conversing about character: new foundations for general education

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CONVERSING ABOUT CHARACTER: NEW FOUNDATIONS FOR GENERAL EDUCATION

Andrew Kaplan

English Department Francis W. Parker School

CHARACTER AND THE SEARCH FOR EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES The construction of a general education for any nation depends on a background

of common values and a shared sense of the common good, but a pluralistic democracy such as the United States contains so many ethnic, cultural, and social traditions that specifications of the common good can often seem vacuous, coercive, or both. The claims of cultural or social relativity may tempt some to abandon all hope of a common learning, but the political if not the intellectual consequences of such a resignation are repugnant. The relativist cannot hope to do any better than promote the status quo in separate and not entirely equal enclaves. In a diverse nation, however, education remains the greatest hope for individual as well as social integration. Yet we find little agreement about what should be studied. Academic pragmatists argue that the diversity of modern culture requires such individual flexibility and initiative that it is impossible to state what constitutes an educated person. According to this view, we should abandon all hscussion of educational ends as fruitless and settle instead on negotiating a balanced program. As Sheldon Rothblatt points out, this is not general education, it is a standoff.’ If we cannot state educational goals objectively, then we endanger the enterprise of a common learning. In an age of curricular fragmentation, we still need to search for the elements that bind educational programs, permitting us to discover continuities and common ground. In an educational climate that is increasingly strident about the assertions of radical difference, we need to develop ways of avoiding the hardening of difference into unrealistic expectations. The claims and cries of a variety of factions have captured the academic spotlight for brief moments, but the ensuing clamor has done very little to temper the distrust of intellectuals that is so endemic in American public life. Yet one of the curious if not perverse accompaniments to that anti- intellectualism is a profound belief in the value of a good general education.

What are the hallmarks of a good general education? This rather modest question has continued to bedevil planners, teachers, and writers at all levels. No one doubts that all children should learn to read accurately, write coherently, and calculate correctly, but just how and when to teach those basic skills presents pedagogical and even political tasks that often seem monumental. No one doubts that all adolescents should be exposed to their national heritage, prepared for entry into a competitive workplace, and equipped to deal responsibly with the social and moral obligations of

1. Sheldon Rothblatt, “General Education on the American Campus: A Historical Introduction in Brief,” in Cultural Literacy and the Idea of General Education: Eighty-seventh Yearbook of the National Society of Education, Part 11, ed. Ian Westbury and Alan C. Purves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988),20.

EDUCATIONAL THEORY / Summer 1995 / Volume 45 / Number 3 0 1995 Board of Trustees / University of Illinois

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citizenship. The nature of that heritage, the tension of vocational with other kinds of training] and doubts about the schools’ capacity to serve educational along with therapeutic needs have again complicated any superficial consensus. No one doubts, finally, that our colleges and universities should pursue instruction and research that will advance the frontiers of knowledge and provide a competent cadre of academic and professional leaders. Yet vexing issues of the content and availability of that teaching and research as well as internal challenges to the structure and control of knowledge have made the design of higher education as problematic as the other levels.

As deep and difficult as these issues and problems may be, we need to find ways of discussing education in terms of common goals, common skills, common practices, and common values. If we do not have an immediate consensus on these common goods, however, that does not mean these goods do not exist. I propose that we begin our search at the beginning, with the search for some basis from which we can derive educational hrections that speak to the common goods of a pluralistic democracy. We find that beginning or basis, I suggest, in our contemporary concern to certify that education produces the kind of person and citizen we want and need. The “we” who are doing the desiring may be defined in a number of often contrahctory ways, but even though each faction or interest group may have different agendas for education, they all agree that it is imperative to produce the “right” kind of person, the kind of person whom we can rely upon to do the “right” thing. Whatever the “right” may be, then, it is an active result of a process we undergo.

Character is the general category that relates such acting andundergoing over the span of a life. Character may be expressed in a single action, but its full significance lies in the pattern or relation of the things we do and the things we undergo.2 Somehow, and here is the paradox of the educational process, the things we undergo are transmuted into the things we act upon: a good education acts upon students in such a way as to make them active. Although there are still some voices raised in favor of inculcating traditional values by indoctrinating the young and enforcing unequivocal rules,3 the general trend of current conversation about education

2. While he cautions that “character” does not have a single, unified meaning, Joel Kupperman provides a schematic definition that takes into account the importance of patterns and commitments developed over a lifetime: ”X’s character is X’s normal pattern of thought and action, especially with respect to concerns and commitments in matters affecting the happiness of others or of X, and most especially in relation to moral choices.” Joel J. Kupperman, Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 199 1 J, 17.

3. Among the most outspoken defenders of indoctrination is Edward Wynne. Wynne argues that ”the general modes of moral formation have remained relatively stable throughout all cultures.” Since “[tlhe transmission of moral values has been the dominant educational concern of most cultures throughout histoiy,” Wynne confidently asserts that school “is andshotzld and must beinherently indoctrinative. The only significant questions are: Will the indoctrination be overt or covert, and what will be indoctrinated!” Edward A. Wynne, “The Great Tradition in Education: Transmitting Moral Values,” Educational Leader- ship 43 no. S (December 198S/January 1986): 4, 9 (italics in original).

ANDREW KAPLAN is Chairman of the Department of English at the Francis W. Parker School, 330 Webster, Chicago, IL 60614. His primary areas of scholarship are philosophy of education, gender, iconography, and literature and society.

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recognizes that the complexity of decision making requires that we think about producing people who are active, responsible, and autonomous rather than merely obedient or faithfuL4 As important as independence may be as a goal, however, neither parents nor educators would argue that children create themselves from whole cloth. Education requires discipline, which at least at its earliest stages means ilnmersion in a tradition of practice, exposure to the rights and customs of a particular way of life, without which choice would not be free but merely random. The relationship of education to character is, I repeat, paradoxical: we have to act upon our students in order to educate them, but they will not be truly educated if they are merely passive instruments who follow directions. Educated students somehow internalize instruction by determining their own ways of respondmg to the world. Character internalizes tralt ion and discipline by creating a distinctive adjustment to the world.

The methods and ends of education must attempt to resolve these issues of acting and undergoing, tradition and self-adjustment, discipline and choice. Educa- tional methods and outcomes depend, that is, on the assumptions we make about the nature of character. Yet there is no consensus on the nature of character to guide us, and even if there were a catalogue of common values, how would we figure out which ones are relevant in a given situation, and how would such a list help us with conflicts among those valuests Instead of searching for a delusive consensus that would only diminish the richness of our current conversation, I propose that we make our disagreements about character central to the ongoing discourse. I am reasonably convinced that we will never agree; what is more, I fail to see what we would gain even if we did. I suggest instead that our disagreement about the nature of character provides a rich and productive ambiguity. Listening to the strands of that conversation about character can lead us to re-examine educational principles and practices. One focus of that re-examination should be the liberation of general education from the crude reductions imposed by economic or social utility.

The ends of general education are integral to the design of meaningful programs; claims of applied utility destroy that integrity by sacrificing education to narrowly defined career goals or broadly sketched goals of preparation for life. Approached from either extreme of application, the resulting program fails to embrace the necessary polarity of true educational utility, which must steadfastly embrace apparently antithetical goals.6 If the course of study for common learning fulfills economically determined goals, we set up false oppositions between the useful and the intellectually rigorous, between training and education. If the course of study

4. A recent survey of parent-child relationships supports the view that much of current conversation about educational outcomes focuses on character as active rather than passive. Contrasting the findings of the Lynds in the 1920s with a current survey of the same Indiana town, one sociologist finds that “adult preferences for child qualities in contemporary society give more emphasis to qualities linked to the autonomy of children, whereas earlier desiderata stressed greater obedience to institutional and adult authority.” Duane F. Alwin, “From Obedience to Authority: Changes in Traits Desired in Children, 1924- 1978,” Public Opinion Quarterly 52 (1988): 33. 5. Ivor Pritchard, “Character Education: Research Prospects andproblems,” American {ournal of Education 96, no. 4 (August 1988): 472-73. 6. Rothblatt, ”General Education on the American Campus,” 9.

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fulfills socially determined goals, we sacrifice the complexities of history and traditions to the merely relevant. If the course of study fulfills politically determined goals, we reduce the claims of education to the necessary information and facts that we all need in order to operate responsibly and lawfully as citizens. If education is something more than preparation for a successful career, something more than exposure to what is popular or current, something more than a service station that fills up the fuel tanks of a mobilized citizenry; if, in other words, education is to have any integrity, there must be a way to design goals in a manner that does not submit theory to practice, thought to action.

I suggest that we search for the integrity of educational programs in the assumptions we make about the ways in which people can achieve that distinctive sense of wholeness and firmness that we call character. Rather than assuming that there are certain fundamental subjects we must all master in order to be educated, I want to search for alternative structures that will permit us to rethink general education without the narrowness and political maneuvering that subject matters impose. When the subjects we teach and learn determine educational objectives, the division of learning into the various departments achievesvirtual hegemony over the distribution and definition of knowledge. Instead of leaving the discussion of education to those who have mastered certain subject matters, I want to broaden the basis of inquiry by asking about the context and the criteria for devising and evaluating new directions. The reduction of education to subject matters divides knowledge as well as the roles of teacher and student. The question of what knowledge is most worth having can be answered according to this view only by those who already know, that is, the teachers. Are there any alternative ways of conceiving the form and substance of knowledge?

We can open up our current conversation about character and education by restoring an ancient distinction concerning the nature of virtue. One of the great limitations of current discussions of character and education is that we seem to have forgotten that character is composed of two sorts of virtues, the moral and the intellectual. I suggest that we restore this distinction of the virtues to the discussion of character: if we focus our inquiry on the consequences of this distinction, we may be able to rethink the nature of common goods that are basic to the educational enterprise. Specifically, if education focuses on the interplay of intellectual and moral virtues, then character ceases to be a collection of predetermined behaviors. Instead of a passive receptacle to be filled up according to previously designed specifications, human character is profoundly various. The acquisition and exercise of intellectual and moral virtues make each of us uniquely active and responsible human beings.

If we rethink the nature of character, we may find ways to avoid unproductive debates about whose specifications are desirable. A good education does not tell students what to do; it gives them the means to make good decisions on their own. A good education, in other words, is a liberal education. Liberal education, in the sense Iuse the term here, refers not so much to a particular course of study or division of knowledge as it does to the development of artful ways to pursue and acquire

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knowledge. Education is liberal, as the word suggests, in three distinctive ways. First, a liberal education is liberating: it provides the means to free the individual from internal as well as external constraints. Second, a liberal education comprises the arts of free men and women: it maintains individual freedom by providing the means to discern and lead a fulfilling life. Third, a liberal education focuses on artful involve- ment with books, including the book of nature: it provides direct experiences and trains articulated responses to texts of all kinds. In each of its three senses, the qualities of a liberal education become aspects of character. Liberal education is both a resource of devices and methods and a structure of ongoing practices and activities that transform and enrich our lives. Liberal education empowers us to make fateful decisions about the course of our lives by giving us not only the skills to adapt but the contexts in which to consider alternatives maturely and fully. Liberal education leads to responsibility in the broad sense of making our responses to texts, to experiences, to other people, and to ourselves as capacious as possible. Liberal education thus transforms the potential of the human spirit to achieve a destiny of its own making, to embody a character. Rather than assume that we know already what that character must be and thus divorce general education from its liberating tendencies, I contend that we ought to make character central to educational planning by making character plural.

The formation of character, after all, is the end that general education specifically sets. Yet we frequently gloss over the rich ambiguities of character, settling instead for rather vapid moralisms or some set of behavioralized objectives that carry a more academic cynosure. Although the currently fractious discussion of character has uncovered a host of specific models that students of various backgrounds should be trained to aspire to, there is surprising agreement that there is some predictable, underlying essence to character, even though each faction, sect, or ideology may describe it differentl~.~In order to appreciate fully the advantages of character as a starting point for the discussion of general education, the first step is to examine whether the current discussion of character exhausts the possible meanings. If we look more closely at these possible directions and meanings of character, we may begin to see ways of extending the terms of current hsputes onto a more philosophical level where we might be able to negotiate our differences more profitably.

This philosophical level must avoid the perils of relativism and monistic reduction in order to take full advantage of the ambiguities of character. Relativism takes no advantage of difference: it merely notes multiplicity as radical and calls any specific selection arbitrary. Monistic reduction finds the one true path or conclusion among all the errors, but even at its most eclectic, such an approach fails to countenance the possibility that there are competing constructions that are just as rigorous. We need to view character in such a way that we preserve the differences while somehow directing them toward the discovery of inclusive tasks and goals.

7. “Despitetheuncertaintyandconfusion surroundingthe sign‘essence,’more thanoneinfluential theorist has advocated that perhaps we cannot do without recourse to irreducibilities. One thinks of Stephen Heath’s by now famous suggestion, ‘the risk of essence may have to be taken.’ It is poststructuralist feminists who seem most intrigued by this call to risk essence.” Diane Fuss, Essentiully Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), 18.

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The neglected ambiguities of character enrich and deepen our current concerns; they also provide a more expansive view of the essential problems of education, a view that permits us to take advantage of the history of liberal education in the task of constructing common directions and common goods out of contemporary disagreements.

The view that I have in mind traces our conclusions about the different meanings of character to their ultimate source in formally distinct modes of thought. At the philosophical level, our disagreements about character arise from the irreducibly many ways in which human beings think about and communicate truth. Rather than a futile attempt to coerce that multiplicity into an arbitrary unity, we need to find ways to encourage discursive relations among these concepts of character. We need to maintain the integrity of different views while somehow taking advantage of the disagreements as the basis for a conversation about the common enterprise of education. The result of such a conversation would be the discovery of thematic relations among the different concepts, converting mutually exclusive approaches into supplementary lines of thought that show us what the full range of educational disciplines must aspire to.

Discipline, we should recall, derives from disciple, referring to the practice as opposed to the doctrine of an institution. When we confuse discipline with punish- ment, we assume that those who command the truth can shape character by beating it into rectitude. But there is also the sense of discipline as a shared way of living, a way that we can train character to internalize. In this sense, discipline and character become problems of communication and community. Character is a project as well as a projection of community life. We need to find ways to construct this project as an inclusive rather than an exclusive expression of the life that we share.

I suggest that we liberate educational discipline from its doctrinaire associations by considering the disciplines not only as subject matters but as arts common to a number of inquiries in a variety of fields. Such a move will liberate us from the confines of current practice and make it possible for us to take advantage of the long history of the liberal arts, a history that demonstrates a continual tension between the arts conceived as fields and the arts conceived as methods. The current practice of the disciplines has made it increasingly difficult to conceive, much less to talk about, general education. The source of our current difficulties lies in the rigid classification of subjects that has come to dominate our notions of the disciplines of knowledge. We have searched in vain for a master discipline that will serve as a paradigm of knowledge for all other fields. Despite many attempts to shoehorn all sorts of subjects into approaches that mirror the supposed approaches of the “hard sciences,” the resulting profile of the disciplines has left whole fields of study distorted beyond recognition, or left out entirely. When we confront the ineluctably multiple forms of disciplinary practice, we seem stymied rather than encouraged by the breadth of conceptions and executions. Conversations among the disciplines are difficult for us to conceive in any but political terms, with the result that we have been unable to sustain inquiry into the nature of a general education except as a preparation conducted by and for each of the distinctive fields. Most colleges and


universities have abandoned the project of a common core of courses for the more politically tenable panoply of distribution requirements. In response to pressures to prepare students for their putative futures, most secondary schools have also abandoned the project of common learning in favor of tracked courses that derive from “testable” levels of student ability. The resulting fragmentation has frustrated indlvidual efforts and institutional commitments alike to design a meaningful program of general education.

CHARACTER AS THE EDUCATIONAL STANDARD OF CURRICULUM

I suggest that we can overcome this fragmentation only by examining the Principled differences that beset our conversation about what we should teach and to what end. If we inquire into the standards and vaIues that can guide educational practice, we need to understand the shaping influence of character in all its modes and varieties. But before I can undertake such an inquiry, there are two prior questions to be resolved. The first is a question about the nature and operation of standards in a pluralistic discourse: How can a fundamentally ambiguous concept provide an educational standard? The second is a question about the nature of the conversation itself: What are the disciplines that we need to use in order to enter into and make sense of the conversation of difference? I will address the question of standards in this section, then close with a brief introduction to the appropriate disciplines.

All statements about desired educational outcomes are essentially statements about character, because any outcome involves assumptions about the relation of reason to action. Each approach to character relies on a mode of thought that attempts to shape educational ends according to a conception of the right or rational way to guide actions. Without a full awareness of these different constructions of character, current discourse about standards takes place in an atmosphere of fragmentation. The rival claims of different cultures, different peoples, different occupations, and different educational programs have been promoted in such urgent and antagonistic ways that they seem to obviate any possible communication, much less common ground.* The conceptions of character promoted by so many different voices seem to be mutually exclusive. Each conception develops a course of study from a fundamental essence that cannot be further divided. Such atoms of curriculum serve as the least parts of educational practice, yet no one of them has any logical priority over any other. Since there can be no assimilation of such beginning points, choosing any one of them necessarily excludes the others.

How can we choose or devise principles in education in such a contentious atmosphere? If we begin by exposing the errors of competing claims and then construct our own version of the truth, we claim victory for a new dogmatism that will swiftly be deconstructed by the next version. I suggest that philosophic pluralism provides the opportunity to discover more inclusive principles. Philo- sophic pluralism does not reduce the dissonant voices to a single harmony; it begins instead by recognizing that the construction of educational standards is inherently

8. Richard McKeon, “Character and the Arts and Disciplines,” Ethics 78, no. 2 [January 1968): 11 1-12.

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ambiguous, and therefore susceptible of more than one true statement. The chmor to reform educatiollal practice and institute new standards of achievement rests 011 a wide variety of assumptions about the relation of reason to action. In recognizing the problem of standards as an issue of long-standing philosophical provenance, philosophic pluralism helps us to understand our present quarrels against the backdrop of centuries-old disputes. Our problems may not be any simpler in this construction, but we can appreciate our current debates more fully when we see them in the context of the past rather than as the unique problems of the contemporary age.

When we consider the setting of educational standards as a problem of settling the ambiguous relation between reason and action, we can see that disagreement in principle is fundamental to the argument. The aim of general education is to form a prudential and artful character whose virtues and skills are adapted to the rational and the right. Education for character also includes the formation of intellectual virtues that will adjust prudence and art to what we perceive to be the case and what we de~ire.~The scope and quality of such an adaptation are defined by the notions of character we bring to bear on "right" and "rational" actions.

I am contending that we can trace current controversies about the nature, design, and import of education to their source or foundation in radically different conceptions of character. In this section, I want to detail those conceptions on the philosophical level. In the following section, I will demonstrate one way in which educational theory can merge those differences to outline the specific dimensions of a general education. I want to distinguish four distinct approaches to character in our conversation. The first two conceptions relate reason to action in ways that underlie or transcend all individual instances. In the first, character is what I will call elemental, a fixed state produced by an underlying essence. This sense of character connects who we are as people to some basic, static essence or element that underlies everything we are and do. Our surface differences reflect unchanging elements in our nature. These elements might be drives or impulses of which we are completely unconscious, or they might be inherent differences that result from conscious adaptations to environmental forces. Character in this sense is unchanging, and the prospects for negotiating difference are therefore rather slim. In a second approach, character is much more fluid and flexible. Character in this sense is a role that we learn to play according to certain rules or stage directions, as in a game or a play. In this second or dramatic sense, character may defy or make use of underlying conditions of all sorts, just as it suits thegame and theplayers. Even without knowing or understanding the full implications of our actions, we may nonetheless adopt and play out our roles.

While neither elemental nor dramatic character demands full understanding of the englobing or underlying circumstances, the last two senses of character depend on the individual's capacity to realize or adjust to identifiable rules, customs, and conditions. Social character may be conceived as the public position we occupy, determined by a heritage of practices and institutional arrangements that we learn

9. Ibid., 113.


through apprenticeship and dedication. Character in this sense may be a consciously adopted set of behaviors that enliven and continue the best that a society has to offer, or character may be the unconscious or unwitting behaviors that reproduce social relations in the guise of what we mistakenly call “nature.” Character, finally, may be ethical, resulting from a lifetime of choosing what we hope is the right action, a restless and intense scrutiny that strives to understand the springs and consequences of those choices as fully as possible. Character in this last sense is the development and use of a kind of wisdom that we then impose on all meaningful decisions, including the determination of what is meaningful.

These four versions of character construct the ambiguous relationship between reason and action in four different ways. In the elemental view of character, all actions, even those determined by impulsive or unconscious causes, are ultimately subject to underlying codes or operations of reason. Some of our actions may be beyond our control, but we can also learn to restore impulses to consciousness and thereby gain greater control over our actions. The implied sense of education for elemental character is therapeutic, finding and eliminating the obstacles that stand in the way of the inhvidual’s full and free self-expression. A therapeutic education constructs the necessary steps we each must take in order to clear the ground of damaging impediments to our healthy progress. In the dramatic view of character, rightness and rationality are the qualities of actions well performed. The implied view of education in the dramatic sense of character is the acquisition of the power to win acceptance for the roles we come to play in whatever group, team, or community we find ourselves. Education involves learning the nature of the playing field or stage on which we must act, its scenic conventions, its boundaries, and its expectations. Education in this sense also involves close study of our fellow actors, our audience, and the strategies and positions of opposing teams or groups.

Elemental and dramatic conceptions of character lead to holistic views of education. In the other two conceptions of character, education begins with the powers or traditions of specific and particular individuals or groups. In the social view of character, each person must learn to examine the rightness and rationality of any action accorlng to the end it serves. An action will be right and good if it enhances and improves the participating elements and circumstances, inclulng the desires and capacities of its agent. Whatever skills and habits we may have, they are performed well when our actions conform to the norms and rules established by reason. The implied sense of education in this view of character is the adjustment of the individual to the demands and dangers of communal life. A fully educated character in this sense would know how to perform the functions necessary for the continuation of the community, or how to change appropriate functions in order to respond to external or internal threats. In the ethical view of character, each person must learn to adjust purpose and character to circumstance. An action is right or reasonable only when we are able to inspect and judge all the reasons that led up to it and all the values that it achieves. The implied sense of education in this view of character is the acquisition of moral and intellectual virtues that will permit the individual to accommodate specific circumstances and personal potential in the most responsible manner. These virtues may be realized in a variety of ways, but the

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ethical view of character identifies the fullness or maturity of character with a certain kind of wisdom.

Any one of these views may guide the development of means and sequences in education. Rather than choosing one mode and lscarding the others, the discipline of philosophic pluralism demonstrates the ways in which these four modes supplement each other. A thematic use of character will have to respond to the issues and concerns of all the modes of thought. If we are aware from the outset of the rich ambiguities of character as foundation and as outcome, we will be able to approach the problems of means and sequences more purposefully and successfully than any clash of dogmatisms permits. Philosophic pluralism permits a restatement of educational problems and calls for innovation in a direction as yet only dimly imagined by the present level of argument. Instead of rejecting all but one of the modes, the pluralist searches for ways in which to accept the truth of each mode as it helps to shape the entire range and significance of character. The modes of character thus supplement each other in the pursuit of common problems and in the statement of common goods.

As variations on the theme of educational design, the four senses of character define the common goods of general education in terms of outcomes or ends that we severally desire. While we will continue to disagree about the nature of moral behavior, we can still discuss and plan the curricular objectives of programs that will assist young people to make the right decisions by giving them the knowledge, skills, and experiences of a good general education. While we will continue to argue about the nature and extent of specific values, we do not have to commit ourselves to a specific schedule of values in order to ask how best to shape educational activities that will provide opportunities for the growth of the rational and reflective powers that young people need to develop as they learn to exercise the values we define so variously. Finally, while schools and colleges will continue to debate what (if any) subjects and texts we should cover with all our students, discussions of general education should focus on the ways we can structure educational activity so that students learn how to appreciate, understand, and communicate in artful and disciplined ways.

If we reformulate general education in terms of a fundamental concern for character, we will not avoid or transcend current controversies. By "fundamental" I mean that we should look at our current disputes not only as conflicting opinions about facts and values but as principled differences about the ways to develop actions that are right or rational. In the reformulation I am suggesting, the controversies remain, but making character central to the discussion shifts our focus to the consideration of educationalmeans. Rather than searching for subjects and texts that will validate a particular conception of moral character, the pluralist can use the very ambiguities of character as an educational standard to constitute four interdepen- dent disciplines that all education can aspire to. These disciplines are the artful ways that comprise the virtues of a powerful intelligence, with "virtue" now referring to an intellectual rather than a moral state of mind. The disciplines are at once the foundation and the outcome of a good general education: they are intellectual virtues


modeled, as I will detail in the next section, on the ancient liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, discourse, and dialectic, These intellectual virtues mark the powers of a well-educated individual but do not predict the specific shape of that individual’s beliefs or actions.

The distinction between moral and intellectual virtues is essential to the ethical construction of character. Having adopted one of the four modes of character as central, I repeat that my purpose is not to invalidate the other approaches but to use them to reconstruct common learning. The ethical sense of character does not presume predictive power because each individual creates a personality out of the choices that nature and circumstance provide. While I would argue that all education is moral, I do not believe in ”moral education” because I do not think anyone can teach another to be good. Like enacting legislation to induce good conduct or censoring art and literature so that we will not be exposed to what is bad, any attempt to approach morality through indoctrination is itself immoral.1°

Character is a responsible and integrative activity that each individual must choose and design. What we accept as facts derives from our capacity to think clearly through the statements and structures in which fact are presented. What we select as values derives from our appreciation of the actual or desirable state of things in which those values might operate. There is no special training that can produce character in this ethical sense, since there is no fixed or determinate essence that we can point to as ethical. There is instead the need for general education that will acquaint each individual with a wide variety of arts and subjects so that he or she will be able to relate successfully to a wide variety of human situations and communities without sacrificing the integrated wholeness of his or her individual character.

The standards I am suggesting are therefore intrinsic to character, but that does not mean that any opinion of any person will serve as a standard. The development of character may not have predictable outcomes, but my position is by no means anarchic: precisely the opposite. The real problem of character is the discovery of appropriate beginning points, and that discovery cannot be accomplished through petulant assertion. Indeed, by calling all education moral I am placing a great responsibility on general education to devise structures and processes that will elicit

10. I do not mean to imply that there are no moral norms or absolutes, just that moral education must proceed from the awareness that children are developing rather than static persons. I am concerned with educating moral agency rather than proclaiming the truths or behaviors to which we must aspire. As Joel Kupperman points out, the theories of Lawrence Kohlberg and the values-clarification school assume that acquiring moral values is a skill-building process “rather like becoming good at mathematics, except that there is a different subject matter and a dfferent progression of intellectual skills.” The mistake of such theories results from the separation of the growing person from the process of skill acquisition: “To treat a student’s preferences at a certain stage as basic, incorrigible data is, in effect, to regard the student as incapable of growth. Such an assumption may wcll promote the result it assumes.” Because moral education is more properly concerned to develop a person rather than a skill, “it would be wrong, and probably futile as well, to workat this withadetailed blueprint of the results aimedfor.”Kuppermandivides moral education into three stages, of which the first (roughly corresponding to primary school) “is the only one that should center on dogmatic instruction of certain moral norms. The central norms should be presented as assuredly correct; this does not mean, of course, that teachers need be heavy-handed, should refuse to take questiom seriously, or refuse to regard what is taught as subject to reflective thought.” These ccntral norms are the questions on which all members of society will agree: Kupperman cites such matters as murder, theft, torture, rape, racism, and sexism. Chnrocter, 173-75.

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from each student a fully developed sense of commitment to the analysis and understanding of moral circumstances. While no education can ever provide guide- lines for us to follow in all our actions, a liberal education focuses its ethical concerns on the development of intellectual rather than moral virtues. Rather than trying to teach students what to think, liberal education strives to help each student become conscious of thinking as an activity requiring attention, rigor, and dedication. The rightness of our actions is as much reliant on what we do as on how we come to choose that action. Even the most slavish adherence to general moral precepts will, without considerable luck, lead us to commit grossly immoral acts, while the development of active habits of responsible inquiry will lead us to learn from our mistakes and make the most moral decisions in even the most complex situations.

THE INTELLECTUAL VIRTUES AS ARTS OF CHARACTER While there are many who argue that we can -indeed must - teach our children

to be moral, our children will only become moral by making the right decisions. Since decisions depend on the circumstances of choice rather than the purity of doctrine, we can teach the truth all we want, but that will not make our students choose the right thing in all cases. Attempts to impose moral truth on the young create a climate of hypocrisy among peers and a heritage of distrust between generations. When we reduce moral problems to the discipline of external forms, we ignore or deny the complexity of virtuous activity. Moral reductionism brings the further danger of suppressing and silencing meaningful conversation about values. Instead of finding the truth of character in passive obedience to prescribed rules, I am suggesting disciplines of inquiry that will enable the young to participate in an ongoing conversation. I suggest we develop disciplines that are internal to character conceived as responsible rather than obedient, active rather than passive. It was Aristotle who first defined the nature and operation of moral and intellectual virtues as disciplines concerned with internal adjustments of character to the demands of tradition and circumstance. In outlining these virtues, Aristotle also delineated the powers as well as the limits of an ethical approach to character.

Aristotle carefully circumscribes ethical discourse as only a rough outline of the truth and calls on the educated reader

to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs."

Aristotle explains the imprecision of ethical theory later as a function of the primacy of the individual case in making any moral decision. While he confidently lists and explicates the dimensions and operations of the moral virtues, Aristotle never tells us what to do because no theory could ever be detailed or precise enough to determine choice in the particular case:

For among statements about conduct those which are general apply more widely, but those which are particular are more genuine, since conduct has to do with individual cases, and our statements must harmonize with the facts in these cases.I2

11. Nicomachean Ethics I, 4, 1094b 25-28, trans. W.D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. with an introduction by Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 19411,936.

12. Nicomachean Ethics 11, 7, llO6b 28-31, p. 959.


Aristotle compares the value of ethical theory to the placing of a target for the training of archers. Providing the target (the good) and some lessons in using the bow [making choices) is the limit of theory: we still have to learn how to shoot by shooting. As Nancy Sherman points out,

Aristotle insists as a requirement of virtue that we be open to inquiry arid a reflective grasp of our ends. This includes reflection on our ends, conceived not abstractly but embodied and clothed in concrete circumstance. Only in this way do we actively reflect on our selves and on our 1 i ~ e s . l ~

Ethical character involves the whole of the process through which moral agents perceive situations, determine that action is indeed called for, and reason about the possible alternatives. We have to figure out what is morally appropriate by perceiving the salient features of each particular oc~asion.’~ Aristotle is no relativist in moral matters, however. The virtues demarcate universal areas of choice that all human beings face. As Martha Nussbaum explains it:

The point is that everyone makes some choices and acts somehow or other in these spheres: if not properly, then improperly. Everyone has some attitude and behavior toward her own death; toward her bodily appetites and their management; toward her property and its use; toward telling the truth; toward being kindly or not kindly toward others; toward cultivating or not cultivating a sense of play and delight; and so on. No matter where one lives one cannot escape these questions, so long as one is living a human life. But then this means that one’s behavior falls, willy nilly, within the sphere of the Aristotelian virtue, in each case.I5

Nussbaum has suggested in this passage the way in which an ethical approach to character can maintain both the existence of moral universals and the ultimate particularity of all moral choices. It is impossible to prescribe conduct, then, but it is possible to describe those essential situations or questions that all of us must face. The way in which we respond to those situations, the way in which we control our perceptions of the good and act accordingly: these are the measures of character. Aristotle could only hope to provide an outline of the good that subsequent inquiries would improve with more specific articulation of the universal experiences that ground moral choice.I6

According to the ethical approach to character, moral virtue is not singular because no doctrine or rule satisfies all cases in which wc have to choose what to do. But moral virtue is also not relative, a matter of mere opinion, because there are certain universal situations that all of us must face in the right way. Moral virtue concerns the way in which each individual develops the powers of deliberation

13. Nancy Sherman, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19891, 30. 14. Ibid., 34-35. 15. Martha Nussbaum, ”Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach,” in Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue, Midwest Studies in Philosophy XIII (19881, ed. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 36.

16. The ‘grounding experiences’ will not, the Aristotelian should concede, provide precisely a single language - natural bedrock on which an account of virtue can be straightforwardly and unproblematically based. The description and assessment of the ways in which different cultures have constructed these experiences will become one of the central tasks of Aristotelian philosophical criticism. But the relativist has, so far, shown no reasons why we could not, at the end of the day, say that certain ways of conceptualizing death are more in keeping with the totality of our evidence and with the totality of our wishes for flourishing life than others; that certain ways of experiencing appetitive desire are for similar reasons more promising than others.” Nussbaum, “Non-Relative Virtues,” 46.

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adequate to the questions and problems that human life encounters in so many different forms. According to my hypothesis, moral virtue is unteachable, but not unattainable. People do act morally, but they do so in such radically different ways that a reductive or doctrinal approach substitutes creed for habit, thereby succeeding only in diverting attention from the very process that the individual needs to pay closest attention to. We must face the inherent diversity of character as a problem of communication and community.

We attain the moral virtues through practice and reflection on the things we choose to do. While our habits and opinions may differ, however, the powers of reflection involve intellectual processes that we may both teach and learn. We differ radically about what we come to choose, but the fact that humanity has devised SO

many opinions, customs, and plactices is a moral truth that we can only maintain along with a corresponding intellectual truth. This intellectual truth is the concept of democracy, not merely the political institutions of a particular government but, as John Dewey so often proclaimed, the vision of democracy as a way of life. No person, no institution is wise enough or good enough to rule people without their consent; it is precisely because our institutions and rulers influence what we do and value that we must each have a voice in determining the nature of those institutions and the person of 0urru1ers.l~ General education serves democratic ends when it frees us to participate, but, as Dewey again reminds us, this liberation is not so much a freedom of action as a freedom of m i n d . If intellectual virtue, in contrast with moral virtue, according to my hypothesis, is teachable, then we need to ask what kinds of practices will permit us to comprehend and apply the diversity of human character to the tasks of prudential and right actions. I have suggested that it is the task of philosophic pluralism to achieve this comprehension and application of difference. W h a t then are the disciplines that will guide and instantiate the enriching conversation of difference! The general answer is that the disciplines that permit a coherent discussion and understanding of difference are the intellectual virtues, the very same virtues that supply the foundation as well as the outcomes of general education.

As modes of active character, the intellectual virtues are neither subjects nor methods: I prefer to call them arts of character. As the successors to the liberal arts, which stretch all the way back to the ancient Greeks, the arts of character inherit the ambiguity and controversy that have always typified any discussion of the liberal arts. First, the arts of character pay attention to the problems that we face as human beings and attempt to free us from misapprehensions and false directions. The arts of character are liberal in the sense that they free us from problems by developing disciplines to state and resolve the fundamental questions of our times. Second, the arts of character signify the achievement or possession of the person who is worthy of emulation, the person who is “free.” The arts of character surmount the passivity of outmoded disciplines, advancing instead the activities of new fields and new methods of inquiry. Third, the arts of character recall the liberal arts of books, extended now to include the broadest range of fact and experience. The arts of

17. John Dewey, “Democracy and Educational Administration,” The Later Works, 1925-1953; Vol. 11: 2933-1937, ed. Jo Ann Boydstoii (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 21 7-18.


character help us adjust to the demands and directions of the modern world by developing modes of understanding and action that descry and address modern problems.18

The arts of character develop and reflect the activities and practices of human beings, enabling us to overcome the sterile and dcep divisions and oppositions of modern culture. We can never hope to avoid the controversics of our current conversation by finding some neutral or higher ground; our problem instead is how to make those controversies opportunities for growth. Education that focuses on the arts of character concerns the development of an integrated personality, both in the sense of a human being in full possession of well-articulated powers and in the sense of a human being who belongs to, understands, and participates in society. Rather than trying to find some higher or underlying principle that will give the educated intellect a secure place beyond the current strife, I seek an education that humanizes the intellectual arts by developing “general disciplines for the interpretation and control of particular processes.”19 The general disciplines are the arts of character that supply both the foundation and the outcome of a good education.

These arts in turn derive from the radcally different ways in which we conceive character itself. Instead of dismissing these differences in favor of a dogmatic assertion of the one true sense of character, or passively accepting them in a relativistic refusal to choose, I suggest the method of philosophic pluralism. Accord- ing to this method, the different modes of character are not only radically different, they are supplementary. We must not only acknowledge these differences, we must act upon that awareness, putting the dfferences to use in the shaping of the common good. There is not simply one true meaning of character that makes the others false: the real issue is to discover in what way all of them are true. That way transforms the different approaches to character into the common enterprise of general education.

Taken together, the four modes of educational thought that I described in the previous section suggest four fundamental disciplines of a general education. First, they suggest that an educated person should be sensitive to the complex circumstances of the world. A general education fosters sensitivity in the form of awareness of the ways in which facts and values are asserted. An educated person in this sense knows how to explore assertions and instances of truth. Second, an educated person is not only curious about past achievements but creative about discovering new facts and experiences. A general education guides the growth of originality in the form of freedom to compose and construct new facts. Third, an educated person knows how to use communication to embody the facts and values that define our sense of belonging and participation in the life we share with others. A general education cultivates engagement in the form of discursive coherence about the conceptions we

18. Richard McKeon, “TheFuture of the Libcral Arts,” in Current Issues in Higher Edrzcution, ed. G. Kerry Smith (Washington, D.C.: American Association for Higher Education, 1964), 36-37.

19. Richard McKeon, “The Liberating Arts and the Humanizing Arts in Education,” in Humanist ic Education and Western Civilizution: Essays for Robert Maynard Hutchins , ed. Arthur A. Cohen (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 19641, 171.

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share and dispute concerning the circumstances of our world. Fourth, an educated person is an individual with the desire as well as the skills to act purposively. A general education in this final sense promotes the capacity to make commitments in the form of life choices that determine what we may become as human beings.

These four disciplines are not discrete subjects; they are general arts of character that can be embodied in a variety of different subjects. The arts of character that generate and enable us to understand our hfferences provide standards for the judgment of educational outcomes. The arts of character merge the different modes of thought into the common enterprise of a good general education. General education ought therefore to comprise the acquisition of these four arts of character: sensitivity, originality, engagement, and commitment. SENSITIVITY

If we want to be able to understand and respond to the human condition in all its complexity, we need to encounter knowledge free of the idolatry of facts. Since there are no facts unless we do something with the raw data of experience, we need an art that will make us conscious of the operation of values as the necessary guides to any investigation or activity. This art will encourage us to reject the false dichotomy between facts andvalues. Such an art demonstrates the ways in which we assume facts in order to ground our values and the ways in which we assume values as the ground for our inquiry into facts. The liberal art of grammar has often been associated with the arts of interpretation, not only in the use of words but more broadly in the application of all the senses to the recovery of meaning. We can think constructively about a subject matter only if we can recover the meaning of its various treatments. We recover meaning whenever we raise questions about the connections established in any document, action, object, idea, or process. As a discipline of character, the capacity to recover the meanings and varieties of facts and values leads to the intellectual virtue of sensitivity, Sensitivity is the virtue of openness and receptivity when these qualities are understood as activities rather than passive absorption. Sensitivity is the activity of character that understands things as they are by asking appropriate questions. Sensitive questions arise from the broadest possible exposure to human problems. Sensitivity involves empathy as well as appreciation for fundamental diversity.

If our capacity to encounter fundamental human problems rests to some extent on our ability to recover the meanings of facts and experiences, we need to supplement our sensitivity with a general discipline that invents and creates new facts and experiences. Sensitivity to a wide variety of practices and discourses disturbs the certainty and fixity of facts, but it may also create anxiety about being able to circumscribe all the facts. So that we do not get lost in the potentially infinite facts of any given case, we therefore need an art of character that will consider the possible structures, interactions, and interrelations of facts. ORIGINALITY

We sometimes hear that the modern age has witnessed such a proliferation of facts that no one person could ever hope to master them. Education has in fact always faced the problem of what to select as basic and what to leave out. Rather than


searching for a single science that will permit us to understandall the others, we need a general discipline that will help us select the facts that are appropriate to our evolving purposes. The liberal art of rhetoric was concerned with invention and included the discovery of arguments, the discovery of things in the world, and the discovery of arts and sciences that comprised the fields of academic study. As a discipline of character, the capacity to relate past treatments of a problem to new conceptions and directions leads to the intellectual virtue of originality. Originality actively examines the ways in which inventions and discoveries have been presented in the humanities and the sciences. Rather than a passive gift of creativity to be understood psychologically if at all, originality is a general discipline that enables us to practice the new in avariety of contexts. Originality constructs the new in relation to the present state of the nature of things, including the human nature of the world.

Although we often perceive inventions and discoveries as abrupt breaks with the past, we can also uncover the continuities of the new in traditions. Originality gives us the confidence and the skills to examine the actual and the possible in order to determine an appropriate course of action. Although the recovery of past meanings and the discovery of new ones involve very different disciplines, they do not simply exclude each other because the development of the whole person requires the virtues of both. Sensitivity makes us aware that values are always implicated in any confrontation with the facts of the case. Originality makes us aware that no matter how “stubborn” facts may seem, they are nonetheless the result of some human construction.

ENGAGEMENT

Yet sensitivity and originality may harden the awareness of the old or the new into claims of uniqueness. Uniqueness may then endow the absolute distinctness of a given fact, the privileged position of a given experience, or the unchallenged power of a given general rule or precept. The liberal art of logic bridged the apparently unique statements of facts by considering them as presentations or discursive activities. No matter what we say, we must still say it in words, and we may then analyze the significances of language as well as the things that words express. We may perform that analysis in ordinary or symbolic language; we may construct distinct logics of discovery and logics of proof; we may seek to avoid or to encourage ambiguity.20 In these and other ways, the liberal art of logic considered the presentations of facts as discursive sequences or arguments. Any presentation seeks to impose some kind of order on the facts of the case. The liberal art of logic was itself such an ordering of the ways that facts come to us. As a discipline of character, the capacity to recognize the sequences and consequences of presentational strategies leads to the intellectual virtue of engagement. Engagement searches for the ways in which any given statement of fact becomes a concrete instance or consequence of one construction of a theme common to a variety of discourses. I have been concerned in this article to unfold the theme of character. Tracing this theme engaged the specifically modern concern to preserve differences in an extended conversation that

20. McKeon, “The Future of the Liberal Arts,” 42.

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attempts to negotiate and discuss rather than dismiss the anomalies and ambiguities of so many competing approaches and ideologies. Engagement involves the coherence of individual human enterprise with the collective condition of the age. COMMITMENT

Facts, discoveries, and themes tend to multiply indefinitely and defy our comprehension unless we are able to put them to use. Those uses in turn are divisive or corrupt if they arbitrarily compel and exclude certain actions, thoughts, and feelings. We are rightly fearful of the extremes, since neither a chaotic jumble nor a dictatorial reduction suits our awareness of the complex and compelling demands of the world. The demands of organization extend beyond the need to order facts, since any order itself is neither self-evident nor without alternatives. In order to avoid the compositional extremes of random eclecticism and unargued assertion, the methodology of any inquiry thus requires some grounding or warrant in the nature of values or the nature of things. The liberal art of dialectic sought the principles of inquiry and action in the systems we observe and create in our experience of the world. Constructing systems involved the recognition of facts as parts of an integrated whole. Dialectic adjusted the parts to the collective or supervening purposes of the whole; dialectic also provided the basis for understanding and connecting wholes to each other in interdisciplinary and cooperative undertakings. As a discipline of character, the capacity to direct an inquiry or action to substantive ends leads to the intellectual virtue of commitment. We can never stand outside of the observations, discoveries, and themes that we uncover and present. No matter how wide-ranging or rigorous a survey we make of any field, we always do so for a purpose, and that purpose defines the nature of our action or inquiry as a whole. Commitment employs pluralism in its various constructions to work with differences, not merely to respect or tolerate them. While a passive respect for kfference may help us to learn the ways of others, it all too easily ends in a lazy indifference to the odd ways and customs of the world. Commitment is active about difference, seeking to take advantage of the broadest possible range of processes in the service of common values and common actions. Commitment to principle establishes priorities that direct the ambiguities and contradictions of conversation toward some aspiration or goal.

CHARACTER AS EDUCATIONAL THEME In order to make sense of otherwise fragmentary and chaotic views of education,

I am suggesting that the theme of character permits us to survey and act upon the aims and aspirations of general education. The disciplines of that education are the arts through which we express and act upon common projects. One of the most significant projects any society can undertake is the design and implementation of common learning. The theme of character engages the constructions as well as the denials of common learning in the task of relating the devices of reason to the processes and goals of human action. The thematic approach to character seeks to understand and make use of our differences rather than deny or overlook them. General education can employ our present and continuing disagreements about the nature of character to promote the development of four intellectual virtues that serve as the normative elements of a process that begins with the acknowledgment of


pluralism and ends with the creation of new forms of community. Character is the foundation for education in the sense that curriculum must always respect and work with the varieties of talent, inclination, and will that students present. Character is the outcome of education in the sense that curriculum should seek to produce human beings with the fullest possible exposure to and interest in the arts and the fields of inquiry that relate us as members of a community and differentiate us as whole persons.

A general education that proceeds from the richness of our modern conversation about character will acknowledge our ongoing disagreements without fully resolv- ing them. Rather than seeking to impose doctrine or privileging certain beliefs, general education should proceed from and contribute to a pluralistic conversation. In this sense, the commitment to general education is dynamic because the nature of that education is itself dynamic. Community life in a pluralistic democracy must grow and change in order to survive. Growth and change signify that while we may foster the intellectual virtues, we cannot dictate the objects or ends to which a succeeding generation will apply them. General education not only permits the young to receive the opinions of an older generation, it also vouchsafes them the capacity to criticize and overturn received opinion. Thc lsagreements within and among generations can sustain rather than deter common projects and programs if we learn to exchange and judge our beliefs rigorously. The commonality we need in a pluralistic culture is not consensus about common doctrine but mutuality about the capacities appropriate to discovering truth.

Instead of a futile effort to make us all of one opinion, general education must strive instead to make us of one mind, a mind engaged in the search for truth. This distinction was central to Richard McKeon’s notion of the social value of pluralism:

Men of one mind can build a society, a nation, and a world community. But to be of one mind is not to be of one opinion. Men are of one mind when they possess reason to iudge statements of truth, understanding to appreciate Statements of their own values and those of others, desires ordered under freedom, and love of the common good for which men are associated. While men are of one mind in these abilities, they can be of different opinions without danger to society or to each othe1.I’

When we develop character according to such a program of abilities, we support the growth of an individual mind at the same time that we encourage confidence and respect in the capacity of others, not because we all take up the same ideas or positions, but precisely because we do not. General education develops disciplines of character that make us receptive but critical, open to the opinions of others but cautious about accepting any assertion without careful scrutiny. General education develops habits of inquiry that help us listen to and join the conversation of our age with avigorous curiosity as well as a healthy skepticism. We learn to investigate the ways of truth so that we can pay attention to the demands of communication and community life with the greatest possiblc rigor.

Vaclav Have1 has declared that ”we must see the pluralism of the world, and not bind it by seeking common denominators or reducing everything to a single common

21. Richard McKeon, “Communication, Truth, and Society,” Ethics 67, no. 2 (January 1Y57): 99

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equation.”221n keeping with that imperative, I suggest that we begin to open our educational programs to the larger prospects that pluralism provides. We can only avoid binding and reducing the world by developing the arts of communication that permit us to confront and understand the ineluctable differences that otherwise threaten to divide and conquer us. We can expand our field of vision only by participating more fully in the conversation of our age, listening to other voices without anxiously trying to resolve their lssonances into harmonies that please our ears but violate the real intentions of the speakers. The prospect of pluralism is as vital as it is difficult: since no human statement is ever final or absolute, we need to converse with each other if we want to grasp any essential truth. Whenever we narrow our aspirations or our institutions to serve the ends of a select group or social vision, we exclude others at our peril. However challenging and difficult, a general education based on pluralism provides the arts to understand and negotiate difference.

A general education that focuses on the arts of character does more than give us the capacity to understand each other; it suggests patterns of mutual activity as well. It is vital that we learn to respect and tolerate each other, but a general education must address the further concern to develop a desire to work with others. If a general education is to serve the broad needs of adiverse society, it must help us pay attention to those needs as well as give us the skills and background to participate meaning- fully in their satisfaction. If we need to set the agenda for education in the context of social vision and political will, we can only do so when we recognize our profound differences and resolve to work with them:

Ways can he found to include all citizens in making the critical decisions about what will be produced, what will be consumed, how benefits will be dstributed, and how America will relate to therest of the world. Without avision of the requirements of democracy and social justice and without the political will to make that vision real, we render our nation at risk.23

The ways and the vision demand the utmost effort we can give, and it is here that pluralism provides the methodology for cooperation. Instead of searching for the chimera of an agreement that will end controversy about our national goals, pluralism searches for the structures of communication that will permit us to understand and work with each other even though we continue to disagree.

22. John F. Burns, “New, Virulent Strains of Hatred in the Balkans, and Beyond,” The New York Times, 3 May 1992, Sect. 4, p. 3. 23. Carol Camp Yeakey and Clifford T. Bennett, “Epilogue: Cultural Reform and Social Struggle for aTruly Democratic Society,” [ournal of Negro Education 59, no. 1 [ 1990): 95.

I WISH TO THANK Nicholas Burbules and two anonymous reviewers for Educutional Theory, whose perceptive comments and helpful criticisms have hclped me shape this article. Their generous scrutiny and able criticism of several drafts of my work have aided and &rated me in the most supportive and collegial manner. I would also like to thank my wife, Susan Kaplan, for her provocative questions about the limits of pluralism. It is appropriate that an article about education as conversation itself owes so much to conversation. Any errors or faults that remain are entirely my own.

conversing about character: new foundations for general education

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