A Crisis of Character
A Crisis of Character
This blog is connected to my website, www.starstudentprogram.com. The website is based on my experience building my own character education program for my students in an urban, public school in New Orleans. The blog is intended to be a forum for the discussion of character education issues.
Having just started this blog I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to delve into current events. With everything that’s going on right now, I can’t resist. Our nation is in a crisis, but not simply an economic crisis. We are in a crisis of character.
The free market economy is not so different from a regular, old produce market. If I buy an apple, and it turns out to be rotten, I’m not buying another one from the same guy. Our economic system is built on trust. Trust develops slowly, as I buy my apples from a guy with good apples week after week after week.
Many mortgage lenders and buyers left their character out of the market transaction and it is now costing our nation trillions of dollars. They bought and sold rotten apples. Banks are collapsing because no one can trust them anymore. They don’t even trust each other. They are engulfed in a crisis of character.
Every crisis is a crisis of character. I was unlucky enough to live in New Orleans when hurricane Katrina hit the city. Many government officials acted without character to turn a manageable natural event into national crisis. From our former president to the levee builders and inspectors, too many individuals failed to take their responsibilities seriously. It had profound implications for the lives of millions.
Don’t get me wrong. Katrina would have been nasty by any measure. But the levees did not have to fail. People did not have to sit stranded on roof tops and in the Superdome for days. The social contract that holds our country together collapsed.
Now the contracts on thousands, if not millions, of homes have collapsed because they were based on nothing of true value. No trust, no integrity. Huge corporate banks compounded the problem by selling these toxic contracts on a global scale. Now the world is engulfed in a crisis of character.
It didn’t have to be this way. You rarely read the news reports of the crises that didn’t happen. You’ll never know the names of many individuals in various professions, in every era, who stepped up and acted with character to avoid disasters.
I can’t help think of Sully the pilot who successfully ditched a plane in the Hudson River recently, saving over 150 lives. Could he have done that if he had not developed his character as a pilot and a human being throughout his life? I doubt it. Meanwhile, nearby on dry land, Bernie Madoff is still sneaking his valuables to family members and still living in his penthouse apartment. A single man created a 50 billion dollar crisis because of his lack of good character.
By some measures our public schools have been in crisis for over a hundred years. The only way to get out of this crisis is to act with character and to teach the understanding and meaningful expression of character to our young students. Someday they may be the individuals that you never read about because they saved their local community, or maybe their nation, maybe the world, from the next crisis of character.
This blog is connected to my website, www.starstudentprogram.com. The website is based on my experience building my own character education program for my students in an urban, public school in New Orleans. The blog is intended to be a forum for the discussion of character education issues.
Having just started this blog I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to delve into current events. With everything that’s going on right now, I can’t resist. Our nation is in a crisis, but not simply an economic crisis. We are in a crisis of character.
The free market economy is not so different from a regular, old produce market. If I buy an apple, and it turns out to be rotten, I’m not buying another one from the same guy. Our economic system is built on trust. Trust develops slowly, as I buy my apples from a guy with good apples week after week after week.
Many mortgage lenders and buyers left their character out of the market transaction and it is now costing our nation trillions of dollars. They bought and sold rotten apples. Banks are collapsing because no one can trust them anymore. They don’t even trust each other. They are engulfed in a crisis of character.
Every crisis is a crisis of character. I was unlucky enough to live in New Orleans when hurricane Katrina hit the city. Many government officials acted without character to turn a manageable natural event into national crisis. From our former president to the levee builders and inspectors, too many individuals failed to take their responsibilities seriously. It had profound implications for the lives of millions.
Don’t get me wrong. Katrina would have been nasty by any measure. But the levees did not have to fail. People did not have to sit stranded on roof tops and in the Superdome for days. The social contract that holds our country together collapsed.
Now the contracts on thousands, if not millions, of homes have collapsed because they were based on nothing of true value. No trust, no integrity. Huge corporate banks compounded the problem by selling these toxic contracts on a global scale. Now the world is engulfed in a crisis of character.
It didn’t have to be this way. You rarely read the news reports of the crises that didn’t happen. You’ll never know the names of many individuals in various professions, in every era, who stepped up and acted with character to avoid disasters.
I can’t help think of Sully the pilot who successfully ditched a plane in the Hudson River recently, saving over 150 lives. Could he have done that if he had not developed his character as a pilot and a human being throughout his life? I doubt it. Meanwhile, nearby on dry land, Bernie Madoff is still sneaking his valuables to family members and still living in his penthouse apartment. A single man created a 50 billion dollar crisis because of his lack of good character.
By some measures our public schools have been in crisis for over a hundred years. The only way to get out of this crisis is to act with character and to teach the understanding and meaningful expression of character to our young students. Someday they may be the individuals that you never read about because they saved their local community, or maybe their nation, maybe the world, from the next crisis of character.
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