Each chapter in this edited collection makes a statement within the fields of moral and character education; collectively the editors’ choice to assemble them implies their statement about those fields. For veteran scholars or new students, the individual essays successfully provide a solid overview of current trends and debates. It is a valuable, highly accessible text for instructors who discuss character and moral education in their courses. Alongside this success, however, the editors undersell the collective impact of these chapters and too hastily overlook moral education’s disciplinary canon: hence leaving too much for readers to infer about their combined purpose. The editors’ introduction is a brief two-page statement that today’s educational culture of high-stakes standardized testing places too much emphasis on student achievement, at the expense of diminishing the school’s role in nurturing social and political life. The editors therefore urge that ‘[e]ducational reform must be guided by moral principles’ (p. xi) and society return its attention to ‘the moral mission of schools’ (p. xii). While I agree with this initiative, and overall recommend this book, there remain some shortcomings that cannot go unnoticed. I make the following observations to guide both students and instructors through these issues.
The title names this book’s two parts. Although the editors do not explicitly state so, the ‘Character Education’ (CE) part appears to be designed to disabuse readers of any stock they might place in this movement’s dominant trends. All save 2 of its 14 chapters are reprints from other sources. The first five begin with Bennett and Delattre’s well-known 1978 criticism of Lawrence Kohlberg’s work as improperly ‘libertarian’, and then move to Thomas Lickona’s and Marvin Berkowitz’s current initiatives. It can be said, without judging Lickona’s and Berkowitz’s complete repertoire, that the selections which represent their work are mainly descriptive efforts which appear to be written for a general audience and focus on application over self-reflexive critique. They essentially reduce to lists of what their titles advertise: CE’s ‘seven issues’, ‘eleven principles’, and ‘what good schools do’. The remaining nine chapters then set off with in-depth scholarly criticisms which, through various disciplinary lenses and scholarly methods, demonstrate that this prevailing conception of CE is philosophically vacuous, politically insidious, and meets much student resistance. This is the place to find a well-rounded set of criticism.
Where in Part 1 the editors strongly imply a negative assessment of CE, Part 2 suggests a positive proposal for moral education (ME) initiatives. Recognising ME’s multi-dimensionality, this part apparently tries to embrace as much as possible, ranging from liberal education to critical pedagogy, feminism, anti-racism, care theory, moral atmosphere, and peace, ecological, and religious education. The assembly of these various perspectives demonstrates the breadth of scholarly and practical approaches to moral education and hence underscores education’s inevitable moral feature. If this is the chief aim, then the editors have successfully accomplished it. If there are weaknesses in this section, they arise in two areas concerning ME’s foundational theory. Although the editors make a one-sentence statement that they wish to move past the Kohlbergian cognitive-developmental approach (p. xii), including some primary source or relevant secondary commentary would still be helpful—especially for new students—to show Kohlberg’s major contribution to this field. Since Bennett’s and Delattre’s argument critiques Kohlberg’s theory, this inclusion seems warranted for balance. More importantly, appreciating Nel Noddings’ chapter ‘Teaching Themes of Care’—itself a general audience paper and not selected from her deepest theoretical work—as a conceptually distinct response to theorists like Kohlberg is next to impossible because of this absence. And no less important is how the editors treat the topic of moral atmosphere. Marcia Peck’s chapter makes an important signal that school climate must be considered before any CE or ME intervention, but unfortunately it does so while overlooking Clark Power’s and Ann Higgins’ (among others) moral atmosphere work with Kohlberg that began in the 1970s. The editors generally do collect important new perspectives on ME, but in these two places they would benefit from returning to its foundational theory.
In the overall assessment there is much to recommend about this book. There are excellent scholarly chapters and a sufficient sample of pedestrian articles that provide suitable fodder for a well-qualified instructor to lead a moral education course. I use ‘well-qualified’ for the same reason I use words like ‘appear’ consistently throughout this review, however, because some further expert guidance is necessary for determining exactly what purpose the editors had when choosing these articles. This collection unfortunately lacks an introduction of the depth necessary to describe the editors’ intent and methods in selection and arrangement. The CE section especially calls for this, for without the added value of knowing the editors’ methods one might simply look to the original sources and create their own anthology. Moreover, the way in which CE is presented for critique raises questions that the editors should have addressed upfront. There is sufficient practical description of CE in pedestrian terms, but there is no solid presentation of CE theory which anticipates or responds to its chorus of scholarly critics. Hence, it appears as though the editors have set up a weak CE so that a mightier scholarship can knock it down. However, have they really made a straw person out of CE? I infer not. The editors have chosen CE’s leading scholarly proponents, for one thing, and, most importantly, a review of current literature finds that these proponents tend not to concern themselves with responding to critics like the ones assembled here. If this is truly the state of the field, then it would be helpful for the editors to say so. Besides leaving the issues of ‘weak CE’ and ‘foundational theory’ hanging, the editors also do not leave sufficient clues as to how they see the field today. So in the end, I find that this book is a most valuable and interesting bouquet of chapters within the field that unfortunately lacks a centrepiece that makes an editorial announcement about it.
© 2012, Graham P. McDonough