Schools should stop telling children to be nice and start teaching them to be good.
So writes Diana Senechal at DoubleX. Reviewing Charles Murray’s recent book Real Education, she seizes on an unremarked upon quote in which the controversial author observes that schools “tell children to be nice but not how to be good. It tells children to be happy but does nothing to help children think about what happiness means.” When Murray is right, she notes, “he is awfully right.”
Being nice is something of a bromide in education. It’s enshrined in KIPP’s “Work Hard. Be Nice” slogan, and is the focus of a lot of group activity that revolves around “pleasant, uncontroversial subject matter” with familiar social messages “Being good is more complex than being nice,” Diana observes. “It requires that we recognize our own faults and complexities; that we forgive each other; that we say what we think; that we make difficult decisions and face the consequences.”
When we read literature and history, we begin to glean what it means to be good. We see how people with the best intentions can fail; how people struggle with conflicting desires and values and make the best choices they can; how people overcome their limitations when put to the test. From works like Antigone, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Chekhov’s short stories, we learn about selfishness, cruelty, cowardice, and confusion, as well as grace, generosity, and patience. We come to see elements of all these traits in ourselves.
When the curriculum has substance, “students learn not only how to behave, but how to think and feel deeply,” Diana writes. ”They come to understand what humans are made of, what choices we have, and what reason, artistic gift, and imagination can do.” By contrast, when the emphasis is on group work for its own sake, ”it becomes more important for students to work together than to learn something important.”
If we only teach children to be nice, they will be at a loss when life calls for more than niceness. They will be at a loss when faced with problems—intellectual, practical, or emotional—that they have to solve on their own. And when the niceness wears out, they will reach for the next thing they know, the knee-jerk reaction. Murray is right: There is a wide gulf between being nice and being good—and while no curriculum can produce goodness, an excellent curriculum can give students a vision of what it might be.
While I’m inclined to agree with Diana, I think we should add that the power of literature to breed goodness depends on very good (in Diana’s sense) teachers. One of the 20th-century’s most wounding disappointments, especially for humanists, was the failure of literature to prevent or even temper the atrocities of the Holocaust. The Nazis celebrated Goethe and Shakespeare. They puffed themselves up as great patrons of the arts. The problem, of course, was that they drew the wrong messages from the works they admired. An entire Nazi-era journal was devoted to Shakespeare as history’s most German poet.
It’s sometimes a tricky business to draw virtue out of literature, but it certainly is important.
I also want to add that, although Murray makes a good point in the quotation Diana selects, the guy still creeps me out.
I remember when my mother wrote an old saying on the first page of my new autograph book: “Be good, my child, and let who will be clever.” That was at least 50 years ago, and I still remember. Of course, the idea was regularly reinforced, at home, at church, at school and in the community. Back in that era, being good and exercising self-control was an absolute good. I don’t remember happiness or self-esteem being important.
I don’t understand the need to throw KIPP under the bus for their slogan, when they’re actually successful in doing what the commenter and the original author really want. Other than singling them out, where exactly are these schools teaching students to be “nice”? Most public schools should have a slogan of “Don’t Work, Be Present.” Is that better?
The point of collaborative work like the Reader’s Workshop model has nothing to do with teaching students to be nice to each other. They learn to work together because that’s what people do in the real world to solve problems. Also, they tend to have to teach each other because this mythical “knowledgeable teacher” doesn’t really know how to teach them anything. Why does it seem both the commenter and author would prefer teachers lecturing at the students most of the time? What a brilliant strategy for solving our educational crisis that is! Just because districts don’t know how to use or model collaborative structures doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea.
Children learn how to behave from a curriculum rich in classic literature? The idea that schools should teach only/mostly “classic” literature pops up in all kind of ridiculous arguments, but I’ve never heard anyone argue that students aren’t good because they failed to read such substantive content. Children learn to behave from the models of their parents, teachers, and the social mores of the community around them. To suggest otherwise is just ridiculous.
Is this really what passes for problem solving our nation’s education problems these days? No wonder we’re so far from fixing anything.
I think you’re misreading Ms. Senechal. She’s not throwing KIPP under a bus, nor is she suggesting that children “learn to behave from a curriculum rich in classic literature.” It’s not about learning to “behave” but learning how to conduct oneself. And why.
And I am not even sure that literature necessarily breeds goodness–but it does allow us to consider certain moral questions more deeply and to become aware of our traits, temptations, and longings. Look at Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet–is he doing the right thing in helping the star-crossed lovers? He himself does not know. He sees the ambivalence of good and evil:
O, mickle is the powerful grace, that lies
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities;
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live,
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good, but, strained from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;
And vice sometime’s by action dignified.
What a great passage for students to consider, discuss, and memorize! The passage will not make anyone good, but it does suggest–in eight powerful lines of iambic pentameter–how complex the world is, and how good and evil can turn into each other.