I don’t have a lot of enthusiasm for “school reform,” because it strikes me as insufficient. To reform our schools suggests working around the margins of the existing system. That means trying to get better at doing the wrong things.
What we need is transformation, a process by which we rewrite the definition of school.
Here’s what I mean:
I had a conversation with PSCS founder Andy Smallman last week in which he explained to me the difference between teaching values and teaching virtues. Traditional schools offer a values-based approach. For example, most schools typically value academic learning. They value preparing students for college, physical fitness, proficiency with technology, high achievement, and a host of other important things.
That’s a values-based approach, and that’s the problem. It’s the first reason why schooling in our society is dysfunctional and everyone is looking for reform measures that will fix it.
PSCS’s program is based not on values, but on virtues.
PSCS is based on things like integrity, determination, grit, community, and courage. When the students are immersed in an environment that places virtues as the primary focus, an amazing thing happens: the values that we all cherish—academic learning, preparation for college, high achievement—come as a natural by-product.
As a society, we’re trying to do it backwards: we hope that by building our schools around a set of values, that students will internalize the virtues. It doesn’t work that way.
Values are relative. I personally place a high value on academic learning, but there are plenty of smart, successful people who don’t. Values vary depending on who you talk to.
Virtues are universal. There are character traits that consistently emerge across history and in diverse cultures. These are permanent.
In this way, traditional schooling is ignoring that which is permanent; it’s building its house on a bed of sand. We’ve ignored the foundation. And when the foundation of a house is compromised, there’s no point in trying to fix the situation by tinkering around the margins.
It must be rebuilt from the ground up.
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