Why Character Education Spirit Murders Black and Brown Children

• In Event: Spirit Murdering: How Racism Kills the Soul

Abstract

Character education has been around since the development of education in America; the founding fathers of public education (Horace Mann, William McGuffey, and Benjamin Franklin) wanted to teach morality in schools (Watz, 2011). However, the explosion of character education arose during the 1980s and 1990s when private, large-scale programs such as the Heartwood Program and Character Counts! infiltrated public education. These programs, with no formal evaluation of their success rates, were bought by public schools everywhere on the belief that their growing student bodies of dark and poor students lacked good character. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush each tripled funding for character education during their administrations (Watz, 2011). At face value, character education seems harmless, and I am sure we can all agree that children need good qualities to be successful in life, regardless of how you define success, but character education is antiblack and it has replaced civics education in our schools. Students no longer learn how to be an informed and active citizen which is key to democracy, they learn now how to comply and recite affirmations about their grit.
The Character Lab, a nonprofit organization cofounded in 2016 by psychologist Angela Duckworth, who popularized the term “grit”; Dave Levin, the co-founder of KIPP public charter schools; and Dominic Randolph, head of Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, defines social and emotional intelligence as the ability “to understand your own and others’ feelings and emotions and then to use this understanding to inform your decisions and actions”(Character LAB, 2018). They go on to add that people with high social and emotional intelligence find solutions when they are in conflict with someone, can quickly adapt to social situations, can show respect for others’ feelings, and are less likely to engage in violence.
The Character Lab defines grit as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals” (Character LAB, 2018). Revising an essay repeatedly or not quitting a sport in the middle of the season are examples of gritty behavior, according to the Character Lab. But what if your long-term goal is fighting racism? Is four hundred years long enough? We have rebelled, fought, conformed, pleaded with the courts, marched, protested, boycotted, created timeless art that reflects our lives, and become president of the country that disposes of us with little to no relief of our oppression. Is this not grit? We take issue with this line of research focused on Black and Brown students behavior by way of examining their character “strengths” and “weaknesses” because we live in a racist, sexist, Islamophobic, patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic world where grit is not enough to fight these systems. Yes, it is needed, but to insist that Black and Brown need, do not have, and can function on those characteristics alone is misleading, naïve, and dangerous.
Our presentation will consist of a comprehensive discussion of character education, specifically grit, and how these concepts with the field of character education are harmful to students of color and anti-black.

Authors

• Bettina L. Love, University of Georgia

• Alex Chisolm, University of Georgia - Athens