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Our local junior high school displays huge hallway banners reading, "Respect and Responsibility—We Can Do It Together." Respect, this year's theme, is meant to pervade the multiethnic school. (Last year compassion and caring took the lead.)

At the annual back-to-school night, our principal took a few minutes to explain the theme to us parents, then turned the program over to the cheerleaders. They illustrated respect by lip-synching a bump-and-grind rendition of Aretha Franklin's song of the same name. At the final beat, they turned around, bent over, flipped up their cheerleader skirts, and displayed the word RESPECT, spelled out on pieces of paper pinned to their bottoms.

I nudged my wife: "I don't think they've completely grasped the concept."

Which is roughly what I thought when I learned of the existence of a movement in the public schools to teach children virtuous character. Are educators, I wondered, really ready for this?

Still, the very existence of the character-education movement catches your attention. For some time, public schools have been saying that values are not part of their curriculum. It is news when a substantial group in public education says, "Yes, they are."

I have on my desk a brochure from the Character Development Foundation in Manchester, New Hampshire. Intended to attract teachers to a one-day seminar, it proclaims boldly, "You can teach kids to be smart & Good!" Good is defined (in language typical of the character-education movement) by the traits of self-control, respect, responsibility, honesty, courage, caring, courtesy, and friendship. Character education claims to teach old-fashioned values to kids who are not getting them at home.

It would be hard to be against such an undertaking. Surely it is part of a school's job to help parents turn their children into decent, responsible, moderately polite human beings. Yet it is also hard to entrust character confidently to the same people who embraced the values education of Planned Parenthood.

RIGHT AND WRONG REVISITED

In Washington, D.C., I attended a national conference put on by a coalition of organizations called the Character Education Partnership. Most of the several hundred people in attendance were schoolteachers or school administrators, cheerful and energetic people who were launching character-education programs in local schools all over the country, or thinking about it. Some very large school systems, such as those from Baltimore and Saint Louis, were represented, as were many smaller places. Vocal supporters ranged from a Democratic White House aide to a conservative Republican senator, and organizations running the gamut—from the Rainbow Coalition to the National Association of Evangelicals.

By all the signs, character education is a grassroots movement, springing up in a hundred different places. There is, so far, no "right" way to do it. Its popularity is perhaps best shown by the fact that educational entrepreneurs are jumping in, looking for a profit. At my first seminar, I met Robert Barden, a friendly, long-haired representative of the Cumberland County Schools in North Carolina. He told me of all kinds of gimmicky presentations people had brought to his school system, including a high-energy performance from a salesman dressed—for reasons unclear to Barden—in a NASA jumpsuit.

I hadn't gone to many seminars before I realized that character education is not the same thing as the "discipline" parents often want in school. Character education is much more upbeat and optimistic than that. As one principal told me, "Some parents want regimentation, and this is the very opposite."

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September 1 1995, Vol. 39, No. 10