The Positive Action curriculum is based on the old-fashioned idea that “you feel good about yourself when you think and do positive actions, and there is a positive way to do everything.” Its philosophy was crisply expressed by Abraham Lincoln: “When I do good I feel good, and when I do bad I feel bad.”64 Children as young as three or four are able to grasp this simple truth. The program teaches them how to stay inside the “Success Circle” (or “Happy Circle” for the younger children). The key is to fix on and hold positive thoughts and then act on them. Good feelings follow.
But Positive Action is not an “I love myself” self-esteem program. Allred became disillusioned with the self-esteem movement when she realized it lacked moral substance. Positive Action directs children toward a set of core values: specifically, trustworthiness, industry, kindness, and achievement. Children learn to pay close attention to how they feel when they are honest, hardworking, and kind; and they learn to avoid the vicious cycle that comes from cultivating bad thoughts, taking destructive actions, and feeling self-loathing. They become their own moral mentors.
One goal of the program is to get kids hooked on self-improvement—physical, moral, and intellectual. They are taught that it can be hard to stay inside the Success Circle but intrinsically very rewarding. It may be tempting to shirk a demanding task, lie to a friend, or steal something from someone. But children learn to monitor the toll it takes on their psyches. They also learn the central lesson that comes down to us from the ancient Stoics: you don’t have to be at the mercy of your thoughts and ideas—you can change them and improve them. As the first-century Greek philosopher Epictetus said, “What upsets people is not things themselves, just their judgment about things.”65 Through Positive Action, children learn to be mindful and careful of their judgments.
Older students also study the lives of great individuals—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, Albert Einstein, the Dalai Lama, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, or Rosa Parks—with a focus on “the thoughts that lead them to take great actions.” Allred’s program is practical, mundane, and homespun, but it somehow captures the insights of the world’s great moral traditions. What’s more, it resonates with children. “It is intuitive in them,” Allred told me. Aristotle and Epictetus could not agree more. This Idaho educator may have found a way to equip children with a moral compass—and the means to find their way back to true north when they stray.
In June 2011, an eleven-year-old boy at Monterey Heights Elementary School in California gave a speech at graduation about how Positive Action had changed his life. He had once been a bully and a troublemaker and was failing his classes. “The lunch lady tried to keep me from recess so I cursed her out,” he told his audience. “School was a prison to me and teachers were just trying to keep me locked in.” But something in the Positive Action curriculum reached him. He is now a Positive Action “Sumo.” His grades are good, he has more friends, and he has emerged as a school leader. “To all my future lunch ladies—I will not cuss you out.”
When a Michigan state official visited a Positive Action class at Tustin Elementary in Tustin, Michigan, she remarked to a coworker, “I can use this in my own life.”66 We can all use it in our lives, but too many parents and schools simply fail to impart basic worldly wisdom to children. Positive Action appears to be effective with both girls and boys; but today, with so many boys clueless about right and wrong, misdirected by the self-esteem movement, and lacking ambition—it is just the sort of instruction they desperately need.
How to Be Successful
The movement to restore directive moral education to the schools has been fiercely resisted by many educators since its inception. Amherst professor Benjamin DeMott wrote a piece for Harper’s Magazine in 1994 jeering at the revived character education movement. Like Professor Puka, DeMott asked how we can hope to teach ethics in a society where CEOs award themselves large salaries “in the midst of the age of downsizing.”67 Alfie Kohn, a popular education speaker and writer, wrote a long critical piece in the education magazine Phi Delta Kappan accusing character education programs of indoctrinating children and making them obedient workers in an unjust society where “the nation’s wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.”68 Reactionary values, he claims, are already a powerful force in our nation’s schools: “Children in American schools are even expected to begin each day by reciting a loyalty oath to the Fatherland, although we call it by a different name.”69 Kohn’s comparison—likening the Pledge of Allegiance to a loyalty oath to Hitler’s Reich—is a fair example of the mind-set one still finds among some progressives.
Thomas Lasley, former dean of the University of Dayton School of Education and another foe of the “old morality,” denounces the “values juggernaut” for its hypocrisy:
Teachers tell students to cooperate, but then they systematically rank students in terms of their class performance. . . . Teachers tell students that respect is essential for social responsibility, but then they call on boys a majority of the time. . . . And finally students are informed that they should be critical thinkers, but then they are evaluated on whether they think the same way that their teachers do.70
Jerry Harrington (now retired) taught math at the Woodland Park Middle School, located in a poor neighborhood of San Diego, for more than thirty years. During his time at Woodland Park, Harrington taught a fifteen-minute morning class to students called How to Be Successful. It’s a course on what Aristotle called the practical virtues. But it is also the kind of course critics like Kohn and Lasley deplore. In Harrington’s class, the kids learn the “Eleven B’s”: Be responsible. Be on time. Be friendly. Be polite. Be a listener. Be a tough worker. Be a goal setter. And so on. Children are taught all about the work ethic and how to integrate it into their lives.71
Writer Tim Stafford described what happened when Harrington ran into a former pupil.72 The student, Philip, then in high school, was bagging groceries, and Harrington asked him how he got his job. Philip said he got it by applying what he had learned in class. First, he set a goal: “I set a goal that I needed to earn six hundred dollars in the summer because my mother could not afford to buy me clothes for school.” Adhering closely to the method taught in the course, Philip then broke the goal down into small parts. Next he had taken what are called “action steps.” Step one: He listed twenty businesses that were within walking or biking distance of his house. Step two: He went to each one to apply for a job. After sixteen rejections, the seventeenth place—the grocery store—hired him.
Two years later, Mr. Harrington ran into Philip’s older brother, who told him that Philip was still working. The older brother told Mr. Harrington, “You saved my life too.” He explained that their mother was an alcoholic who had had a series of boyfriends. Their home life was chaotic. Philip had told his brother about what he had learned in his How to Be Successful class. Now both brothers were putting their lives together.73
I spoke with Harrington in the fall of 1999. He told me that, on average, middle school boys are less mature than the girls: “The boys have difficulties at the level of basic organization: being responsible for their backpacks, their homework.” Most of the girls understand the idea of personal responsibility and are ready to move on to the idea of being responsible for others. At Harrington’s school, it is girls who are active in school events and who hold the leadership positions in student government. The male students are preoccupied with skateboarding, surfing, and roller blading—activities with few rules, little structure, no responsibilities. When he asks his male students about their long-term goals, many of them confidently assert that they plan to become sports stars. But when he inquires about what steps they are taking to realize even that unrealistic goal, he finds that they have a very poor understanding of the relationship of means to ends. Harrington has two daughters and assures me that “girls are very dear to my heart.” But, he points out, no one seems to be focused on boys: “Every time I t
urn around, if there is an event or program where someone is going to be lifted up and encouraged, it’s for girls.” Harrington was unusual in recognizing and talking about boys, their insufficiencies, and how badly we neglect them. He was doing what he could to help them, but in too many schools the moral needs of boys are disregarded and unmet.74
There are millions of American boys who could greatly benefit from courses like Harrington’s and from programs like Positive Action—and not just poor and neglected boys. Of course, girls need directive moral education as well. But when we consider that boys are more likely to fail at school, to become disengaged, to get into trouble, and generally to lose their way to a viable future, it is reasonable to conclude that boys need it more. When two University of Pennsylvania researchers tried to determine why girls do so much better in school than boys, one glaring but simple difference stood out: “Self-discipline gives girls the edge.”75
What real-world help do the DeMotts, Kohns, Lasleys, and Pukas have to offer boys such as Philip and his brother? What do they propose the schools do about boys with serious character disorders, such as Kyle and Kevin Scherzer and Chris Archer, the Glen Ridge ringleaders, and the Lakewood boys? How would Philip and his brother have fared under the latter-day romantic permissive philosophy of these progressive educators? At the other extreme, too many schools have adopted zero-tolerance policies and simply suspend or expel troubled boys and leave them to cope on their own. The evidence on current character education is mixed, but the extremes—value-free education, gender resocialization, and zero tolerance—have no empirical basis whatsoever.
Lacking guidance and discipline and ignorant of their moral heritage, many American public school children, especially boys, are ill prepared for real life, confused about how to manage their personal lives, and ethically challenged. Some, indeed, are lethally dangerous. In the war against moral education, it is boys who suffer most of the casualties.
9
War and Peace
There have always been societies that favored boys over girls. Ours may be the first to deliberately throw the gender switch. If we continue on our present course, boys will be tomorrow’s second sex.
The preeminence of girls is gratifying to those who believe that, even now, many girls are silenced and diminished. At long last, it is boys who are learning what it is like to be “the other sex.” Recall Peggy Orenstein’s approval of a women-centered classroom, whose walls were filled with pictures and celebrations of women, with men conspicuously absent: “Perhaps for the first time, the boys are the ones looking in through the window.”1
But reversing the positions of the sexes in an unfair system should be no one’s idea of justice. A lopsided educational system in which boys—finally—are on the outside looking in is inherently unjust and socially divisive. The public has given no one a mandate to pursue a policy of privileging girls. Nor is anyone (outside exotic gender equity circles) demanding that boys be resocialized away from their boyishness.
The Great Relearning
Recently, there have been signs of resistance. New groups, such as the Boys Initiative, have formed to promote the cause of boys.2 Several excellent books on the struggles of boys have materialized. Chicago public schools have dared to introduce an ambitious boy-focused ethics program with a blatantly gendered name: Becoming a Man—Sports Edition.3 Indeed, with respect to boys, we may now be entering the era of “The Great Relearning.” I borrow the phrase from the novelist Tom Wolfe, who first applied it to lessons learned in the late 1960s by a group of hippies living in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. What happened to Wolfe’s iconoclast hippies is instructive.
The Haight-Ashbury hippies had collectively decided that hygiene was a middle-class hang-up. So they determined to live without it. For example, baths and showers, while not actually banned, were frowned upon as retrograde. Wolfe was intrigued by these hippies who, he said, “sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero.”4 After a while their principled aversion to modern hygiene had consequences that were as unpleasant as they were unforeseen. Wolfe describes them thus: “At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.”5 The itching and the manginess eventually began to vex the hippies, leading them individually to seek help from the local free clinics. Step by step, they had to rediscover for themselves the rudiments of modern hygiene. That rueful process of rediscovery is Wolfe’s Great Relearning. A Great Relearning is what has to happen whenever reformers go too far—whenever, in order to start over “from zero,” they jettison basic values, well-proven social practices, and plain common sense.
Wolfe’s story is both true and amusing. We are, however, familiar with more consequential, less amusing twentieth-century experiments with rebuilding humankind from zero: Today, more than twenty years after the fall of communism, Eastern Europeans are still in the midst of their own Great Relearning. The United States has also had its share of radical social experiments. By recklessly denying the importance of giving young people moral guidance, parents and educators have cast great numbers of them morally adrift. In defecting from the crucial duties of moral education, we have placed ourselves and our children—especially boys—in serious jeopardy.
We are at the tail end of an extraordinary period of moral deregulation that has left many tens of thousands of our boys academically deficient and without adequate guidance. Too many American boys are floundering, unprepared for the demands of family and work. Many have only a vague sense of right and wrong. Many are still being taught by Rousseauian romantics, which is to say they have been left to “find their own values.” Leaving children to discover their own values is a little like putting them in a chemistry lab full of volatile substances and saying, “Discover your own compounds, kids.”
In the pursuit of a misguided radical egalitarian ideal, many in our society have insisted the sexes are the same. In our schools, boys and girls are treated as if they are cognitively and emotionally interchangeable. We must now relearn what previous generations never doubted: the sexes are different. It is much more challenging to educate males than females. Just like the British and Australians, we must find out way back to fair-minded, gender-specific policies and practices that acknowledge difference.
Between Mothers and Sons is a wonderful book about feminist mothers coping with an unforeseen and startling event—the birth of a son.6 One might expect the book to be full of advice to mothers on how to resocialize their male child in the direction of androgyny. Instead, it offers a poignant glimpse of women rediscovering the ineradicable nature of boys. These mothers came to question cherished antimale dogmas when these conflicted with something far stronger and deeper—motherly love. Some of the mothers confess to having tried to educate their sons to conform with strict feminist precepts, stopping only when it became evident their boys were suffering. In these accounts, Mother Nature, not Social Construction, gets the last word.
Deborah Galyan, a short-story writer and essayist, describes what happened when she sent her son Dylan to a Montessori preschool “run by a goddess-worshiping, multiracial women’s collective on Cape Cod”7:
[S]omething about it did not honor his boy soul. I think it was the absence of physical competition. Boys who clashed or tussled with each other were separated and counseled by the peacemaker. Sticks were confiscated and turned into tomato stakes in the school garden. . . . It finally came to me. . . . I had sent him there to protect him from the very circuitry and compulsions and desires that make him what he is. I had sent him there to protect him from himself.8
Galyan then posed painful questions to which she found a liberating answer: “How could I be a good feminist, a good pacifist, and a good mother to a stick-wielding, weapon-generating boy?
” And “What exactly is a five-year-old boy?” “A five-year-old boy, I learned from reading summaries of various neurological studies . . . is a beautiful, fierce, testosterone-drenched, cerebrally asymmetrical humanoid carefully engineered to move objects through space, or at very least, to watch others do so.”9
Janet Burroway, a poet, novelist, and self-described pacifist-liberal, has a son, Tim, who grew up to become a career soldier. She is not sure how exactly he came to move in a direction opposite to her own. She recalls his abiding fascination with plastic planes, toy soldiers, and military history, noting that “his direction was early set.”10 Tim takes her aback in many ways, but she is clearly proud of him: throughout his childhood she was struck by his “chivalric character”: “He would, literally, lay down his life for a cause or a friend.” And she confesses, “I am forced to be aware of my own contradictions in his presence: a feminist often charmed by his machismo.”11
Galyan and Burroway discarded some common antimale prejudices when they discovered that boys have their own distinctive charm. The love and respect they shared with their sons left them chastened, wiser, and free of the fashionable resentments that many women harbor toward males. All the same, such stories are sobering. They remind us of the strong disapproval with which many women initially approach boys.
The War Against Boys Page 22