 As students and teachers across the country head back to school this month, hopes run high for a year of academic flourishing (those high-stakes tests still far in the distance). Schools employing strong content-based curricula or the gold standard Core Knowledge Sequence have a leg-up on this goal. Their meaty language arts, history, geography, math, science, and fine arts programs feed a very real hunger for solid knowledge (not vapid fluff) in a voracious student population.
But why were the Founders insistent on “virtue” as the necessary companion to knowledge? And what is virtue? How does it differ from values? Think of it this way: the difference between a value and a virtue is the difference between “want” and “should.” Anything can be a “value.” I can value cunning, uniformity, or ethnic purity. Hitler did. Stalin did. In China and Myanmar, they still do – and those deeply held “values” can get the world into a lot of moral (and political) trouble. A “virtue” on the other hand, is an “excellence.” The Greek root word for virtue (“arete”) means “excellence.” This millennia-old philosophical tradition calls us to our highest self – not simply to tolerance, but to respect and to justice; not principally to self-assertion, but to diligence, perseverance, and temperance; not to ecological awareness, but to stewardship; not to cultural sensitivity, but to compassion and civic courage. The list goes on. The tradition of educating children in the virtues has very long roots – going back to Plato’s dialog with Socrates in The Meno. It is a tradition the Founders prized. Even as we entered the twentieth century American statesmen agreed that virtues education was the task of quality schools. “To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society,” Theodore Roosevelt reminded us. Many schools today resist this lesson. They strive for strong academic results, but see “character education” (in its many possible forms) as a burdensome add-on, yet another non-academic to-do for teachers whose main task ought to be educational. Isn’t this the job of parents? Where will I fit it in? But one cannot avoid educating for character in the schools (hence the proliferation of conflict-resolution curricula); we do it whether we think about it or not. And the virtues – not a panoply of self-chosen values - are necessary for quality academic work.After all, how can we foster healthy classroom interaction and the meaningful exchange of ideas in class without respect and responsibility? How does the nine-year-old child memorize her times tables and math facts without perseverance? How does a child take to the stage and recite a poem, play a role in drama, or try a new solution to a math problem without courage? How does that same student handle the disappointment of not doing well on a test without humility? How do kids learn to push themselves to study still harder and do better the next time without diligence and hope? The virtues are habits of the heart that ensure quality scholarship. An increasing number of studies affirm that schools with an emphasis on character yield higher academic results. And most recently, the focus of Positive Psychology, the study of how/why human beings come to flourish, has trained its focus specifically on character strength and virtues—such as grit, service, gratitude, forgiveness. The task of virtues education is three-fold: teaching students to know, to love, and do the good. Aristotle placed strong emphasis (rightly so) on the latter, on habit formation as the key. We become courageous by doing courageous acts repeatedly. But FIRST comes knowledge and LOVE of virtue, attraction to that which is praiseworthy. The Core Virtues approach cultivates virtue principally by helping young children identify and fall in love with the good. Our literature-based approach showcases worthy exemplars of virtue in action and helps populate the theaters of kids’ imaginations with compelling and heroic guides. It helps children learn not just what they should aspire to, but which individuals (real and fictional) they might be like. And that is key. For there is not a child on the planet, who wakes up in the morning and says: “How shall I behave today?” His or her first thought is: “Who shall I be like?” And they’ve got fifteen dramas in their heads before breakfast. Am I Pink Ranger? Elsa? Spiderman? Spongebob Squarepants? But why not Jane Addams, Harriet Tubman, Johnny Appleseed, Abe Lincoln, or Neil Armstrong? Plato said: “the core of education is a correct nurture, one which as much as possible draws the soul of the child at play toward an erotic attachment to what he must do when he becomes a man.” He got it exactly right. Although in the twenty-first century, let's be expansive: we should work on drawing the souls of children at play to the heroic dramas they can aspire to when they become adults. Mary Beth Klee
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 Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton recently reflected on America’s tradition of according respect, honor, and gratitude to those who laid down their lives for their country. Between combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Cotton served with the “the Old Guard,” as the Army Third Infantry is known, and has written Sacred Duty. A Soldier’s Tour at Arlington National Cemetery (Harper Collins, 2019). It is a remarkable read.
The book recounts the history of America’s oldest active-duty regiment, which became the nation’s Ceremonial Guard in 1948. This unit (formed 1784) predates the Constitution, fought in the War of 1812, in the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and has been headquartered in Washington D.C. after 1948. From the nation’s capital, its thousands of physically fit, active-duty members are best known now for guarding the Tomb of the Unknown soldier, but they also oversee the daily military honor funerals at Arlington. On an almost nightly basis, Old Guard members receive the flag-draped caskets of the war dead at Dover Air Force base (“If a soldier is coming home, the Old Guard will be there to honor him,” Cotton says.) They provide protection in the Inaugural Parade, act as Color Guard at ceremonial events, and it was Old Guard medical corps, who were dispatched to the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 to attend the wounded and exhume the dead. They did this while the 9 AM, 10 AM, and 11 AM funerals at Arlington continued uninterrupted. “Funerals First” is the motto of the unit, which Cotton describes as a “no fail, zero defect mission.” The Old Guard oversees up to twenty funerals a day at Arlington, but practices ceaselessly. Every morning, teams rehearse folding the flag, the three-volley salute, and key sequences in the funeral ceremony. Their objective: perfection for the fallen and their families – whether the fallen is aviator and former-President George H.W. Bush or an unknown Private First Class. The Old Guard’s is a self-imposed pressure to flawlessly perform this sacred duty, honoring the nation’s heroes. Cotton stresses that The Old Guard, more than any other regiment in the Army, is deeply connected to the nation’s heroic and hard-fought past. Arlington National Cemetery (once known as Mount Washington) was first owned by George Washington Custis (“Wash”), grandson to George and Martha (Washington himself had advised on the purchase). When Robert E. Lee married Mary Custis (“Wash’s” only surviving child), the land passed to the Lee family. After Lee resigned from the Union army to lead the Confederacy, Union forces occupied it (May 1861), and in 1864, made it a burial ground for the nation’s mounting Civil War dead. After the war, the Lee family sued for re-possession of the land and won in court. But in an act of magnanimity and reconciliation, George Washington Custis Lee (Robert E. Lee’s son) deeded the land back to the United States. That deed was received by Secretary of War, Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the slain president. The heirs of the two adversaries jointly committed to honoring the nation’s fallen. The young men and women of the Old Guard are heirs to all this, custodians of the nation’s “most sacred shrine.” One foreign leader remarked to a member of the Guard, “You take better care of your dead, than we do of our living.” Cotton sees this as a free nation’s tribute freely given to those who embody the best in us. We often feature “New and Noteworthy” works on our site, and for parents, teachers, and older students, this is one such book. Mary Beth Klee
 Not surprisingly, patterns of human brain activity are idiosyncratic in various situations, even when individuals are gathered as a group and even when they are listening to a lecture. But when people in a group are told a story (such as one from “The Moth” radio hour) the group exhibits synchronized brain activity. For the time of the story, “brain coupling” takes place. Patterns of brain activity from the speaker are echoed or repeated in the minds of the listening audience, and the audience, composed of any number of individuals, aligns to the same wavelength. That is a remarkable occurrence, and that synchronization dramatically facilitates human communication. Hasson’s lab conducted all sorts of experiments to determine whether such brain wave alignment had to do with sound of voice, sense of words, or a specific language. But when a given story was translated into Russian for another group of native speakers, the scientists got the same results: brain wave patterns that were both synchronized from speaker to audience, and nearly identical to patterns generated by the English speaker. (You can watch Dr. Hasson explain this in his TED talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDhlOovaGrI) What does this sophisticated research—brought to a wider audience by Arthur Brooks in his new book Love Your Enemies—have to do with character education, the Core Virtues Morning Gathering, and ultimately, creating a more civil and fruitful society? A lot. Go back to the month just past when our focus was on forgiveness. Imagine (or recall) the second grade teacher at Morning Gathering who begins to read Robert Coles’s The Story of Ruby Bridges to her fidgeting class. We all know that within seconds, the fidgeting dies down, and twenty little minds and hearts are tuned in to the story of the brave six-year-old girl in Louisiana, who, because of her skin color, was unwanted as a student in an all-white public school. The first African-American child to integrate the school in 1960, Ruby Bridges had to be escorted (for her own protection) by federal marshals while a crowd jeered, booed, spat and threw things. Once inside she prayed God would “forgive these people. Because even if they say those bad things, they don’t know what they are doing.” That took courage. That took largeness of heart. Every child in the room hangs on each word, identifying with the young protagonist. They are on the same wavelength. From then on, when the teacher points to the wisdom of forgiving classmates who may have called them names or unintentionally hurt them on the playground, they have a common frame of reference. Now when they talk about the need to respect classmates regardless of their skin color or clothes or the place they were born, the class has a common role model, and a shared commitment to higher goals based on a real-life story that moved minds and hearts in the same direction.  The beauty of the Core Virtues approach to character education is that by regularly employing a treasure trove of stories (from history and literature) to exemplify the virtues, we build the common ground so essential to communication and fruitful interaction. We bring children’s hearts and minds together for a good goal, for human excellence. That’s what the virtues are: human excellences. The stories of respect, responsibility, diligence, generosity, courage, compassion, humility and more, move kids' hearts, and now we know, unite them in a profound way.
For fifteen minutes three times a week, “brain coupling.” Who knew? How wonder-ful. And as we think about divisions among us and our quest for a more civil future, that's also a source of hope and joy. Mary Beth Klee
 Corrie ten Boom’s particular push-come-to-shove moment came in 1947, when after addressing a Munich audience on forgiveness, she was approached by a former Ravensbruck prison guard. With horror, she recognized the guard who’d taunted and mocked her naked sister, as she was forced into the showers. He had "found Jesus," and was, she wrote, “beaming and bowing. ‘How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein,’ he said…his hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people … the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side. Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me...I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not…I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give Your forgiveness. As I took his hand, the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand, a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.” Corrie spent the remaining thirty-five years of her life, putting that love into practice, establishing in the former Darmstadt concentration camp, a flower-filled, cheerfully painted place of renewal and rehabilitation for ex-prisoners and victims of war. Her 1971 book The Hiding Place and the 1975 film by the same name made her story known to a generation of readers and viewers.  Forgiveness on that level (like mercy) seems super-human and is often inspired by faith. Yet, it has been preached and practiced by pragmatic, not particularly religious people, like South Africa’s Nelson Mandela. He also had something to forgive. Actively resisting his country’s unjust apartheid regime, he organized armed struggle against the government and was jailed. Mandela spent twenty-seven years as a prisoner, much of it in solitary confinement, and endured torture and abuse. Yet he also had time to reflect, and come to know his enemy. When he was released, four years later becoming South Africa’s first black president, his principles were generosity of spirit and reconciliation; his politics were those of forgiveness. “I do not forget,” he said, “but I forgive... Forgiveness liberates the soul. It removes fear. That is why it is such a powerful weapon.”
"We must strive to be moved by a generosity of spirit that will enable us to outgrow the hatred and conflicts of the past," the new president emphasized. The 2009 movie “Invictus” memorialized Mandela's first year as president, when in 1995 he threw his vigorous support behind South Africa’s mainly white Afrikaner rugby team, formerly a symbol of the hated apartheid regime. He urged them on to victory in the World Cup—an event that ended up uniting 43 million of his countrymen, fostering reconciliation and forgiveness like no other. Many contemporary psychologists emphasize forgiveness as a means of healing from a grave transgression – a coworker who has undermined you, a spouse who has betrayed you, a colleague who ensured your ouster, a “friend” who let his candid assessment of you poison a new relationship. Psychologists distinguish between forgiveness (desirable) and reconciliation (not always possible or desirable). The latter involves a restored relationship with the transgressor: the spouses, for example, are reconciled. Forgiveness, however, involves a psychological and emotional pivot that allows the person wronged to view the wrongdoer with compassion, kindness, and even to wish them well. Forgiveness, in other words, is a shift and a gift. Psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman define forgiveness as “an unconditional gift given to transgressors based on the belief in the innate value of all persons.” The person who practices forgiveness does not excuse the transgression, does not say “what you did is OK.” But he or she is able to let go of hurt, move beyond a desire for retribution, and toward an attitude first of forbearance and then of love. That is very hard. Divine even. One thinks, of course, of the font of Corrie ten Boom’s deep faith: Jesus on the cross, forgiving his crucifiers: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Those words, which millions of believers will remember in a special way this month, have inspired and challenged generations of Christians. Nor are Christians alone in preaching forgiveness. Judaism teaches that God forgives people their sins, and commands them to forgive their transgressors. Islam refers to God as “Al-Ghafoor,” the Forgiving One, and encourages forgiveness in order to receive forgiveness from Allah. Buddhism and Hinduism enshrine the concepts of compassion and forbearance to encourage relinquishing one’s resentment towards the transgressor. What difference does it make? All the difference in the world. We all know people who have endured the same horrible experience, but have reacted in very different ways: one with bitterness and contempt, another with kindness and determination; one with resentment, another with forbearance; one with toxic rage, another with forgiving love. Which serves us better? Which is more attractive? Which is more liberating - for ourselves, our children, and our future? Corrie ten Boom made her choice. "Forgiveness is setting the prisoner free, only to find out the prisoner was me," she wrote. The greatest gift of forgiveness is for the giver. Corrie ten Boom was born and also died on April 15. It’s a good month to think about forgiveness. Mary Beth Klee
 Consider Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, whose trailblazing service in the Civil War earned her the nickname “Angel of the Battlefield.” In the carnage of that conflict, she saw her countrymen needlessly dying on the battlefield, and she fought to bring mercy. She battled back many bureaucratic obstacles to minister as a nurse on the scene. She then went on to found the American Red Cross, the agency that serves victims of natural disasters and humanitarian crises.
Or think about Barton’s contemporary, Henry Bergh, whose patrician upbringing freed him from the need to earn a living through his work. In his fifties, Bergh was so moved by the plight of cruelly treated animals (and most animals were cruelly treated in the mid-nineteenth century; read the eye-opening book and see how) that he urged new laws to prevent such abuse, filed more than twelve-thousand unpopular court cases, and founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to carry on his life’s work of “humane” treatment for animals. Bergh was an infamous showman (he might spring from a perch on a roof into a ring of fighting cocks or dogs to make his point), but he made mercy his lodestar and moved the needle. Or look at another late nineteenth great: Jane Addams, who put her full energies and intellect into the formation of Hull House, a community center to assist and educate Chicago’s impoverished immigrant community. The classes she offered there (in domestic arts, the trades, and English) allowed many newly arrived immigrants to find solid footing in their new home, and provided a model nationwide. Mercy differs from compassion and is harder. It is compassion extended to an enemy, a wrong-doer, those to whom we have no “obligation,” and those in our power. Our Core Virtues mercy poster features voracious cheetahs letting a trapped baby wildebeest live. It looks like the lady cheetahs are saying: “Where’s your mother, honey?” Mercy, in other words, is completely counter-intuitive. Modern day heroes of mercy? Consider St. Louis-based Charles Clark and Morris Shenker. In 1959 Jesuit priest, Father Charles “Dismas” Clark sought a way to help ex-cons start a productive life that would prevent them from returning to jail. He knew that housing was a major difficulty for many newly released offenders: those who had no place to stay often returned to crime on the streets. With the assistance of Jewish criminal lawyer and financier, Morrie Shenker, he founded Dismas House in St. Louis, the first half-way house for ex-offenders. It offered not just shelter, but meals, vocational training and counseling for residents. It became the inspiration for the 1961 film The Hoodlum Priest, and today there are hundreds of Dismas Houses throughout the United States. (Dismas was the Good Thief in the story of the Crucifixion.) Do we want children to show mercy? Of course. Children are often fruitfully charged with the task of feeding or cleaning up after the family/classroom pet or caring for a baby sister or brother. Such responsibilities promote concern for those less capable than themselves, and may prompt them to show mercy in their own way, for example, donating some of their hard-earned savings to a good cause. But in schools, we should not give children the impression that mercy might mean compassionately tolerating someone who abuses or hurts them. That’s not mercy. That’s criminal negligence. How do we mere mortal grown-ups show mercy on a daily basis? Who’s in our power? Consider not just our spouses, co-workers, children and pets, but the telemarketer who phones at the dinner hour. Or the store clerk, who really had no part in the faulty item we purchased at an inflated price. Or the clueless driver ahead of me, still paused at the traffic light that turned green thirty seconds ago. How we react—is a measure of our mercy. And it’s not easy. Mercy may fall upon the recipient as a “gentle rain from Heaven,” but the one who extends it must cultivate hard won-traits of self-control, openness to others, and as we see in the biographies featured this month, sometimes courage. It’s not about “always being nice” and “always giving” to those in need. It’s about actually meeting needs, and helping supposed enemies, wrongdoers, and “those in our power” to ultimately flourish.
 What about those who demonstrate moral courage—who endure scorn, insult, imprisonment, and even loss of life in defense of an ideal or a principle? Are they, as Twain believed, fewer in number than the physically courageous? Maybe. But perhaps we simply don’t recognize those heroes at the time of their great principled actions.
As President, George Washington, strove mightily to keep the young United States out of European wars, and for that was guillotined in effigy three times daily on Philadelphia’s Market Street (1793) and was derided in the press as a “monocrat” and “old splinter-mouth.” When that “Black Republican” Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, stocks plummeted, enlistments in the Union Army dropped, and Lincoln himself was eventually assassinated. When Jane Addams opened her Chicago-based settlement home for immigrants, she was regarded with suspicion, and dubbed a socialist and anarchist. In 1872, when Susan B. Anthony attempted to vote in her hometown of Rochester, New York, she was arrested, put on trial, and accused of attempting to destroy the institution of marriage. When Martin Luther King Jr. led a non-violent revolution for civil rights, he was rewarded with imprisonment, an FBI investigation and ultimately an assassin’s bullet. When Nelson Mandela embarked on his campaign of resistance to apartheid, he too was arrested and spent twenty-seven years in prison before emerging as South Africa’s first black head of state. You get the picture. We admire all of those individuals for their moral courage in retrospect. Time has sharpened our lens. We admire them for their willingness to buck the status quo, endure contempt, and risk their lives, for the greater good of peace, civil rights, human dignity, and/or justice. But nobility is not necessarily evident at the time. There are no Olympics of moral courage with clear winners and losers. There are only those who dig deep within themselves and summon the courage to make unpopular choices in defense of the good and for the common good. Frequently at a high cost, often involving loss of stature and danger to themselves. Men and women of moral courage, unsung heroes, are still in our midst and frequently derided for their obstinacy. In 1996, seven Trappist monks were captured and beheaded by Islamic extremists in Algeria’s civil war. Many could not understand why the little monastic community hadn’t abandoned their home months before. For decades, the French monks had lived peacefully with the Muslim-majority population, pursuing a ministry of medical assistance and solidarity with the local population. But as the forces of terror grew, so did the danger. They were foreigners, outsiders, and Christians. They had been warned. They should get out, the Algerian government insisted. Their decision to stay, serve the community, and witness to the power of faith and love was an act of extraordinary moral courage, chronicled by the 2010 film, Of Gods and Men. (Read more on this story here.) “If there is anything that links the human to the divine,” Abraham Lincoln wrote, “it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it.” Or as another wartime American hero, Admiral Chester Nimitz noted, “God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right, even though I think it is hopeless.”
 Gratitude, psychologists tell us, is good for us. In the last twenty years, study after study has confirmed that people “who live a life of pervasive thankfulness” (those inclined to count their blessings and see life as a gift, according to Dr. Robert Emmons) reap undeniable mental health benefits. They have a lower incidence of depression, higher satisfaction with life, higher levels of happiness and well-being. The Grateful Living also have better immune systems, physical health, and longer life expectancy. Psychologist Robert Emmon’s pathbreaking work on this topic explores not just that theme, but also the fortuitous effects of gratitude on community. Grateful people, he finds, are more likely to be altruistic, service-oriented people, who cheerfully give back to the community because they see themselves as fortunate and their lives (regardless of material condition) as abundant. Gratitude truly is, as Cicero observed, the parent of all virtues.
So, it turns out that our national tradition of reserving the fourth Thursday of every November for Thanksgiving is a cutting-edge idea. This year’s annual feast of gratitude comes at a time when many in our land are not feeling particularly thankful. We seem to be focused on the slimy road we’re walking and the boulders that may trip us up. And there are boulders. We’re not at a summit, where we can look back, see the big picture, and pronounce it good. But that inability—to see the abundance and beauty, and not just the muck at our feet—is partly of our own making. One thing that makes human beings different from other mammals is historical memory. We have the ability not simply to recall the past, but to make sense of it, gauging where we are relative to where we have been. In this modern era, we don’t do that often enough; we tend to focus on the short-term issues. But if we do a big picture look-back, we human beings have come a long way, baby, in a short period of time. What do we have to be grateful for this November 2018?
It’s true that these indices of global prosperity, health, and education, are “just” material realities, rather than indicators of political or moral development. But these are objective, hard-won triumphs, and we have a lot to be thankful for. The world is (in very many ways) in a much better place now than it was as late as 1990. And the United States- a nation of problem-solvers, innovators, and trail-blazers in technology and medicine-has had a lot to do with that. So, this Thanksgiving, while we walk the rocky road ahead of us and pray for a better foothold, let’s stop for a minute, remember that we have been in darker places, and count our blessings. Buen Camino! Mary Beth Klee
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