Character Education in Public Schools: The Quest for a Suitable Ontology

Craig A. Cunningham National-Louis University April 9, 2007

Three conceptions of character

One way to think about character is to see it as the extent to which a moral agent exemplifies the moral ideas of a society. We can call this socially normative character. Gather together all of those idealshonesty, perseverance, modesty, temperance, whateverand convert them into behaviors or qualities of agents that conduce to those behaviors (that is, traits), and you get an idealized moral agent who seems to embody the ideals, who seems to exhibit ideal moral character. On this view, a persons character is evaluated in terms of how closely he or she resembles the idealized moral agent. Those who resemble that idealized moral agent have character, and those who do not resemble that idealized agent either lack character or have a bad character that exhibits non-idealized or non-normative traits. A different way to think about character is to view it as the particular set of qualities or traits exhibited by a given person, without regard socially-sanctioned ideals. We can think of this as descriptive character, or non-normative character. On this view, everyone has their own unique character, which is what it is without regard to socially-sanctioned ideals. Some would argue that this non-normative conception of character robs character of its most useful affordance, resulting in moral relativism of the worst sort. Either we uphold a

particular set of ideals as normative, these critics would argue, or we have no ideals at all and hence no possibility of a moral society. Id like to suggest that we consider a third approach, which replaces the collection of socially-sanctioned traits or ideas with a shared set of criteria or principles which can serve to evaluate individual character not in terms of the adherence to an idealized set of behaviors or character traits, but in terms of whether that individual is reaching his or her own unique potentials for excellence.

The behaviorist assault on traditional conceptions

In A Certain and Reasoned Art: The Rise and Fall of Character Education in America, which appeared in Daniel K. Lapsley and F. Clark Powers edited volume, Character Pscyhology and Character Education, I detailed some of the different conceptions of character and character education that have appeared historically. Each eras educational method was supported by a psychological model based on then-current theory. The "mental discipline through effort" pedagogy of the mid-1800s was supported by early "faculty psychology" model of George Herbart and others. The "character as the sum of its traits" approach of the 1920s and 1930s received support from the account of human nature produced by early behaviorists. The "whole curriculum" approach of the 1940s and 1950s was in line with the emerging "environmentalism" of child psychologist Arnold Gesell. "Values clarification" was supported by Jerome Bruner's "discovery" model, and the moral development approach reflected the cognitive theories of Piaget as translated through Kohlberg and others. As I described in A Certain and Reasoned Art, character education advocates displayed a tremendous lack of certainty and agreement about the proper relationship among the brain, emotions, conscience, and the body. To a large extent, their failure to build

continuing consensus can be traced to the failure of psychology's attempt to develop "a comprehensive and generally accepted conception of the nature of man" (Allport 1968, 5). This psychological failure, in turn, can be traced to the failure of a larger societal consensus about the nature of the person and particularly of the moral nature of persons. This failure can be linked to what Judith Shklar calls the social and religious "nonscheme" of contemporary society (1984, 248). David Carr (1991) makes an even broader point: My basic view is that all the major mistakes about the moral educational role of the teacher with respect to the moral development of others to which people are nowadays inclined are based on misconceptions or misunderstandings of the nature of moral life which have followed certain failures of nerve concerning the legitimacy of a fairly familiar and informal sort of enterprise. In short, teachers fail in the task of moral education not primarily on account of their lack of any pedagogical skill or technique or of a coherent curriculum theory, but rather because they have only an uncertain grasp of what moral life actually means" (8). I think this nonscheme with regard to moral life can be linked to two related developments in the history of ideas in America: relativism and materialism. Let me explain. Historically, one can trace the fall of character education in America to the late 1920s, with the release of the Character Education Inquiry, directed by Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May. The CEI reflected what were becoming the intellectual biases of the times. Two related strands of intellectual thought were coming together at that time that lead to an impressive decline in the explicit teaching of morals and character. These strands are relativism and behaviorism. The religious consensus of the nineteenth century had disintegrated, to be replaced in the early 1900s by an emphasis on "rational rules" which arose out of students' self-interest and which were somehow related to the basic values of democracy, which in turn gave way to a notion that individuals learn values and the "traits" of moral behavior by practicing them within the school community. Each of these earlier models of character depended to some extent on the assumption that there exists an absolute distinction between "right" and "wrong", "good" and "bad," which could be learned

or taught within the school setting. This assumption came under harsh scrutiny in the 1920s and 1930s as the new science of anthropology began reporting that these assumptions were not always shared by widely differing societies. It seemed to the anthropologists that one's values and morality seemed to be determined exclusively by the accident of which society one was born in, rather than by some rational connection to an absolute sense of right and wrong. This shift in moral ontology had, of course, been taking place for some time. Taylor (1989) places the change in the late eighteenth century, with coming together of a Newtonian mechanistic world view and a "a radical rejection of teleology, of definitions of the human subject in terms of some inherent bent to the truth or to the good, which might give justification to an engaged exploration of the true tendencies of our nature (Taylor 1989, 164). This growing relativism was made more acceptable to educators by a growing trend in the 1920s and 1930s to see the human being materialistically; that is, as an automatic mechanism which developed in response to environmental stimuli and inherited characteristics. This model dramatically reduced the importance of thought on behavior. ; for the connectionist, This "nothing but" school of thought"Intelligence is `nothing but' a form of adapting the individual to the tension between his needs/drives and surrounding conditions"; Johnson 1980, 47; quoting Julian Huxleyarose out of the new behaviorism fostered by the animal stimulus-response experiments of Edward Thorndike and others. This combination of anthropological relativism and materialistic or mechanistic psychology in the third and fourth decades of this century had profound implications for society's conceptions of morality and moral education conceptions which had already in the preceding fifty years undergone significant reevaluation. Evolutionists in the late nineteenth century had introduced the idea that natural selection determined character; this

had prompted the development of a functionalist approach to the development and evaluation of moral behavior. This conception remained popular until the psychological scientists of teens and twenties came along and contended that the functionalist's language itselfthe language of traitswas unempirical: that it was arbitrary. The word "honesty" was claimed to have not only a content that was relative to circumstance; it had, in fact, no content at all. Using the language of Richard Shweder (1991), the authors of the CEI were claiming that the "reality-posits" of assumed character traits had null-reference". Under this assumption, fostered by the popularization of Nietzsche, "reality-posits or symbolic forms have null reference, for the realities they posit do not exist" (39). Shweder decries this perspective as the birth of "ontological atheism" (39). I believe we should look at the "fall" of character as psychological and educational concept as a direct result of what we might characterize as the atheistic ontological implications of Thorndikian connectionist psychology. This model of the self fostered a popular conception that morals and values are completely "relative" to one's circumstances and environment, and a view of the phenomenological selfthe intentional selfas being devoid of any moral consequences. In the face of such a conception, schools gradually lost their mandate to teach certain values as absolute and true, resulting in what Gerald Grant has characterized as a "profound confusion in America today about the school's role in shaping character" (1988, 1) Connectionism also generated confusion in psychology's view of the self. Allport's contention that modern psychology lacks any "meta-theories" which will help to explain social interaction or moral development is, he argued, a direct result of its inability to account for the fact that most people conceive of character as a collection of traits despite the psychological "evidence" amassed that this was mere illusion. The psychological attempt

to evict the "character" concept (Roback 1925, 79), and to focus on "personality" instead left us with a relatively shallow and broad notion which could not adequately fulfill the function of the rather deep concept of character, which was focused on moral personhood and excluded extraneousrelatively superficialissues such as Jungian psychological type, persona or attitudes about authority. Roback (1925, 82) provides a clue as to the reasons for the psychological avoidance of character: the fact that it was relied upon so readily by ethicists. For some reason, ethical terms are eschewed by those claiming to study human nature empirically, perhaps because these terms have value denotations which are antithetical to the empiricists' professed "neutrality." The loss of value-laden conceptions of human nature has created a difficult situation for character educators. Recently, some conservative theorists have even argued that without strong, shared sectarian or religious commitments, character education becomes impossible. James Davison Hunter, for example, in his provocative book The Death of Character, claims that psychology cannot fill this void; indeed, that there is no possibility of creating an inclusive moral vocabulary that is shared by all in our democratic society (2000, 225), and that the ongoing attempt to do sorelying on psychology, democratic consensus, or other nonparticularized sources or techniquesis doomed to failure. Hunter writes: Intending to deepen innate moral sympathies and even build character, moral education takes shape in ways that make that impossible. It is through a strategy of inclusion, which includes the denial of all particularity, that one guarantees the death of all godterms capable of rendering morality authoritative within communities and binding on conscience. The problem is that character cannot develop out of values nominated for promotion, consciously chosen by a committee, negotiated by a group of diverse professionals, or enacted into law by legislators. Such values have, by their very nature, lost the quality of sacredness, their commanding character, and thus their power to inspire and to shame. (225)

Hunter suggests that American society will have to find ways to respect and nurture particularistic differences, rather than continue to seek consensus. This recommendation lends itself to abandoning the notion that common public schools can adequately forge a strong national identity in favor of strong supports for decentralizing education using charter and private schools. While I think that Hunter is correct in his view that character education is almost impossible in a condition of crass relativism and materialism, I want to challenge his view that commanding values are inherently sectarian. Even a secular society such as that of contemporary America has shared ideals such as democracy or self-fulfillment that can serve as commanding and inspiring values across sectarian communities. I would like to suggest that a naturalistic, developmental conception of persons as moral agents with unique potentials for excellence can fulfill this role even in secular public schools.

Character as an essentially contested concept

Why is the concept of Character problematic in a relativistic and materialistic moral environment? The answer to this question may seem obvious, but I think it behooves us to examine it explicitly. Character education requires some conception of what outcomes are to be achieved. To say merely that one wants to achieve an outcome of good character is insufficient. The main problem is that the word character has empty content below the surface. While everyone would agree with Pritchard that character, when used in a moral education context, as "a definite positive connotation" (1988, 471, the question of what specific attributes are being referred to when someone says "that person has character" is unanswerable from the mere use of the word. Unless one knows the content of the

appraiser's value system, one needs to follow up this question with: "what about this person's character do you appraise as good?" Thus two different people can both analyze the same third person's character, and while one might admire her independence of mind and refusal to adhere to conventional style, the other might think her insufficiently modest and overly self-centered in her tendency to dress in an outlandish way. W. B. Gallie, in his classic, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (1968), develops a notion of what he calls "essentially contested" concepts. Certain concepts are essentially contested, he says, because what we think of them has profound and immeasurable implications for what we think of many other topics, and because the internal structure of these concepts is neither simple nor stable, but in turn dependent upon what we think of other subjects. (See also Taylor 1989.) In Gallie's terminology, "character" is certainly an "essentially contested" concept: first, because what we think of character has wide implications for what we think in terms of ethics, education, sociology, philosophy, psychology, the study of literature, history, etc.; and second, because what we think of such subjects as human nature, heredity, educability (="conditionability"?), the emotions, the relationship between mind and body, individuality, politics, etc. has immediate implications for our understanding of character. Our conception of character, and hence good character as an educational outcome is inevitably wrapped up in our entire conception about human nature. According to Gallie, while our understanding of an essentially contested concept such as character might be perfectly reasonablesupported by rational argument and mounds of evidencethere is no overcoming the essentially contested quality of the concept. There is no proving that our conception of character is any better than their conception, or that their conception must be abandoned because of what it includes or fails

to include. Rather, continuing and continuous disputes about the meaning of a term such as character are inevitable, ensuring that human debate will always and forever congeal around certain vital issues. Under this framework, to ask the question "What is character really?" is nonsensical. Character isn't anything really; rather, it is what we think it is, insofar as what we think of it determines in deep and unroot-outable ways how we see it operating in the world of our experience. Thus the question of "What is character?" must devolve into the question of what have so-and-so thought about character at such-and-such a time, and is there anything that this perspective can offer our own perspective or how does so-and-so's account fail to satisfy certain of our (or even our assessment of their) needs.

Salvaging character for a pluralist society

The authors of the classic Character Education Inquiry of the late 1920s proposed to turn the eternal issue of how to teach good character into the issue of whether people actually exhibit tendencies or generalities in their behavior. They meant to take character, an issue of moral philosophy, and rephrase it as an issue in empirical psychology. In so doing, the authors moved an ethical concept into the realm of statistics. There were no apologies for this action: If there is no such thing as honesty (so far as unified conduct is concerned), is there any such thing as goodness? Or is goodness also specific? Again, it must be remembered, we are dealing with conduct, not motives. We have seen what trouble we get into when we try to change the essential features of an objective act by calling it by another name. What we are concerned to know is whether "good" acts go together. This is a problem of statistics, not ethics. It is more obviously a statistical problem if we change the question to read: What conduct trends are positively associated with one another? Or better still: What interrelations among conduct are actually found? (Hartshorne and May 1930a, 173).

The authors thus adopted the behaviorist bias that character was nothing more than what A. A. Roback called "merely a concept to which are attached the possibilities of moral predication" (1925, 80), a point of view which would eventually lead to its banishment from psychology textbooks. Roback (1925), on the contrary, urged that character be given an important place in psychology, defining it with Mnsterberg as "Character is the power to keep the selected motive dominant" through controlling and checking the impulses of the will "by certain inhibitions" (87) and again as "an enduring psycho-physical disposition to inhibit instinctive impulses in accordance with a regulative principle" (118). This definition escapes the reductionism inherent in the behaviorist view, by retaining character as an aspect of phenomenological experience: "character is a relation which holds not between a man and his community [as suggested by behaviorism], but between his reason and his own acts" (113). I would like to suggest that we replace his reason in Robacks formulation with her ideals, in the sense of the ends which he or she has chosen as worthy of realization. This collection of ends can be referred to as the persons unique potential. The concept of unique potential, which I have developed elsewhere, offers us a path toward the third conception of character I briefly outlines at the beginning of this paper. The following text pieces from the height of the character education movement of the early part of the twentieth century illustrate the extent to which participants in the character education movement conceived of character in terms of potential. It is illustrative of the degree to which the psychologists such as Hartshorne and May may have been missing the point when they tried to define character in terms of conformity to social expectations: The great truth that marks the new Education...is the conception of child-nature as the promise and potency of all that may be hoped for in the mature man or woman, and therefore as the only datum and basis of education (Sisson 1911, 272).

...the new light teaches us to search in the developing human soul for the growing points of every virtue and excellence demanded of the mature man. Character is absolutely a growth from within outward, like any other organic development, and the possibility of moral education is dependent upon the discovery in the child of all the necessary original tendencies (Sisson 1911, 276-77). [Bowdoin College] President Hyde has said: 'The high school teacher who knows his students individually and leads them to the recognition of their deeper selves, is almost omnipotent for determination of both career and character' (Lawson 1915, 629). President Hyde has written, 'The teacher who will do this work of revealing the student to himself and discovering his individual purpose, must of course have a purpose of his own. Unless one has chosen teaching because that is what he feels specifically designed and drawn to do, he will hardly have power to lead others into what shall be to them an equally novel and enjoyable career. You can never discover the true self in others unless you have found and worked out your own. The true high school teacher finds his crowning opportunity in revealing to his students some appealing career and compelling purpose, which shall be to them what teaching is to him (Lawson 1915, 631). The term 'character education' suggests and implies the unfolding of the child's better self by the processes of growth and under the stimulation of the guidance of the teacher. The purpose of character education should be the growth of the child out of its weaknesses and crudities and superficialities of character into strength, depth, breadth, and harmony of character (Fairchild 1918, 120). Such a faith in human nature operates in the most definite manner in the educative relation. The teacher who has it constantly perceives and judges every child in the best possible light; he interprets the child's conduct as favorably as intelligence permits; and above all, he casts the child's horoscope, reckons his course, forecasts his development on the highest possible level. This is the deepest and most indispensable technique of character education. Without it, all ploys and devices, however shrewd, wise and expert, will prove futile, if not damaging. With it, and the intelligence by which alone any disposition or purpose can thrive, success may be hoped for, even in this most subtle and difficult task of education (Sisson 1927, 927). Character in its unfolding and development follows the spiritual law of growth, 'First the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.' In each individual there are potentialities for good, which, in the right environment and under the proper conditions, develop (Glenn 1932, 559). The teacher who has understanding of the complexity of modern life, courage to face its issues, and faith in the possibilities which human personality has for growth will see to it that the school is always a place of growth. This does not mean that the teacher exudes good character habits for pupils. It means that he has scientific technics [sic], such as the case-study method, for helping pupils develop

good habits. Such a teacher will not only see boys and girls as they are, but as they are capable of becoming - as they possibly may be Such a teacher unconsciously leads pupils to know that he believes in them (Norton 1932, 556). [In my own school,] we believe that character can be modified and that it changes from day to day, for better or for worse. We believe that the child is neither good nor bad, but a bundle of potentialities which may be developed in either direction. Guidance is necessary. We have come to believe that it is our duty to improve the character of children; that materials from outside mold the child, and that we should seize upon every opportunity for doing so (Jenkins 1935, 12) Ideal morality might be defined as a system of behavior that does two things. It provides maximum expression of the constructive potentialities of the individual; and it guarantees the same opportunity to all other people who may be affected by the individual's actions (Peck and Havighurst 1950, 6). In a democracy, ethical decisions are usually not made by an appeal to absolute and final truth but through the interwoven processes of individuation and socialization that is, by individuals hoping to maintain satisfying and accepting relationships with other humans equally bent upon realizing their potentialities (Thomas 1991, 53). While these samples may be characterized as educational rhetoricconcentrating on the identification and exhortation of certain ends rather than carefully crafted discourse about specific meanswe can see weaving through them a conception of the primary moral purpose of schooling: to create the aspiration among the children to actualize their good potentials as opposed to their bad potentials. While the Thorndikian behaviorists were looking for the children they studied to have already made observable alterations in their conduct (by the age of 13), what they found was a bunch of children whose behaviors seemed to be out of their conscious controldetermined, rather, by peer group and family and cultural values. Meanwhile, it may have also been true that the ideals which some of these children were being exposed to in class or in extracurricular activities were gradually building up their resolve to begin acting in a moral fashion as soon as they were capable of exercising such control. The behaviorists claimed to prove that character education was unable to alter the capacity of their pre-teen students to behave in a moral fashion. Thorndike, for example,

wrote: "The only thing that educational theorists of today seem to place as the foremost duty of the schoolsthe development of powers and capacitiesis the one thing that the schools or an other educational forces can do least" (Thorndike 1904, 6; quoted in Jonich 1968, 322). In perhaps one of the most significant examples of research bias in history, Hartshorne and May explicitly chose only to study the actual behaviors of young children, rather than the childrens future capacity to live according to their emergent sense of their own moral ideal. In so doing, the CEI researchers had already made up their minds that characterin the sense of a relation between a person and his or her conception of his or her own idealscould not be taught. In other words, the character education advocates were attempting to prepare students to aspire to certain idealscategorized in ordinary language into traits such as honesty, courage, self-control, etcas a way to alter their capacity to choose the good in certain morally-charged situations. In this, they were following Aristotle's view that only when youngsters are raised to cherish virtue can they lead virtuous lives. Such an ethics of aspiration has also been urged recently by Richard Taylor (1985), David Carr and David Norton. As Norton writes, "character growth in a human being is a form of selftranscendence involving the persistent venturing beyond one's prior self. In one's relations with others this means that one's own striving for moral growth is a continual striving for improvement upon this relations, which is to say that it continually endeavors to go beyond those relations in their prior terms" (1991, 27-8). In Norton's terminology, character educators were asking students to self-transcend in their dealings with others and in their individual behaviors; perhaps such self-transcendence is simply impossible for the preteen children studied in the CEI.

Charles Taylor (1989) makes a similar point about aspiration when he discusses the importance of our "best account" of what it is that makes our human lives seem significant. He speaks of the need for us to see ourselves as undergoing "a biographical development, from a stage where we fail to see" the significance of our lives "to a stage where it dawns on us... Put another way, the limit that we see ourselves tending towards, to the extent that we move to overcome distortions and illusions in our lives, is an understanding of life with this significance. Before we arrive at this limit, which presumably means forever, this construal [our best account] will remain a more or less plausible presumption... (Taylor 1989, 341). Our ideals, if they continue through the testing of experience to draw us onward, will act as our "best account" of who we are aspiring to become, and as such, will serve as explanationsor at least rationalizationsof our behaviors or at least our aspired-to behaviors. These accounts serve as standards by which the agent evaluates him or herself and self-corrects (see Scheffler 1985, 25). Despite the conclusions of their study that the mere urging of certain kinds of ideal behaviors would have little impact on the actual responses of schoolchildren, Hartshorne and Mayin what almost seems like an afterthought or perhaps even a lingering glimmer of their pre-empirical faith in character education reveal that they, too, hold ideals as crucial for the development of moral characters. The urge the "building of a functioning ideal for society which may serve at once as a principle of unified or consistent response and as a principle of satisfactory social adjustment." They argue, however, that schools have failed in at least three respects: (1) in presenting ideals which are scientifically unsound (in that they do not emerge as empirically workable as theories of life and (2) in often presenting children with ideals which contradict the ideals these children are receiving at home and with their peer group; and (3) in not allowing these ideals to emerge out of the children's own "guided

experiments in living" rather than merely presenting them a priori (Hartshorne and May 1930c, 762). So, for example, when a teacher preaches the virtue of honesty, but then rewards children for cheating on exams and quizzes, the children will develop a standard for their own behavior which directly contradicts the explicit teaching of the student. The "hidden curriculum," in other words, teaches more deeply than the "overt curriculum." This notion of a consistent "functioning ideal" which emerges out of the educational experiences of children comes close to an argument that the school (and the community) must have a certain sort of ethoswhich can be conceived as "institutional character" in order for students to develop their own characters in certain ways. Ted Sizer makes this one of the central tenets of his school reform efforts: to foster schools as "functioning communities" imbued with certain habits of "thoughtfulness" (Sizer 1992, 125) and also of character (Grant 1988; Lightfoot 1983).

Emergence as an ontological category

Following the publication of the CEI, an alternative way of looking at character was advocated by W. C. Bagley (1934) and Francis F. Powers (1932) in an attempt to counteract the immediate effects of the Inquiry. This theory seems to grasp the fundamental point of my previous section, that character was conceived by its advocates not as a set of observable behaviors, but rather as the gradual accretion of greater capacity for moral choicesthe increase of moral potential and the decrement of immoral potential. This concept was the idea of "emergence," a doctrine that the "whole [person] is greater than the sum of the parts." Given this framework, "the great task of education...is to determine and inculcate in the pupil those matter-of-fact specific trainings which, taken as a whole, lead to that general quality which we call character" (Powers 1932, 3-4; see also Smith 1925).

Bagley's Education and Emergent Man (1934) is the primary source for this view of character education, which combined elements of the trait approach to character with new conceptions of psychology developed by Germany's gestalt psychologists. Bagley, of course, was still a trait/idealist: by being explicit about transferable skills and concepts, and helping students to accept certain ideal traits as standards to be applied in a number of situations, he believes that these traits will eventually become habitual, or at least more common than they were previously. In this belief, Bagley continued to deny the extreme version of the connectionist specificity doctrine and to assert the importance of cognition on behavior. The difference is that now he proposed that mechanismsbiological, social, and psychologicalcould evolve and complexify over both generations of the species and the lifetime of an individual into processors which transcend the capabilities of the original mechanisms. "No one can tell when a congeries of social forces [for example] will gestalt into a new configuration the qualities of which are not predictable from the qualities of its components" (221). Thus, Bagley was arguing, the connectionists may have been right about the importance of studying the individual components of characterthrough observations of specific responses to specific stimulibut they were wrong to assume that they could thereby understand the emergent functions or qualities of personsmade up of "congeries" of such components evolving in complex and unpredictable fashion. For Bagley, character is the "volitional maturity" (190) which results when a person begins to develop the ability to react habitually to situations in accordance not with primitive impulses but with standards, principles, and values. This viewpoint has been carried forward through the work of Ausubel, Bruner, and others as what Darling-Hammond and Snyder (1992) have called the "cognitive structural perspective" on learning, which supports Bagley's

notion that students will learn (and "volitionally" mature) more quickly if their attention is directed to the general concepts and structures underlying a specific learning situation. Bagley's theory also claims to resolve the "troublesome dualisms" of idealism vs. naturalism; discipline vs. freedom; work vs. play. Ideals, for example, "are conceived of as emergent qualities of naturalistic integrations" (64). This idea, that ideals are "natural" is also the key to Dewey's (1934b) view of ideal ends, or teloi as emerging from the natural experiences of human attempting to overcome resistances find the necessary means to achieve particular ends. An important implication of the concept of emergence is the notion that while certain character qualities or traits may be unobservable in actual children's behaviors under the scrutiny of empirical study, educators need to approach each child as having the potential for these qualities to emerge from their continuing experiences. As potential aspects of children's character, these qualities are unmeasurable, and so were inevitably missed by the early empirical the psychologists when they tried to test the actual validity of the commonlyaccepted notions of how these qualities are manifest.

Unique potential as a functioning ideal

In a 1995 article, Dewey's Metaphysics and the Self, I argued that John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct (1922), when seen through the lens of Dewey's own naturalistic metaphysics, offers a conception of the self that not only explains what we know about character development but that could serve as helpful scaffolding for the process of character education (Cunningham 1995). I examined Deweys writings and developed a list of 40 proposed generic traits, which included two types of traits: (1) complementary pairs of traits such as stability and precariousness, incompleteness and finishedness, repetition and

irregularity, and association and individuality and (3) qualities present in all existences such as temporality, tendency, and potentiality. I also discussed Deweys concept that all existences are events, with beginnings, histories, and endings, and his claim that When the potential consequences [of an event] are important and repeated, they form the very nature and essence of a thing, its defining, identifying, and distinguishing form (LW 1:143). I used these ideastogether with a chronological narrative of ways that Deweys conception of the self evolved during his careerto describe his later, mature conception of the moral self as unique potential, not in the sense of a fixed essence or determinate capacity, but in the sense of a a field of indeterminate (though not limitless) transactionality (Calore 1989) within which a person has options for selecting possibilities and pathways that he or she thinks will lead toward the development of his or her ideal self. I also suggested that the concept of unique potential could provide inspiration and motivation for the process of moral education. This conception of the self provides a useful antidote to fundamentalist or absolutist approaches to morality, by emphasizing the possibilities of intelligence and choice to mould cultures and habits that conduce to personal growth and continual improvement in the human condition. As such, unique potential as an ideal can function in a society that rejects fixed or final ends and embraces Deweys vision for democratic participation in the shared construction of an open society. When we focus on a persons unique potential, according to Israel Scheffler, "We look at the agent not just as what he is, but as what he might become, as what under given circumstances he is likely to become, or indeed as what, if he chooses, he will become. Our vision of the manifest characteristics of persons is strongly tempered by such future reference and the converse is also true; we judge their future characteristics in the light of their manifest features" (Scheffler 1985, 65).

Human beings formulate rules or laws for themselves by which they monitor their own conduct, and create ideals to which they try to conform. Such functions go beyond the mere having of beliefs and purposes; here the effect is reflexive; the agent strives to meet a standard, to conform to a style, to approximate an ideal. What emerges here is implicit self-reference, awareness of how one is acting, whether one has in fact performed properly, whether one has lived up to one's ideal. Such self-reference implies that the agent has, as G.H. Mead put it, 'becomes an object to himself,' has swept himself into the sphere of his own reference. He has attained a form of self-consciousness, and with it the ability to attend to, and to correct, his conduct in light of his rules and ideals. This remarkable ability, born of symbolic capacity, is the root of self-criticism, the precondition both of science and conscience (Scheffler 1985, 25) Focusing on unique potential draws attention to what Bernard Williams (1985, 1) calls the essential question of morality or ethics; that is, the question of how one should live. This is the most important question that the individual faces in life, subsuming, as it does, other issues about the conduct of life such as one's ends, means, vision, motivation, and deportment. The question is essentially future-oriented, and involves a projection of present situations into decisions which will affect the future. From the possibilities presented, ethical agents choose those which they believe will lead to a future approximation of a personal ideal. These ideals are the result of an imaginative vision which either selects a subset of potentialities or a separate set of hopes and dreams toward which the person strives to develop their potential. The idea that agents actually have choices (rather than everything being predetermined) presupposes the ability of humans to imagine ends of present situations. Humans are "active beings who symbolically represent both their environments and their options, imagining futures and recollecting pasts, forging durable selves and communities structured by ideals and rules, and creating, above the biological substrate of their lives, the realm of human history" (Scheffler 1985, 7). As Charles Taylor has written, As I project my life forward and endorse the existing direction or give it a new one, I project a future story, not just a state of the momentary future but a bent for my whole life to come. This sense of my life as having a direction towards which I am

not yet is what Alasdair Macintyre captures in his notion quoted above that life is seen as a 'quest' (Taylor 1989, 48) Ideals, then, form the crucial connection between one's actuality and one's potentiality, and form a path of living which would give normative content to a well-lived life.

A working definition of character for unique potential

In a all-too-brief conclusion, Id like to tie all of this together and get back to my initial purpose, which was to develop an ontology of character suitable for American public schools. Early in the paper, I laid out a three-part categorization of character conceptions. The first category saw character as related to the degree to which a moral agent embodies socially-sanctioned ideals. This conception of character seems to work in societies with a deep shared commitment to a set of moral values, scaffolded by shared understandings of what is sacred and of the essential purposes of life. Such shared commitments and understands are necessary to support character education that aims at developing moral character as conformity to socially-sanctioned norms and expectations. If this is what we mean by character, then Hunters claim that character education is impossible in a pluralistic democratic society is at least plausible. But this is not the only possible conception of the nature of character or of the purposes of character education. The second category of character saw it as a merely descriptive concept that focuses entirely on the behaviors exhibited by a moral agent. This conception seemed to be what the authors of the CEI were aiming at: a purely empirical and value-free construct that could be used to analyze character in purely behavioristic and materialistic terms. By successfully arguing that a scientific and hence modern conception of character would exclude not only the godterms highlighted by Hunter but any attention at all to cognitive or dispositional elements in agents, the authors of the CEI effectively undermined the faith

of American society that its public and therefore increasingly pluralistic schools were effective in developing moral character. The third categorization I briefly described in my introduction would see character not as adherence to socially-sanctioned norms or as purely behavioralistic and descriptive, but in terms of whether a person is actualizing those qualities that have been chosen by that person as worthy or ideal. This conception would replace socially-sanctioned ideals with personally-sanctioned idealsthus preserving and even celebrating the reality and ongoing possibility of moral pluralismwhile conceding that character must actually produce behaviors and not simply remain in the realm of imagination or ideals. Im suggesting that we conceive of character as those actual qualities of a personbehaviors, dispositions, commitments, and understandingsthat support the emergence of that persons idealized moral self (her unique potential). On this conception, I can offer a working definition of character as follows: Character is the complex system of habits that support or impede the development of a persons unique potential for excellence. Such a conception would require character educators to pay attention not simply to socially-sanctioned norms for behavior such as honesty and perseverance, but also and perhaps more importantly to the ways in which their students conceive of their own ideal selves, and the personal qualities that will support the actualization of those selves. This conception may require a more personalized or less formulaic approach to character education, but the rewards of such transformations of educational goals and methods might well be the revitalization of democratic society.

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