For generations, schools have been remarkably successful at teaching children how to solve for x, diagram a sentence, and remember just enough history to pass Friday’s quiz. Unfortunately, life has changed faster than the curriculum. Today’s children are growing up in a world dominated by social media influencers who confuse fame with significance, technology that can answer nearly any question before a child has finished asking it, and political divisions that can turn Thanksgiving dinner into an Olympic event. Information has become cheap. Character has become priceless. After forty years in education, I learned that every child possesses remarkable gifts, but those gifts flourish only when supported by qualities like responsibility, generosity, courage, resilience, and integrity. Schools have spent decades perfecting the transfer of knowledge. The next great challenge is helping students become the kind of people who know what to do with that knowledge.
Somewhere along the way, we also created a strange illusion that good grades automatically produce good lives. They don’t. Report cards predict how well students performed in school, not how well they will navigate marriage, careers, friendships, disappointments, or the occasional boss who thinks replying “per my last email” is a personality trait. Parents remain the most important influence in a child’s life, but today’s families face challenges previous generations never imagined. Artificial intelligence can write essays, summarize novels, and probably explain quantum physics better than most of us, but it cannot teach a child empathy, honesty, or the courage to admit, “I messed up.” As schools gradually stepped away from character education over concerns about crossing the line between education and moral instruction, a vacuum emerged. Nature hates a vacuum, and the internet was more than happy to fill it.
The encouraging news is that this story can have a different ending. Most parents, regardless of politics, religion, or income, want remarkably similar things for their children: kindness, responsibility, perseverance, generosity, and the ability to become productive adults. Schools have an extraordinary opportunity—and I would argue an obligation—to lead this effort by partnering with families around these universal virtues. I witnessed the power of this firsthand in classrooms where students like Jackson transformed not because they memorized one more chapter in a textbook, but because they learned generosity, responsibility, and respect for others. Those lessons changed classroom culture, strengthened friendships, and prepared students for life beyond school. If schools can intentionally teach algebra, grammar, and chemistry, surely they can intentionally teach the qualities that determine whether that knowledge is used to build a better world. After all, nobody has ever said, “I wish my surgeon had scored higher on the standardized tests, but kindness and integrity were really overrated.”
We welcome you to the conversation. Please let us know that you care by liking comments, forwarding posts, or joining in our dialogue at johnzurn.com. We would love to hear your own “Stories From the Classroom….”.
From our first posting:
“As parents and teachers, we need to reclaim our traditional role as influencers of our children – not by shouting louder than the influencers our children discover online, but by stressing ideas that are more important than fancy shoes and snappy TikTok tunes. We need to emphasize traits that everyone agrees children will honor. We need to convince our children that the people who are most important to them have a better understanding of what it takes to be successful in life.”
#charactereducation #successtraits #parentingtips #homeschooling #teachertips