© Copyright Tony Wagner, 1996 (first published in Education Week, October 9, 1996)

A growing number of educators and parents are beginning to see the importance of some kind of values or "character" education. But efforts to impose forms of character education with a predetermined set of values onto students and communities often provoke bitter and divisive debate between many liberals and conservatives. After leading discussions on this subject in many widely varying communities over the last five years, I have learned that there are ways to consider these issues that can create new common ground and a significantly improved climate for learning. What follows below is a brief summary of some lessons learned:

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• Hold communitywide conversations before taking any action.  The debate about values in schools is like the debate about educational reform. Everyone may seem to agree that we need more of both, but definitions and priorities differ, and so it is essential to seek community consensus on goals. We have used a combination of both focus groups and what we call "town meetings for learning" to engage all community members in discussions about values in schools. In addition to parents and educators, we are careful to include students, community members, and service providers in such discussions.
• Distinguish between values and beliefs. When starting out to hold community conversations about values, it is important that the facilitator set some basic ground rules. The first is to make clear that the purpose of the discussion is to seek agreement on the values (not the beliefs) that we can all agree should be promoted in our schools.

Of course, different religions hold divergent beliefs, but there is a core of values (and thousands of years of human culture and tradition) that are much more common than they are different. The facilitator must remind participants that the point of community discussions is not to convert anyone to a particular belief system. The purpose is to create the common language that all can agree will be used to describe the values most important in the community.

• Focus on citizenship rather than "character education." It has been my experience that efforts to promote so-called character education can be divisive in many communities. First, individuals promoting character education are often perceived as having a conservative and explicitly Christian set of beliefs that they are seeking to introduce into schools. Second, the approach, which often emphasizes lessons from literature and history, strikes some as "preachy" and moralistic and sometimes focuses on certain predetermined values which are not necessarily the highest priority for many in the community.

Discussions of virtues like loyalty, patriotism, and obedience can divide a community. For some of us, cultivation of these and other traits of individual character are less important than nurturing the values and behaviors which are at the very core of the practice of democracy. It is increasingly clear that without greater civic engagement and civility (for example) our democracy may not survive. For all of these reasons, I have found that discussions of citizenship values have the greatest potential for creating common ground.

• Don't assume the problem is just the students. People promoting "character education" also frequently make the mistake of focusing lessons and other improvement efforts only at students. However, in many of our schools (suburban, urban, and rural; private as well as public) adults are part of the problem. It is too often the case that both educators and community members are not positive role models for our students.

My experience in some of the most elite public and private schools is that sarcastic banter and clever quips at someone else's expense are the way many adults relate to one another and to students (especially the men). It is a way of showing how quick and bright you are. Such "joking" is widely imitated by students, who use their adult-sanctioned "cleverness" to bully other students.