in the real world. What’s more, in such schools obedience to teachers, their academic facts, and standardized test scores are the be-all and end-all of educational excellence! We’ve already seen some results of that model.
Of course, many conservatives don’t want to talk about such results, but rather like to tell people how liberal habits of equality are a threat to Western civilization itself. More and more, however, it seems more liberals are rejecting such oversimplified and unfounded rhetoric; how does it hurt anyone to allow same-sex marriages? In any case, without such educational democracy, all of our serious social problems, like crime, unemployment, drug abuse, and cycles of imprisonment are made worse, not better. A recent article in the New York Times (8-23-13) offered some figures about their imprisonment problem. Mark Santora writes how the city spends over $165,000 of taxpayer money a year just to keep one inmate confined! And on a national level politicians spend about 50 Billion taxpayer dollars a year on our prisons. Imagine how more useful liberal schools could be built with just half that money!
Meanwhile, our conservative public schools continue demanding all students learn the same kinds of book facts, whether they’re interested in them or not! So, again, for us Deweyan liberals, the conclusion seems more obvious than ever: the less our public schools teach children more democratic character habits, and allow more character-building community service projects in our schools, such disruptive and stressful social results will continue growing worse, not better. To those conservatives who still feel they are, in fact, a master race practicing eternal and unchanging Truth, such social results are exactly what they want. Only libertarian kinds of conservatives say each of us has the right to build the character habits we want. Their weakness, however, stems from the fact they do not want our public schools teaching liberal kinds of character habits. We’ve seen how economically damaging to the public good are non-governmental libertarian kinds of ideas; they’re helped create a greatly divided society based on wealth and thus encouraged an addiction for more and more profits.
Liberal Character Habits Grow Slowly
Within such conservative schools, it should be fairly obvious why Africans, Native Americans, and women were kept as second-class citizens, and from getting the same jobs white kids were getting. When liberal character habits are kept from growing, social differences and inequality are easier to keep in place. For example, not until a more liberal Supreme Court was in place in 1954, with its more liberal character habits, did it finally overturn the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine established more than 50 years earlier. Of course, to conservatives that '54 ruling was the result of liberal activist judges, but of course by some strange Alice-in-wonderland logic the earlier ruling wasn't! Such was another example of how really important character habits are to social health and the public good. They're much more than just personal habits; in fact, they help build the moral fabric and heart of the nation itself, and so our neighborhood schools become one of the most important institutions of all! With such liberal habits war itself becomes less dangerous.
The growth of liberal US character habits went back to the early 1800s; its seeds, so to speak, were planted by people like Ben Franklin. He was a modern-day Democritus; he taught himself to see people as people, rather than belonging to one racial tribe or another. And so by Andrew Jackson's 1830s, a progressive educational movement followed a progressive political movement and began focusing on teaching very different kinds of character habits. Naturally the movement was stifled during the American Civil War and its aftermath, as all wars do, but liberal progress towards Franklin's more enlightened character ideas were kept alive and growing, especially in liberal New England, where Dewey himself grew up. As he did, in the 1860s a liberal educator in Massachusetts named Col. Francis Parker re-energized liberal character training with an active experimental learning model.
A few decades later Dewey too joined the tradition with his Lab School at the University of Chicago. With his help building a more naturalistic model of Behavioral psychology, a liberal model of character excellence grew into a worldwide movement in the 1920s and 30s. China, Japan, and Turkey all invited him to speak about progressive education, and his informative book Schools of Tomorrow offered some good examples of how it was working in places like Gary, Indiana, Chicago, and many other cities; in them more liberal kinds of character habits were being built. Even before he built the Lab School, recently freed slave Booker Washington also kept the movement growing in the late 1800s with his Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. There students learned practical skills, useful knowledge, and social involvement by building the institute itself! Students even learned how to make the bricks and build the buildings. And what’s more, personal health was such an important character habit, students were even required to carry a tooth brush with them and use it after each meal! No doubt, today many dentists would not be in favor of teaching such habits. In any case, with the continued growth of liberal and progressive democratic character habits, on-going class warfare here in the US became and remains a reality. Conservatives keep working to take more of the public’s money, rather than allow public schools to remain non-profit.
So, only recently, within the past century, have liberal kinds of character habits been forcefully challenging conservative ones. Are we to have a wealth-based feudalistic society, controlled by a few people largely for their own benefit, or a democratic one based on equal rights and focused on using our wealth to keep increasing the public good? For us liberal democrats, then, character excellence means knowing how to keep increasing the opportunities for all law-abiding citizens, respecting our just laws, and how to keep intelligently improving the social spaces we all share. If that weren't the case, computers would have character excellence too.
More importantly, within that liberal progressive movement, a new Behavioral model of psychology became another important educational tool. With its growth in the early 1900s, slowly more and more liberals began seeing children in a more positive light, as people like Franklin saw them. With its ideas about learning based on choice and rewards, liberal parents, pastors, and teachers continued working to rebuild and reshape negative kinds of Puritan psychology. In their schools students were regularly told those who disobeyed and sinned might suffer an eternity in hell. Slowly, however, more and more people saw how useful it was for children to enjoy what they studied, and learn about their world more actively, rather than getting hit by the teacher if they didn't sit at their desks and keep reading their books. (Tanner & Tanner, 42-50).
Another of Dewey's important books, Human Nature and Conduct, published in the early 1920s, also helped ground liberal character habits to a solid Behavioral psychology. It remains our most powerful psychological model to this day. It thus helped free liberal teachers from the old model of growing inbuilt mental faculties, and also from the conservative character habits of obedience to book-work. It focused more on making naturally impulsive student actions more intelligent and constructive with active and useful work projects. It took advantage of the constructive building energies and desires in pre-teens, helping build important feelings to give more depth and feeling to more abstract ideas taught in senior high, when the brain has reached its adult stage. After all, even conservative Plato realized most children could best learn to read around the age of 10 or 11. By then they also had more sense experience and feelings to give their ideas more depth and meaning. No doubt, a few students want to read earlier, but why make all students learn to read at the same time; at worst it’s undemocratic.
In effect, that book on Behavioral psychology, and the Progressive educational movement, promoted a kind of democratic educational Reformation. In such schools students and parents were liberated to choose what they wanted to learn, just as Protestants were liberated to direct their own religious growth in the 1500s! In such progressive schools students would thus learn a more liberal model of character excellence, based on working intelligently to keep improving their own weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits as well as working to build a better public good. Thus, active community service projects were celebrated, where students got to feel both their personal and social powers growing! Even if a student project was too ambitious and failed, it too was an important part of character excellence; it helped teach the lesson of learning the limits of one's power, as well as intelligently stepping back and making a new plan.
Dewey’s liberal educational model was another fine example of how modern experimental ethics and Behavioral psychology could be used to help teach liberal kinds of character habits. It also gave people some ideas to use for judging what their own neighborhood schools were doing, as well as help make suggestions for making them more liberal and democratic. No doubt, largely because of conservative work building their book-centered schools, progress in educating the public about Dewey’s liberal model of education has been very slow; immigrant populations have grown much faster than liberal schools have grown, and most parents are so busy making economic ends meet they have little time for learning about liberal education. As a result, most schools today still operate on a conservative book-centered model.
The Case for Community Service Projects
For thousands of years conservative upper class people have been taught to look down on learning practical kinds of knowledge and skills. In ancient Babylon and Egypt scholars normally studied the heavens hoping to learn more about what the gods wanted and worked for. Even much later, to aristocrats like Plato and Aristotle, practical and useful kinds of knowledge were merely menial, slavish, and much less than the best knowledge; to them the best knowledge was like the heavens, it was eternal and unchanging. Such arrogance and disrespect for natural kinds of knowledge not only show how psychically divided people were in the ancient world, but what a challenge it remains to start changing such feelings. Conservative Plato even sensed the corruptive danger of such work. The rulers in his closed cities were not to have anything to do with money or manual work; their job was basically to maintain the status quo of a closed and unchanging religious-based society. He voiced an ancient version of contempt for any kind of liberal democratic character habits when he said young people should never be allowed to do anything on their own, and to always wait to be told what to do! With that idea alone a feudalistic status quo, run from the top down, was justified as natural, normal, and best. So again, obedience was the dominant conservative character habit; the New Testament too says slaves should be obedient to their masters. For such conservative character ideas we Deweyan liberals have absolutely no respect.
Important movements like the Industrial Revolutions have helped change such feelings, but economic feudalism still helps separate people into different classes of rich and poor, even though great wealth couldn’t happen with poor workers. In any case, however, our largely conservative book-centered schools continue producing such negative feelings about knowledge and skills learned with active and intelligent community service work. As a result, far too many students are not learning the practical kinds of knowledge useful after they graduate, like how to set up and run, say, a plumbing, healthcare, or electrical business after they graduate high school. And of course profit-hungry colleges and universities want students who believe they need book-knowledge to really get a good paying job. College costs have gone up over 70% in the past 20 years, while the average income has gone down by thousands of dollars, thus making it more difficult for poor students to build a more productive and rewarding life for themselves!
Another important liberal character habit is learning more about how our own bodies work, as well as practical skills and knowledge useful in the real world. How many college graduates suddenly realize they are almost completely disconnected not only from themselves, and how to keep themselves healthy, but also from the world in general? Economic majors, for example, often don’t know how the world is actually working, much less how to make it better. They have little feeling for all the many weaknesses and excesses of under regulated corporate capitalism, much less how to make them more healthful, stable, and democratic.
And in conservative public schools even the important character habit of merely asking intelligent questions is often not encouraged. Books have become so arranged so as to provide all the questions students need to pass the next test and get a good grade. As a result, even the basic question of asking why a teacher gives everyone the same assignment when not everyone wants to learn such facts, is rarely, if ever, asked. If it were, it would mean the end of conservative educational models! Children might start revolting the same way slave classes revolted thousands of times before. In liberal schools, however, children are learning what they want to learn about, and also helping build constructive feelings for the neighborhood around them. After all, during vacations children are free to learn whatever they want, so why shouldn’t that model continue on in liberal schools?
If not, then students will come out of high school having few intelligently liberal character habits, like thinking independently and intelligently for themselves, looking into the future to see what knowledge and skills might be useful, learning what they'd really like to learn about and how it can help people, and what character habits are needed to make their educational dreams a reality. Should children really be made to believe they need 20 years of schooling before they can make a decent living and be socially useful? It seems our present educational system is doing more social harm than good when it encourages students to believe such ideas.
No doubt, there are some very promising signs of liberal character habits, like the Occupy Movement, and the Progressive Democratic movement, but how rapidly can such character habits grow without help from our public schools? As students of ancient history already know, the Greeks built a democratic society forming the basis of Western civilization with such active and constructive business habits. Their wide and extensive colony system, for example, helped build confident democratic character habits around the Mediterranean and Black Sea. So, again, why shouldn't public school students too learn more about our corporate world with community service projects, like which ones are helpful, and which ones aren’t? Aren’t such constructive and intelligent character habits and knowledge helpful for making money after high school, and then perhaps returning to college to take the courses they want, rather than the courses they’re told to take? Could it be some of our universities are more interested in profits than the public good?
Why shouldn’t such active and constructive character building projects be available to public school students in the form of constructive community projects? Such learning projects not only make school an active place, but also help grow feelings for what intelligent work is like; such work requires intelligent plan-making, as well as testing of ideas. Such projects would thus give students of all abilities and skills a chance to learn more while building worthwhile character habits of community betterment.
Such projects also provide a useful antidote to traditional conservative character habits of obedience and passivity. The more such intelligent character-building projects exist, the more students will learn to respect all kinds of practical and useful knowledge, rather than just book-centered ideas, and the less likely they’ll be to merely accept orders from others and not question them. With unquestioning character habits, and a lack of practice skills and knowledge, war have remained a viable alternative for centuries.
Perhaps the best argument for such constructive community projects is from ancient Greece itself, the foundational culture in Western civilization. As early as the 700s BCE, boatloads of people were sent out across the Mediterranean and Black Sea to found colonies for trading with native tribes in the region. There were no public schools in ancient Greece, but with the help of constructive building projects, like such colonies, the Acropolis in Athens, and of course theatres and temples in and around Greece, the world's first democracy evolved. Were the 2 events disconnected, or were they organically related to each other? In fact, such projects encouraged people to feel how important everyone is to social well-being and building the public good. Some 300 years later, in the 400s BCE, liberals were talking about ending slavery, a really radical idea at that time. After all, in the real world both slaves and free artisans worked with their hands to create works of lasting beauty, as well as build the all-important feelings of equality every democracy needs to blossom and survive. Some slaves in fact became quite wealthy, especially those who made military equipment, and at the same time wealthy people were socially pressured to use their wealth for improving everyone's lives; everyone should pay their fair share. Even though much of such constructive work and character building was financed by taxes from their colonies, such work increased everyone's pride in their city, even before Socrates willingly drank some poison hemlock in 399 BCE. Liberal Democritus was merely one liberal democrat amount thousands who felt all people should have the same equal rights to guide their own growth and learning.
Today then, such liberal constructive character building neighborhood work projects in our schools would no doubt continue strengthening democratic character habits of equality. So, why shouldn’t more active, intelligent, and constructive character-building projects be a bigger part of our public schools? After all, isn’t connecting more with people still an important part of healthy life in the real world? Even in poorer school districts children can begin feeling how useful, educational, and rewarding such work can be. For example, they can begin learning what an intelligent character habits means by helping plan, cook, and serve meals both in and outside of school, and thus start learning about nutrition and health long before they begin reading about chemistry and biology in high school. They can also learn how to make useful school furniture in a wood shop, as well as painting and doing simple plumbing repairs, all under professional supervision of course, also laying a foundation for more abstract studies in high school. To continue training teachers merely to hand out more academic assignments, and isolate them from other kinds of practical and useful knowledge merely perpetuates the ancient conservative habit of isolating practical from abstract kinds of ideas and knowledge. And what’s more, such practical knowledge and character habits are useful all through life, even to those headed to college after high school. Won't they too have broken pipes and housing problems, as well as beautification challenges both at home and in their community? And, doesn’t such useful knowledge and skills allow one’s precious dollars to last longer and be used for more important things like recreation and vacations?
Another important social result becomes likely when schools start teaching such liberal kinds of community service projects. Such projects will also help break down another artificial separation now existing between older and younger students. Today it’s rare to see older students helping younger ones with learning more skills and knowledge, right? However, with such active kinds of work younger students would interact more frequently with older, more mature and helpful students, thus freeing more education dollars to pay for community service supplies. And, that way more of a community spirit would evolve with the help of such helpful projects. It would thus be easier for older students to build more caring feelings for younger students, and so feel less of a need to bully anyone. Without such interactions it's easier to feel bullying younger students is acceptable, and feeling they really need a gang to protect them from others. In fact, that interactive educational model was practiced in rural one-room schools decades ago, and yet in how many schools has it become almost extinct?
So, why not just imagine for a few moments some of the beautiful works of social art our public school students could create if more community improvement projects became a normal part of our public schools? For example, more public parks would be one result. Also, why shouldn’t students be allowed to keep beautifying our dull and drab subways, sidewalks, and community gardens with such constructive work? How else can children begin growing important feelings for creative art unless they’re allowed to practice them in school? Often in homes parents are simply too busy to spend much time teaching such useful character habits. Also, they would help increase feelings of social pride, democratic equality, and intelligent building and thus help make young folks less vulnerable to becoming pawns in local gang wars or corporate games of fleecing the public! In short, wouldn't it be more healthful for everyone, teachers, students, and parents to see more children actively working on constructive community projects, even helping make every neighborhood park as beautiful and dynamic as New York's Central Park, except of course without all the muggers; even one of them can just ruin your whole day.
And of course for those who also like to focus on helping foreign students learn more about what democratic schools look and act like, such projects will again play a very important role. Really now, how can we become a greater model of what democracy can mean to poor and undereducated foreign students when we don’t even practice such habits in our own conservative book-oriented schools? In fact much of the world is still feudal and undemocratic at best. So, the more people and students allow the US to continue supporting military or undemocratic dictators around the world, the more vulnerable we all become to hateful and dangerous foreign attacks like 9-11. It's yet another reason to build more constructive community projects with our public school students.
More Reasons For Teaching Liberal Character Habits
Who needs some more reasons to start making our conservative schools more liberal? Well, during the early 1900s, a progressive and liberal democratic educational model reached a new level of achievement, thanks to Dewey’s work. With it democratic feelings and habits spread to millions of young people around the US. And, as President Roosevelt’s Works Project Administration continued putting people to work in the 1930s, they began seeing there's more to life than merely working for some greedy profit-obsessed corporation and getting little for it as well. In fact, after the Great Depression and World War 2, as the armed services were integrated and more Africans were trained as leaders, the stage was set for another major educational challenge in the 1950s: breaking down the artificial education barrier between whites and Africans, as well as all the social barriers whites had built, like voting restrictions and housing segregation. Thus with the Supreme Court finally overturned the 'separate but equal' ruling of 1896, the way became more open for a civil rights movements still working to this day. Such important democratic work was greatly helped with more liberal kinds of character habits! Today gay, lesbian, transgender, and bi-sexual students, as well religious skeptics, continue their quest for equal educational rights. And, no doubt, such equality is now making it easier for more parents and students to begin demanding a larger voice in guiding the growth of their own knowledge, skills, and character habits. All such democratic improvements depend on one important character habit: learning how to learn useful knowledge intelligently.
The Vietnam War protest movement also was another major example of how strong such character habits were becoming in the 1960s. As a misguided and ill-advised government was sending tens of thousands of young Americans to fight and die in little and harmless Vietnam, many thousands of students took to the streets and demanded an end to such a senseless and destructive war. To this day many Vietnamese continue suffering from birth defects caused by chemical weapons. The more our liberal news organizations photographed the war's brutality, and sent pictures into American homes every night, the more young folks became convinced obedience to the government and its war was not only a right, but a duty! What right did the US have to send over 1,000,000 people to their deaths, while maiming millions more just to prevent people from getting the freedom to run their own country the way they felt was best? For me too it was a big part of my early adulthood education. And it seemed to be a nationwide wake-up call, so to speak, of how dangerous politicians could be the public good when they waged war for really no good reason and justification. What’s more, the world has only become more liberal and democratic since then.
Thanks to liberal character-building events like that, more people have become more conscious of the danger conservative educational models can be; blind obedience and submission can make like more dangerous for everyone. As a result, today more people than ever before know that fact; they realized such conservative character habits are not, in fact, defenders of absolute Truth, but rather defenders of the quest for more and more profits and social power! Feeling my country is always right is merely another form of conservative obedience!
In short, for millions of liberals around the world, almost the entire conservative model of character excellence has lost its believability and respect! The quest for more and more profits, fed by obedient and accepting workers, helps perpetuate a feudalistic status quo. No doubt, conservative anti-democratic habits are still alive and strong, not only here in the US but around the world too, but thanks to our Behavioral psychologies, more people know all such conservative character habits are organic and changeable. The recent financial meltdown of 2008 has also been another huge eye-opener, so to speak, for millions more who've recently lost their homes and jobs: conservative character habits are not the best habits upon which to base a stable and secure democratic society. They see student debt at an all-time record high, our prisons full of undereducated people who don’t have the skills to make a decent living, and don’t even know how to begin building better and more intelligent character habits of their own! In Chicago where I grew up, some neighborhood gangs are now openly terrorizing and killing innocent adults and kids on the streets, no doubt seen by many conservatives as proof of racial inferiority. A more reasonable explanation is to simply point to the lack of liberal character training in our own public schools.
Those are just some of the personal and social results of our conservative book-oriented schools. Many students coming out of them are convinced the best habit to have is knowing how to build as large a bank account as possible, keep hounding the government to de-regulate as much of the economic sector as possible, and keep allowing profits to remain the be-all and end-all of business and life. Another wonderful article by Ellen Brown at Truthdig.com, entitled Not Too Big to Jail: Eliot Spitzer Is Wall Street's Worst Nightmare (8-21-2013), details how the conservative Bush 2 administration actively worked to keep states from better regulating bank actions dangerous to the public good. It seems the bigger banks become, the bigger menace they become to society.
Reforming Education: A Liberal Model
Because so many parents, students, and even teachers are grossly undereducated about liberal character habits, and how best to teach them in public school students, education reforms are often merely cosmetic and shallow. Conservative politicians especially love to say reforms like charter schools are the solution to poor test scores and student incompetence. As we’ll see in a later section, however, such reforms remain within a conservative book-centered framework, rather than in a liberal student-centered model. Thus, people hear about such reforms as adding more academic classes and hours to the school day, making teachers responsible for student standardized test scores, and so on. They are all reforms within a conservative model, and that remains their great weakness!
As a result, children and parents are still denied the freedom to even think about making our public schools student-centered, much less actually working to make it a reality. So, in conservative schools students are still threatened with failure and leaving school merely because they’re not interested in learning the academic facts teachers are now required by law to make children learn. Even Albert Einstein was once labeled dull and stupid by one of his conservative teachers just because he wasn't interested in anything but math and science. For most of US history conservatives have pretty much had the power to teach their kinds of character habits to students, but things seem to be changing in so many different ways. More and more people are seeing more of the weak and unhealthful personal and social results conservative schools help produce, like boredom, obesity, ignorance about how best to earn an honest living, and how to intelligently improve dangerous habits like gang membership and drug use. More people are thus more interested in learning about a more liberal model of character development, and what’s more, are willing to begin experimenting with make such ideas a reality.
Today, more and more people are realizing our schools need more liberal democratic character habits if democracy itself is to keep growing stronger and life is to become better for everyone. We live in the richest nation on earth, and yet more and more people are forced to live on the streets and see their lives become a series of painful events, while rich folks figure out more ways to hide their money from tax collectors in offshore accounts. As our very costly prisons continue overflowing and sucking away more and more tax money, as drug abuse keeps growing, as do health problems and unemployment, more and more people are realizing our schools could be doing more to teach more intelligent kinds of character habits. For example, wouldn't teaching students what foods do inside their bodies help build the desire to eat better and more intelligently? Such useful kinds of knowledge are the crucial first step to actually building a healthier society, and yet such knowledge is often not even talked about, much less formally taught. As a result, too many children are coming out of high school with practically no real knowledge about their own bodies, much less how to keep intelligently improving them. So, profit-obsessed food corporations keep making good tasting food, rather than healthful good.
Are we so naïve to believe students won't teach themselves the math, history, and language skills they need to work successfully when they’re hired? After all, don't most of us learn with on-the-job training, and from verbal instruction rather than reading facts? With each job I had I learned a little more academic knowledge. In truth, the world's oldest democracy is still not very democratic, and probably won’t be for at least another century, thanks to the educational monopoly conservative character habits still have on our public schools. So the question becomes: are we merely at the dawn of a democratic world, and where liberal schools keep strengthening our democracy, or are we merely at a stage where conservative book-oriented public schools become even stronger than they are now? The more parents, students, and teachers continue learning about liberal kinds of character habits, the easier it becomes for liberal schools to be built and stay functioning.
Highly stressful economic events like continuing lower wages and non-union work help prevent more meaningful liberal school reform. With our recent economic chaos people are still almost forced to keep the bank from taking their house, keep their job, and find a way not to pay outrageous prices for food and gasoline. Thus, more and more people are feeling the obnoxious results of teaching only conservative kinds of character habits in schools, where students are required to keep accepting academic book assignments. Thus, as adults, they keep allowing big corporations to continue a greedy quest for larger and larger profits. Profits are fine; there's nothing wrong with making a profit. But when it becomes an obsession allowed by people, then it endangers everyone's life.
For us liberals, character habits learned in conservative schools continue serving the wealthy upper class, rather than the public good. The more wealth is concentrated, the easier it becomes to control social institutions, both political and educational, and so many wealthy people continue supporting a conservative educational model. With more liberal character habits, however, it becomes easier to start focusing on improving all their unhealthful results: overcrowded and inhumane prisons, illegal drug use, unhealthful diet habits, expensive welfare programs, an expensive and overpriced medical system, a tax system favoring the wealthy, and also improving a rather un-naturalistic school system teaching mainly docile and passive conservative character habits.
In short, democratic equality remains the most intelligent antidote to any form of concentrated and dangerous feudal power. Losing their homes and being perpetually in debt has definitely helped millions of people realize there’s some serious educational reform work in front of us, which only more liberal schools can best solve. In effect, then, this is a call to start building more liberal schools right in our own neighborhoods, here and now! And the more that happens, the less need they'll be for students to commit crime, drug abuse, build unhealthful habits, and become unemployed after graduation. Are we liberals in fact seeing what it’s like for a nation to rot from the inside when conservative character habits are taught in public schools, much like Czarist Russia rotted all through the 1800s with similar kinds of habits? There came a point during World War 1 when enough people finally stood up and ended their feudal aristocratic system. Their educational weakness, however, lay in not knowing what democratic habits feel like, so they could demand their practice. As a result, soon another form of political tyranny replaced it -- Joseph Stalin's Communist Party. Much the same thing happened in Germany with Hitler’s Nazi Party.
Let's hope we don't need another Great Depression and its great social chaos, or a military coup, to convince people in the US there are much more intelligent ways to keep improving the public good. Their public schools can begin teaching children what it feels like to begin intelligently building liberal democratic character habits even in the 1st grade. When have you ever seen signs like Respect Just Laws in 1st grade classrooms, or Helping Others Is The Highest Good? It's either that or see more and more young folks continue wasting their energy and time on learning largely useless academic facts, seeing which neighborhood gang they should join, what kind of drugs to take and sell, how many guns to carry, keep eating foods which will eventually make their lives a living hell and a burden to society, and how they can steal what they haven't honestly earned. Or if they live in more affluent neighborhoods, how to cheat to get good grades, where best to pawn their parent's jewels, how to use one credit card to pay off another, and pay off politicians and police to help them keep as much of their money as possible! In short, is there any more important work than making our public schools formally teach liberal character habits?