A Question of Right and Wrong

No sooner had Marshall High School senior Kyu Lee ducked out of an ethics and career course a few minutes early than his classmates began hollering for justice.

“They wanted consequences,” said Maggie Lapre, who instructs the experimental “Life Skills for the 21st Century” course designed to teach students right from wrong. “So I asked Lee for an apology, an hour of detention and for him to meet with a counselor.”

At first, Lee protested: “What did I do wrong? I didn’t hurt anybody.”

But Lapre explained that meeting a counselor would mean missing a film the class would be tested on. Therefore, she told him: “You hurt yourself; you lost a test grade.”

Students across the nation are increasingly being taught that their actions have consequences--not only for them, but often for others. The Los Angeles Unified School District has waded into the potentially dicey political and religious waters of trying to instill character by launching the pilot course that aims to blend old-fashioned core values and civic virtues with career planning.

By June, Life Skills, which was intended to replace the district’s 20-year-old virtues-free Education Career Planning program, will be mandatory for all ninth-graders. Next year, an amended version of the program will be offered to sixth-graders as an elective course.

So far, 125 credentialed instructors have undergone the three days of training needed to teach the 20-week course, which emphasizes universally shared values in life and the workplace. Steering clear of religious doctrines, topics include student life, self-identity, relationships and community.

“When I first suggested the idea of teaching virtues to kids five years ago, it was a real hard sell,” said Suzanne Blake, who co-wrote the Life Skills curriculum. “Most faculty maintained that morals and values-based instruction did not belong in public schools.”

That attitude softened after revelations of an affair between President Clinton--who has endorsed character education--and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and after a spate of schoolyard shootings over the last two years.

Jumping On the Bandwagon

Now, fearing an erosion of values among students, Los Angeles Unified has joined hundreds of school districts across the nation that have scotched the long-held notion that such so-called eternal verities as courage, honor, hope, compassion and self-discipline should remain the domain of family and religion.

Some form of character development is being taught in all 50 states. Georgia and Alabama have made such programs mandatory. An awards program called National Schools of Character recognizes 10 campuses each year that promote initiatives that yield positive results in student behavior and academic performance.

The Character Counts! Coalition, operated under the auspices of the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Marina del Rey, is a partnership of nearly 400 national and regional organizations and school districts that promotes model core values acceptable to liberals and conservatives alike.

In Los Angeles Unified, Evangelina Stockwell, assistant superintendent of intergroup relations, which oversees Life Skills, said: “Our ultimate goal is to produce adult team players who can make critical ethical decisions at home and in the workplace, people with the social skills to transcend ethnic politics and work toward a safer, more harmonious Los Angeles.”

To be sure, there are plenty of teachers and administrators who regard the subject as distressingly “touchy-feely.” Others dismiss the character movement as just another educational fad.

Los Angeles Board of Education member David Tokofsky fretted that Life Skills lacks a textbook.

“All that’s missing is a formal reading list,” he said. “Given that this is an idea stretching from the Bible to Cesar Chavez and Desmond Tutu, why not have kids read selections from these great thinkers?”

Battles over teaching morality and values in public schools have been waged sporadically since the Supreme Court banned classroom prayer in 1963.

In the 1970s and early ‘80s, the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal prompted a surge of interest in injecting public school curricula with personal standards of conduct. Before long, however, schools were flocking back to basics, and the national temperament shifted toward self-centeredness during a period that came to be known as the “Me Generation.”

Now, governors from Colorado, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, South Dakota and Utah would side with Kevin Ryan, former director of the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University, who says it can’t hurt to steep daily lessons in references to time-tested codes of conduct that cross religious lines.

“We’ve had 20 years of seeing the impact of schools that took a passive approach to values and character,” Ryan said. “There’s been an explosion of out-of-wedlock births and fatal Columbine High School events, even as students picked up values from television and movies instead of Thomas Jefferson and Socrates.”

Establishing a Value System

At the Philosophical Research Society headquarters just up the street from Marshall High, President Obadiah Harris, a former director of community education at Arizona State University, was bullish over the resurgence of enthusiasm for the concept that “education must revitalize our culture with wisdom, which is simply common sense.”

“All the great philosophers taught that philosophy has no meaning without application in life,” he said. “Human welfare, for example, is not just some abstract philosophical notion to be considered outside the province of public schools. It is an important value that gives meaning to life.”

Reforming society through ethical behavior was on the minds of Marshall High teacher Julie Manno’s 40 students as they noisily broke up into groups to identify behaviors associated with a code of ethics they devised that included respect, honesty, love, trust and responsibility.

“I get a sense of relief from my kids that there really is a right thing to do,” Manno said. “In an era when there are fewer role models they can count on, that code of ethics they are putting together is actually a reflection of their newest heroes: their own best selves.”

Marshall student Analyn Terre, 15, said she already has used classroom understandings of respect and self-identity to resolve a pressing family dilemma. Terre said she had been “terribly troubled” by the “enormous personal and financial sacrifices” her mother had been making so that she could participate in nearly a dozen after-school activities ranging from drill team to the debate club.

“I knew all these activities would help me in the long run,” she said. “But when I weighed that against what it was costing my mother, I decided to drop half of them. When my mother asked me why I did that, I just said, ‘Oh, they’re not all that interesting.’

“I feel a lot better,” she added, “because it was the right thing to do. It was good.”

Kyu Lee, 17, would testify to that.

“If we don’t get things right, wrong becomes a habit that can affect our future,” he said. “I should never have left class without permission.”