By Dr. Rushworth M. Kidder, Founder and President, the Institute for Global Ethics

Ours is an age of inordinate moral confusion. Every day’s headlines report big-picture dilemmas with no clear solution: international terrorism, regional
warfare, global warming, energy shortages, corporate scandals, nuclear proliferation, endemic corruption.

At a more granular level, this bewilderment appears in a litany of national and local ethical lapses, where values are subverted, integrity is abandoned, and moral courage is given short shrift.

Little wonder, then, that parents are searching for schools where character matters, where values are in focus, and where moral reasoning and ethical
behavior are central to the educational culture. Parents often find those qualities in the nation’s private schools, so many of which are deliberately
trying to achieve a culture of responsibility, respect, honesty, fairness. A central aspect of the appeal of private education—a key reason that parents
willingly pay for an alternative to what, in North America, is available free in every community—lies in the commitment of private education to
developing students of character.

That commitment is not easily maintained. As our nation emerges from several decades of determinedly values-neutral education, efforts to weave ethics and integrity into the fabric of education still meet skepticism. The arguments against it are as varied as they are trite. Aren’t we already doing this? Isn’t all ethics relative anyway?

Are you saying my child is unethical? Are you trying to impose your values on my family? Whose values are you trying to teach, anyway? If there is one characteristic that seems to unite students currently opting into private pre-collegiate education, it is that they and their parents have thought about these questions. So have the schools they patronize. While private educators would be the last to claim that they have found the infallible
formula for educating students of integrity, they are the first to tell you that the quest is on their minds, that they are constantly looking for progress, and that the game is very much worth the candle. The real question for them is not, “Should we be doing this?,” but rather “How can we do it better?.”

That was the question that impelled the Institute for Global Ethics to undertake this study. Working closely with the National Association of Independent Schools and the Canadian Association of Independent Schools, and funded by the John Templeton Foundation and The Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund, we set out to learn what constitutes “best practice” in North American private education in relation to teaching character and integrity. To do so, we closely examined 10 “schools of integrity”—institutions widely viewed by their peers as singularly effective in educating for
character and ethics.

This study reports on our work. It condenses hours of on-site interviewing and piles of documentation into 10 key findings. It does not pretend to present the final word on the subject. But it lays out the broad headings under which, we think, the future directions of character education will develop both in the laboratory of private education and in the broad reaches of our public school systems. And it provides hallmarks and frameworks for educators looking for effective ways of educating students to address the moral perplexities of the 21st century.

Copyright 2007 The Institute for Global Ethics

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