Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1929-12-08
SCHOOLS TACKLE PROBLEM
OF CHARACTER EDUCATION
District Faces Question as Result of
Recent Controversy Which Divided
Education Board.

| general ideas have been emotionalized,' "
they say, has no necessary relation to
! the control of conduct The extent to
! which individuals may be affected
| either for better or worse is not known.
but there seems to be evidence that
such effects as may result are not gen.
orally good and are sometimes unwhole-
some.
THE large place occupied by the
situation in the suggestion and con-
troll of conduct, not only in its larger
aspects such as the example of other
pupils, the personality of the teacher,
etc., but also in its more subtle aspects.
such as the nature of the opportunity
to deceive, the kind of material or tests
on which 1t is possible, the relation of
the child to this material, and so on,
points to the need of a careful educa-
tional analysis of all such situations for
the purpose of making explicit the ma
ture of the direct or honest mode of
response In detail, so that when the
child is placed in these situations there
may be genuine opportunity for him
to practice direct methods Of adjust
ment."
Mistakes Are Pointed Out.
One of the great mistakes in the past
IN the consideration of character train
Education Association, is the tendency
toward too rigid classification of char
acter. That is, the boy or girl who
steals is naturally characterized as dis
honest and unworthy of confidence
but this may be far from the case. The
pupil who would steal without COM
junction might die rather than tell a
lie or cheat at lessons, just as the SOL
der who would run in the face of the
or offr1Nt AA ,Aekn
In countless other situations. The bank
president who cheats at poker or on
his golf score is by no means necessarily
dishonest custodian of other peoples
money while the SanctimoniouS fellow
in the same position who holds up his
hands in holy horror at the very Sug-
gestion of falsehood may be crooked as
a snake with his accounts. ..
When such facts are considered, those
interested in character education point
out, the subject becomes almost in
f1nitely complicated with the only hope
OF outstanding success depending almost
entirely on series of objective tests to
determine the characteristic ethical re-
actions of the individual Then each
pupil must be considered as an indi-
vidual case to be dealt with by a series
OF especially designed Situations"
But such procedure would be long
and costly with neither the personnel
nor the technique available. Some
thing of this nature was attempted in
the D. c. schools last year by Harold
Fyfe, principal of the Gales special
school, with boys who offered specific
moral problems, but he operated with
his own technique which depended to
no small degree on the personality of
the teacher.
Neither Held Unified Traits.
Neither deceit nor honesty" say May
and Hartshorne. ARE unified character
traits but rather specific functions of life
situations. Most children will deceive
in certain situations and not in others.
Even cheating in class room is rather
high specific, for a child may cheat on
an arithmetic test and not on a spelling
test. Whether a child will practice de-
ceit in any given situation depends in
part on his intelligence, age, home
background and the like, and in part on
the nature Of the situation itself and
his peculiar relation to it."
Striking examples of character edu-
cation as introduced in American
public schools, as furnished by the files
of, the National Education Association,
are the programs in the high schools
of Los Angeles and Oakland, Calf,
which work almost entirely by the
situation" method. Boys and girls are
conditioned against immoral behavior
by having their environment so ar
ranged as to make this the unnatural
adjustment. The consensus is that little
can be accomplished in the line of
character education by the traditional
teaching" by books or precepts. It
must be along lines partly embodied in
the practice Of such organizations as
the Boy Scouts, which make use Of the
gang tendencies. of boys. which in the
past used to result in hoodlumism and
turn them into constructive channels.