Reply #14: I met Michele Borba 8 or 9 years ago. [View All]

[LWolf]

She was speaking to a group of teachers about the importance of growing the whole person, rather than focusing on academic achievement only. She's the author of a book, Building Moral Intelligence: The Seven Essential Virtues That Teach Kids to Do the Right Thing. According to her book, the 7 "essential virtues" are:

1. Empathy
2. Conscience
3. Self-Control
4. Respect
5. Kindness
6. Tolerance
7. Fairness

She made a big impression with me, because I've been watching what seemed to me to be the decline of empathy for others in American culture since the 80s.

I don't think schools can be responsible for teaching those virtues. Those have to come from our culture, and from the homes that are raising the children. We can and SHOULD be supporting, extending, and enriching the efforts by families to grow healthy, positive people, though. It puts the current obsession with data, and using that data to evaluate, pay, punish, and fire teachers, in a whole new, ugly, dysfunctional light. Schools should be focused on the development and well-being of the whole person, as partners with families and the rest of the community.

We hear constant frustration about the amount of bullying that happens in schools, with good reason. It happens. The kinds of things schools can do to minimize bullying and maximize an environment that grows those 7 virtues is limited by resources and mandates. To do away with bullying, schools and classrooms need to be small, and need to be fully staffed, including staffing supervision for all those areas bullying happens when there aren't enough, and close enough, adults to intervene, and to staff counselors. Spending instructional time on social skills and team building, valuing all the things that create a positive climate at a school just as much as academic achievement, is essential.

Am I the only one that notices how the culture of bullying has been on the increase in my 5 decades of life? How the current authoritarian, top-down threaten, blame, and punish culture of education "reform" models the very bullying that so many complain of?