Helping Students Grow Morally

As you well know, Bosque’s core values are scholarship, community, and integrity; we look at these three components of an education as equally important in helping young women and men to become fully realized human beings.  As you can imagine, teaching students each of these core values requires different curriculums, a variety of pedagogical techniques, and a plethora of lessons.  What helps an adolescent become a stronger student may require a different set of skills than how to be a contributing member of a community or a person who demonstrates compassion, kindness, and honesty. 

Thanks to New York Times columnist David Brooks we have something else to consider as we ponder how to teach students about integrity.  In a recent column, “A Moral Bucket List,” Brooks outlines how to build a life that differentiates between two types of virtues—what he calls “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.”  We may know intuitively the difference between the two, but it is all too easy to focus on the traits we need for our careers rather than the character elements we require to lead a happy and productive life.  As Brooks points out, “We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.”

Brooks reminds us, as parents and educators, that the people he has admired over the years became moral beings with hard work and effort as opposed to being born that way.  To help us see how character is developed, he proposes a list of experiences that will enable us to become better people:

• The Humility Shift demands that people be honest about their shortcomings.
• Self-Defeat asks us to confront our weaknesses and work to overcome them.
• The Dependency Leap reminds us that nobody achieves greatness alone.
• Energizing Love forces us to focus on the needs of others.
• The Call Within The Call enables us to turn a job or a career into something that meets a higher purpose.
• The Conscience Leap requires us to shed all of our external signs of success and grapple with the fears that hold us back.

As students take on these challenges, they learn that becoming a person of high moral character is a process rather than a singular event or a disposition that is innate; it is an ongoing struggle where we regularly face situations that require choosing between what may be expedient and what may be right.   Hopefully, as the adults in their lives, we can help our children develop a mindset and a moral toolbox, so they can make the decisions that will solidify their “eulogy virtues.”  From what I see of Bosque students, they are well on their way. As Brooks says towards the end of his article, “The people on this road see the moments of suffering as pieces of a larger narrative. They are not really living for happiness, as it is conventionally defined. They see life as a moral drama and feel fulfilled only when they are enmeshed in a struggle on behalf of some ideal.”  We wish our students well as they travel this road of becoming scholars who are also community-minded people living lives of integrity.