Let’s begin with two premises:
1. It is out of positive character that sustainable ethical and moral choices are made.
2. Discipline develops habits, and habits are part of shaping character.

• Discipline is structured learning to do the right thing even when you don’t feel like it.
• Habits are formed by consistently doing those right things on a daily basis.
• Character becomes a way of living for anyone whose habitual way of doing the right thing leads to a meaningful and fulfilling life for others as much as for self.

We believe that education provides a context where moral development and intellectual development collaborate in that challenge of building new social capital by raising healthy children. Character education facilitates that interplay between the intellectual and the moral, as well as their integrated application to life situations that are relevant to our children (at school and at home).

Writers in the field of moral development have guided us in understanding the developmental agenda of childhood: “…moral judgments signify efforts to find order in the chaos of social experience. These judgments are tied, on one hand, to the structure of thinking that a child brings to bear on his experience and, on the other hand, to the experiences themselves of which he strives to make sense…The notable achievement of the adolescent mind is the capacity for reflective thought – the ability to include, among the facts of experience, the activity of thinking itself.” The author goes on to say that this thinking process can threaten to “derail moral judgments altogether.” Carol Gilligan, Harvard University (The Modern American College, page 139f)

Therein lies the educational challenge! We are discovering that the Changing Lives character education program enhances the developmental context of education by infusing a comprehensive program of character values into the daily life of an entire school. In that setting, there is the opportunity to influence the consistency of habits resulting in a sense of meaning and fulfillment accompanied by a sustainable desire to continue to do the right thing…in the right way…at the right time…for the right reasons. Aristotle said it best:  “We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Dr. Dick Daniels
President, Changing Lives
dickd@mark1.org
www.teachingtochangelives.com
www.coachingtochangelives.com
800-932-7235