June is a month of commencements, and on June 30, 2022 we at Core Virtues will celebrate ours! With pats on the back for work well done and eyes trained on the future, the Core Virtues Foundation joyfully announces new stewardship for the Core Virtues program.  We are delighted to transition our work of nearly thirty years to the University of Dallas (UD), where Professor Jeffrey Lehman will be spearheading its ongoing development and implementation. 

This transfer is borne of mutual admiration, great synergy, and months of conversation. UD is the only university in the country to offer a Master’s degree in Classical Education. The Core Virtues program (piloted in 1992) predates the burgeoning classical school movement, but shares many of its goals.  Classical schools are distinguished for their commitment to academic rigor and virtues-based character education.  The University of Dallas, through its Saint Ambrose Center and its Center for the Arts of Liberty, is a robust resource for classical schools and assists a network of K-12 schools that share these goals. Now part of the university’s educational toolkit, the Core Virtues program will offer K-6 schools in their network and beyond an intentional and uplifting approach to character education. 

We at the Core Virtues Foundation sought out and welcomed this opportunity for the future of Core Virtues. We have strong confidence in the talents of key people at the University to advance this work.  In the years ahead, we foresee an army of energetic faculty and graduate students at UD, working to expand both the reach of the program and the range of its literary offerings.

Core Virtues schools and teachers, who rely on the regularly updated Core Virtues website, should fear no loss.  The website will be strongly supported and advanced in its new stewardship, and eventually will be fully integrated into the U.D. platform. Until such time, however, the website will maintain its current address, configuration and accessibility. All the resources you’ve come to rely on will still be found here, and key members of the Foundation will be working with UD to assist in a smooth transition.

This springboard program, building character “one story at a time” as our tagline announces, is designed to inspire all children to know and love the good through the structured reading of quality literature. Our new home will ensure that Core Virtues lives on. We hope you’ll join us in tossing hats in the air at this Core Virtues-University of  Dallas commencement. ​

“Some men see things as they are and ask why?
I dream things that never were, and ask why not?" 
​Bobby Kennedy, 1968

This May in the Core Virtues program we feature (for the first time) the virtue of “imagination” – the flight of fancy required to step outside the world we inhabit and form a new or different “image” of what the world could be.  Imagination can be used for good or evil but is a virtue when in service of a higher good (truth, goodness, or beauty). It remains the trait that unites great writers, scientists, filmmakers, musicians, engineers, artists, and just about anyone who asks bold, wildly speculative questions and comes up with answers. 
 
Could human beings fly? Might computers be made small enough to become personal devices? Could we produce enough food to feed 8 billion people?  Might we speak timeless truths of good and evil through a family of rabbits in the English countryside?  Or find them “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”? Or could we bring eighteenth-century triumphs to light using modern rap?  All of those questions, answered now in the affirmative, were daring dreams of the imagination just decades ago. The Wright brothers, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Norman Borlaug, Beatrix Potter, George Lucas, and Lin Manuel Miranda all share a root excellence:  imagination.
 
In each case, their imaginative work was grounded in a strong knowledge base.  Albert Einstein once famously said “imagination is more important than knowledge.”  Poet Derek Walcott observed that Einstein earned the right to say that, because he had spent much of his life accumulating a vast storehouse of knowledge upon which to apply his imagination. As had the Wright Brothers before him.  As did Steve Jobs and Lin Manuel Miranda after him. But we should still take Einstein’s point:  imagination creates steppingstones to new knowledge.
 
So how do we encourage children to use and enjoy their imaginations? First, continue to delight them with a strong knowledge base.  Wonder and imagination feast upon genuine understanding:  of the physical world, of the human past, of world literature, of mathematical truths, of the fine arts.  Children long to encounter real wonders and see the connections from different realms.
 
Second, in this busy world, parents should not forget that children need time for imaginative play.  Kids need unstructured time, outdoor time, and on-their-own time.  Free time to make up their games, to create their characters, and plan their projects – whether they are building a fort or exploring a stream or making a town of their own or going to a galaxy far, far away.  We need to resist the temptation to schedule every minute of a child’s day. 

On January 14, 2022, North Las Vegas police officer Nicholas Quintana answered a dispatch call that changed his life.  A child called 911 to report her parents fighting.  Then four shots announced a tragic end.  Twenty-seven-year-old Quintana, who was on his lunch break, felt “this abrupt urge” to answer the call, and he raced to the scene with other cops.   There they found not just a fatally shot man, but five children.  Police arrested the forty-year-old mother for killing her ex-husband. 

The couple’s children, ranging in ages from six to seventeen, were now without parents. “So, are they going to split us up?” one of the distraught children kept asking. Quintana felt he was there for a reason.  His own father had been killed by a relative when he was young.  He knew what it was like to be both fatherless, and to carry a toxic burden of hatred toward a family member who had been responsible. On the scene, as the youngest child wailed and the children anguished over their probable separate futures in child protective services, he confided to a fellow officer that he wanted to make a home for all five children.  He went home that night heavy-burdened.

Quintana and his twenty-six-year-old wife Amanda did not yet have children.  Nicholas shared his over-sized hope with his wife.  “Is this a dream?” she asked.  She was “understandably  … absolutely reluctant towards it… I was like ‘Well listen, hun, just meet the kids, just meet them, because you might fall in love with these kids. Just meet them.’”  They drove the next day to the city’s Child Haven, and hearts melted. “All of us?” the seventeen-year-old had asked wide-eyed, when Amanda and Nicholas proposed their plan.  “Every single one of you,” the Quintanas responded.  Two days later they were driving back to their three bedroom, two-bath home as a family of seven.  They were a new family, embarked on a challenging new journey. 

What motivates this largeness of heart?  Quintana speaks openly about feeling called to this, about wanting to be for the children the father they need and the one he never had.  He worries that he might fail because he had no modeling, but the experience of his father’s murder taught him an important lesson that he wants to share with the children.  He told them: “I want you to promise me that you’ll learn to forgive. It’s impossible to forget things…Especially things that hurt us the most,” but he found in his own life that he was released from the burden of toxic anger only when he could say “I don’t this hold against you anymore. I love you…That took a long time to happen, a while to happen.”  

The fact that it did happen, for him and for others, has huge ripple effects – many of them empirically verifiable. Twenty years of psychological research now supports Quintana’s conviction that forgiveness is freeing and conduces to human flourishing.  In study after study “spiritually motivated forgiveness” is linked to improved psychosocial wellbeing, mental health, and improved physical health outcomes.  It is linked to lower risk of depression.  Books with titles such as The Psychology of Forgiveness (M.E. McCullough, et al.; 2000), Forgiveness and Health (L.L. Toussaint, et al., 2015), The Handbook of Forgiveness (E.L. Worthington, et al.; 2020) and many others point to this virtue as a path to emotional and physical wellness. 
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There are no words to describe the sort of real-life heroism of Nicholas and Amanda Quintana.  This month, as Christians remember Jesus forgiving his own crucifiers from the cross, that is the lesson he wants to share with his children. And it’s not simply a religious one.

​Mary Beth Klee

Our March virtues have special resonance in March 2022.  What do compassion, faithfulness, and mercy mean when a small, free nation suffers an unprovoked invasion by its aggressor neighbor? The world watches in horror as Ukrainian civilians flee Russian bombs, missiles, and tanks. Rockets level not only centuries-old municipal buildings but opera houses and concert halls. They strike a maternity clinic, the Holocaust Memorial, orphanages, and schools. Women and children separate from husbands and fathers who remain to defend their homeland.  More than a million refugees surge across Ukraine’s borders as their cities fall, and a forty-mile enemy military caravan snakes toward their capital. 

What do we teach our children as our hearts are breaking? First, we should not ignore this moment in history.  We should speak with our young students about dictators and thugs who use their power to enslave others. Assuring them that we ourselves are not in peril at this moment, we should reflect that there are those who regard compassion and mercy as weaknesses. Students in Core Knowledge schools or in classical schools, students who study history, realize that this theme (conquest, tyranny) is not new.  They have met Rameses II, Qin Shi Huang Di, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Adolph Hitler, and Josef Stalin. And there are many more.

Many adults in the post-World War II West have come to regard international peace as our right and the norm, but the last eighty years have been a fortunate historical anomaly.  History teaches that there are always dictators among us. When unchecked, they re-emerge to teach us that freedom isn’t free. Oppression characterizes history more often than liberty. So go ahead: get out a map and talk to students about this moment when liberty is in peril.  It’s a lesson worth teaching the young.

But how do we channel and allay children’s (and our own) fear and helplessness in the face of international affairs few of us control?  If you are a person or a school of faith, the indisputable first answer is prayer.  But for any person or school, part of the answer is in figuring out how – in their adult life and in the present—they can become helpers.

American historian David McCullough is fond of closing commencement remarks by challenging students to “do something for your country.”   He invokes the spirit of John F. Kennedy, Jr., whose 1960 inaugural address urged Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” 
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In an age when we are increasingly encouraged to consider ourselves “citizens of the world,” and when many elementary school curricula include units on “global citizenship,” how relevant is love of country anymore? McCullough, who has dedicated a lifetime to telling America’s stories, would say: very.  We are still a planet of sovereign nation-states – 195 of them by last count.  We pass our laws, inherit our mores, formulate our aspirations, shape our futures, and realize our daily potential in the context of a national framework and heritage.  We flounder or flourish in that context, and ours is worth knowing. 

McCullough has worked for over five decades to reveal America to herself.  Indeed, in 1968, when Simon and Garfunkel “walked off to look for America,” so did McCullough, publishing his first major work, The Johnstown Flood. With drama, suspense, and a storyteller’s compass, McCullough told the tale of the nation’s worst flood disaster and introduced a new genre:  narrative non-fiction.  His novel-like read was spectacularly successful, spotlighting the foibles, missteps, heroism, and lessons to be learned, as well as earning him accolades as the nation’s leading social historian.  (Much to the chagrin of academic historians.)

Whether spurred by the spirit of adventure or the pursuit of an ideal, we are often able to exercise courage when something meaningful rallies us to move beyond fear. But what about when courage is required simply “to continue,” as Churchill had it?

The pandemic affords us a new opportunity to exercise courage:  courage to go into the classroom, courage to go the grocery store, courage to go to a doctor’s appointment, courage to get on a bus or an airplane….  We look at this January 2022 Courage List and are tempted to laugh out loud.  Or shake our heads.  This is a Baby Courage List.   But so be it. 

Let’s take our baby steps and do (as Eleanor Roosevelt suggested) one thing that scares us every day.   Let the spirit of adventure take us to a restaurant.  Let the pursuit of an ideal lead us back to church or synagogue or the classroom or the theater or the museum.  Let the will to live well triumph over the temptation to cower.  And let the words of Henry Ford inspire us as we continue an uphill slog: “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”   
​
Mary Beth Klee

Charles Dickens’ nineteenth century classic A Christmas Carol remains an admonition to stay alert to the plight of fellow travelers on the road of life.  It is ever useful because then as now, we tend to wear social blinders or get stuck in our lanes.  Depending on our neighborhood or profession, those in need may be nearly invisible to us.  We may see right through them – or past them.  Just as those original Christmas travelers, Mary and Joseph, were invisible to the innkeepers who had a full house.
 
In this season when we try to sharpen our vision and fortify our bowels, let’s consider assisting some of the literal travelers on the road of life:  Afghan refugees.  Since our country’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, thousands have fled the Taliban and sought refuge here and abroad.  In my home state of little Rhode Island, we are welcoming 250 Afghanis (mostly families), and though there was no “Afghan community” here to speak of before the August crisis, there is now.  That’s thanks to the work of Dorcas International, a nonsectarian outreach group, which has dedicated itself to refugee resettlement, and making a home for the stranger. 

Afghani refugees are grateful.  Former US interpreter for the armed forces Amin Faqiri, arrived in Providence with his family in October, and says with a big smile, “I am starting over, like a newborn baby.”  In many ways, it’s the best time ever to be an immigrant.  Restaurants are desperate for staff.  Manufacturing plants need workers.  Construction sites seek carpenters.  Groups like Dorcas International try to position these legally admitted newcomers for success in their new homeland.  With both a professional staff and LOTS of volunteers, they arrange for apartments, for English language classes, for vocational training in carpentry and the trades, enrollment of children in schools, and family assistance with grocery shopping, as the newcomers get their feet on the ground.  The needs are immense, but the folks from Dorcas and many other non-profit and church groups are there to welcome the “poor, tired, and hungry yearning to breathe free.”

But what about the poor, tired, and hungry who are here on our own shores already?  The everyday Americans, who often, because of bad fortune or drug addiction or alcohol or mental illness or domestic abuse have lost their way and are on the streets?  We cannot walk through our cities without being aware of the homeless:  folks with their carts and their pets, with a pleading sign, and a hand extended.  Nearly half a million of our fellow countrymen are homeless. On the Core Virtues site, we’ve featured the slender middle school novel Stay (by Bobby Pyron), which shines a light on those who live in Emergency Shelters and/or public parks.  And we feature some moving picture books as well.  When addressing the problem of homelessness, there are state and federal initiatives to be sure, but the national tradition of voluntarism and what used to be called “benevolent institutions” is still active and a way to extend a hand.  This is the time of year to support the work of non-profit, non-partisan groups like the National Alliance to End Homelessness and the Salvation Army.  Our personal contributions and turning the attention of our students to those these groups serve is a way to keep the spirit of the holidays.
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The holidays are a time “when Want is keenly felt and Abundance rejoices,” two bell ringers tell Scrooge.  His “bah-humbug” echoes in our ears.  But the miser became a changed man following that Christmas Eve journey, and it was always said “that he knew how to keep Christmas well.”  May we too know how to keep the spirit of the holidays well even beyond the holidays. 

​Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday, and if we didn’t have it because of 1621, Squanto, the Pilgrims, Sarah Buell Hale, and Abraham Lincoln, we’d have to (re)invent it. Because that fourth Thursday in November grounds us in a higher reality and builds bonds of community. Thanksgiving reminds each one of us that we are not uniquely responsible for our own accomplishments and successes.  That we are helped along the way by others.  That we are the humble recipients of many gifts freely given, and that we are connected in a great web of giving to each other.  And all that inspires affection, awe, joy, and thankfulness.  

To see how innately human this desire to express gratitude is, just watch this wondrous clip of a toddler hearing a violin for the first time.    Then watch it again, and again, and again. 

So much in our daily lives turns us in upon ourselves as each undertakes “the pursuit of happiness.” Ours is a seagull society – one in which “me-me-me” is the shrill cry heard from all sides. The iconic American essayists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau urged their readers to “insist on yourself; never imitate” and be alert to “a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears.”  Modern gurus encourage contemporary pilgrims to shun ties that bind and “seek your bliss.”  

In rebuke, stands our annual day of Thanksgiving – which recalls both an extraordinary historical event of fellowship four hundred years ago and the deeply human need to give thanks. In that fall of 1621 English settlers and native people celebrated their shared endeavor of the harvest with some ninety Wampanoags and their King Massasoit joining Pilgrim settlers "that we might after a more special manner rejoice together." 

On this four hundredth anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, our primary focus with elementary school children should not be on historical irony that breeds cynicism (“Wampanoags Regret Helping Pilgrims”), but on how each of us is lifted up, bound, and made part of something larger by giving thanks.  

Mary Beth Klee  

For more reflections on the importance of gratitude as an attitude,  read Robert Emmons, the world’s leading expert on gratitude here. 

How did we get here?  That musing, which goes right to the heart of the human search for meaning, became an increasingly literal question last month.  How did we human beings get here – to the American continents? 
 
For more than a century, scientists have speculated that when massive ice sheets began to melt at the end of the last Ice Age (c. 20,000 years ago) humans crossed a newly exposed land bridge in pursuit of their animal prey.  They migrated from Eurasia to the Americas and eventually peopled the northern and southern continents.  Settlement took time, and humans were not imagined to be in the Americas more than thirteen thousand years ago.  But that date has been under fire.  And last month some hauntingly well-preserved footprints in White Sands, New Mexico and some dogged researchers threw all that into doubt.

The Journal of Science reported that a rich array of human tracks uncovered in the White Sands National Park have now been dated to 21,000-23,000 years ago.  The process of documentation was painstaking and the supporting evidence impressive. Yet glacial ice-sheets would still have covered the North American crossing at that point.  So, were humans already in the Americas before the end of the last Ice Age? It sure looks like it, according to lead geologist Michael Bennett and the fifteen co-authors of the blockbuster study. Two thousand years before.
 
The White Sands findings are stunning because the tracks are so undeniably human, so numerous, and have lent themselves to scrupulous radiocarbon dating protocols.  Their discovery comes on the heels of earlier discoveries that hinted at human settlement long before thirteen thousand years ago in Mexico and as far south as Chile.  So, did humans find little known land routes from Eurasia to America before an ice wall closed off the two continents? Or was the land bridge itself exposed thirty thousand years ago, and might hunter humans have crossed before a wall of ice separated the continents?  Or did early humans come by sea? The new findings open new mysteries.  A paradigm shift is underway. ​

As children return to school this fall – in the time of Covid – teachers once again attempt to cultivate the virtue of respect.  Every year in Core Virtues schools, our September focus is on treating others with high regard -- regardless of their race, creed, ethnicity, age, economic circumstance, physical disability, or anything else.  In past years it seemed easier to model respect as a self-evident human excellence. Most teachers love teaching kids to see beyond genetic attributes or economic circumstances.  We love the stirring picture books that encourage children to focus on the real person, disregarding externals.  The picture books we feature in September -- Strictly No Elephants or Carla’s Sandwich -- make the point, celebrating individual essence and even quirkiness. 
 
But in the time of Covid, respect for others—particularly for their choices, their thoughts, their intentions—is hard to cultivate.   The pandemic has afforded a new gift and challenge.  How do we cultivate respect for those who have different ideas?  What if I believe that your ideas and choices endanger my health?  Or what if you believe that my ideas and choices imperil normal child development and even education?  How do we stave off mutual contempt?  For contempt is the sworn enemy of respect.
 
The challenge is daunting, particularly regarding masks in schools.  This year, in schools where masks are required, teachers will have to interact respectfully with parents (and students) who find the mandate injurious to their children’s education and to civil liberty.  In schools where masks are optional, teachers will have to deal respectfully with parents (and students) who find the choice to unmask irresponsible and a threat to their health.  Teachers will have to model respect for both choices as legitimate, keeping their opinions to themselves. 
 
That’s very hard.  But there has never been a better opportunity to practice what we preach:  respect for dignity of the human person in all our diversity – even (and especially) diversity of thought, point of view. 
 
Perhaps one virtue that will help us model that respect is humility.  We are living in complex (and as we’ve been told repeatedly) unprecedented times.  Our death toll (as a percentage of the population) does not yet rival the bubonic plague.  But we are surpassing 1918 mortality rates, and in new territory with this extended, morphing international disease.  We don’t know what we don’t know.  We’re not sure of the evolution of this disease, and we’re not even sure of the long-term effects of our choices.  There are no “twenty years out” studies.  The only thing we know for sure is that much of what we currently believe will turn out to be incorrect. That has been the case historically for medical practices, pandemics, and public health.
 
So, rather than demonizing the other, let’s practice listening to those with different views. We might learn something.  If not, let's practice saying: “Thank you for helping me understand your thinking on this.  I’m not in the same place, but I'm grateful you shared that point of view."

​The novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, had a cult following.  It’s time for a new novel:   Respect in the Time of Covid.  

​Mary Beth Klee, Ph.D.