Early Character Development and Education

Abstract

It is a well-worn refrain that more attention must be paid to the moral character of our youth. Such pleas are prevalent in the mass media and in professional forums, and typically are justified by data reflecting the misdeeds of youth; e.g., crime, substance use, unwed teen pregnancies, suicide. Whereas it is unclear that the state of youth morality is at a nadir and imprudent to suggest that character education is a panacea (Bebeau, Rest, & Narvaez, 1999), it is nonetheless clear that character education should and can be part of the solution (Developmental Studies Center, 1998). This article represents an attempt to investigate what we know about character development in early childhood, in order to suggest how we can effectively promote character in early childhood education. For the purposes of this manuscript, early childhood will be defined as 18 months to 6 years of age. Research has suggested that a moral sense begins around 18 months (Lamb & Feeny, 1995) and formal schooling typically begins around 6 years of age. The challenge is to implement character education so that it has the desired impact on the development of children's character (Bebeau et al., 1999). There are numerous obstacles to such effective implementation, including a lack of an empirical base to justify character education (Leming, 1993), poor dissemination of character education information to practitioners, contentiousness among disagreeing proponents of character education (Berkowitz, 1997), and very limited training of pre-service teachers (Berkowjtz, 1998; Jones, Ryan & Bohlin, 1999). Central amongst these challenges is the fact that we do not have a clear empirically-grounded sense of what teachers must do in the early childhood classroom (or any classroom, for; that matter) to promote character development. This paper will address that limitation by drawing from the literature on teaching for character development and even more substantially on the literature on parenting for character development. Bridges between the two literatures will be suggested. Finally, we will offer some suggestions from a more clinical perspective on how early childhood teachers can deal with character dysfunction in students. First, however, we will need to define some terms.