When I was a tutor with Chicago Lights Tutoring, each week I would put a quotation relating to character on a 3″ x 5″ card for my student (many from John Wooden – like those in June 16’s post).   To me, the reading, writing and arithmetic are all important.  But developing character is just as important. 

One of my favorite books is David Brooks wonderful work The Road to Character.  Brooks opens with reference to the end of World War II — a victory of epic proportion.  He observes that our parents and grandparents did not go around telling each other how great they were.  The collective impulse was to warn themselves against pride.  And self-glorification.  But Brooks observes that there has been a shift in ensuing generations.  From a culture of humility to a culture of I am the center of the universe.  Brooks calls it “The Big Me.”  Fame and fortune used to rank low as life’s core ambitions.  Today, those goals have moved to the top.  Yet curiously some people push to censor the teaching of virtue, character and integrity in schools.

Walter Lippmann said that when “good” and “evil” are reduced to “how we feel” about something, then society loses the objective standards necessary for truth and order. Martin Luther King delivered a sermon in 1954 on the topic of “right” and “wrong.” “I’m here to say to you this morning that some things are right and some things are wrong. Eternally so, absolutely so. It’s wrong to hate. It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong! It’s wrong in America, it’s wrong in Germany, it’s wrong in Russia, it’s wrong in China! It was wrong in 2,000 B.C., and it’s wrong in 1954 A.D.” As both men later said – the concepts of right and wrong are woven into the fabric of the universe.

How do you feel about that?