Be Good

Diana Senechal offers a review of the latest book by the author of The Bell Curve entitled Real Education and brings attention to a small but powerful arguement that is made about how teaching children to be nice is not the same as teaching them to be good.

"When we read literature and history, we begin to glean what it means to be good. We see how people with the best intentions can fail; how people struggle with conflicting desires and values and make the best choices they can; how people overcome their limitations when put to the test. From works like Antigone, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Chekhov’s short stories, we learn about selfishness, cruelty, cowardice, and confusion, as well as grace, generosity, and patience. We come to see elements of all these traits in ourselves."

She continues: "If we only teach children to be nice, they will be at a loss when life calls for more than niceness. They will be at a loss when faced with problems—intellectual, practical, or emotional—that they have to solve on their own. And when the niceness wears out, they will reach for the next thing they know, the knee-jerk reaction. Murray is right: There is a wide gulf between being nice and being good—and while no curriculum can produce goodness, an excellent curriculum can give students a vision of what it might be."

Yup. Only in my role as my children's teacher have I come to appreciate the beauty of naming truly great works of literature living books . They really do shape you in ways that is hard to describe but present without a doubt. This is just one reason that I have been reading many of the works that I neglected in my own schooldays, having choosen instead to pass the test with my friend Cliff.

The argument for being good as opposed to nice also speaks to my absolute rejection of the worth of "team learning" as a worthy skill in the classroom. Been there, been the recipient of a bad grade because I feared that speaking up when my team was producing shoddy work would have me labeled as a control freak or worse. Also been there and been taken advantage of, being encouraged to do all the work myself and handing out A's to my undeserving "teammates". I believe that many who have gone to college, especially women, have similar stories to tell.