This slim volume examines how young people acquire their values and how parents, teachers, and mentors can help foster and strengthen their moral character. Harvard child psychiatrist Robert Coles describes the book as a response to a number of influential books that have appeared in recent years — among them Cultural Literacy, The Bell Curve, Emotional Intelligence, and Multiple Intelligences — that challenge our standard ways of thinking about intelligence. While much has been said about cognitive intelligence, and more attention is now being paid to psychological or emotional intelligence. Coles wants to shed light on what he calls "a third realm" of mental activity — the part of us that knows right from wrong and good from bad. (He distinguishes the book from his 1986 study The Moral Life of Children which was chiefly concerned with moral thinking, especially as it is influenced by forces outside the home. His focus here is on moral conduct and how moral character takes shape in young people.)

What Coles sets out to do here is reclaim the study of childhood character formation from the realm of expert psychiatric theory, a theory which he says attributes moral conduct to unconscious emotional development and to conflicting psychological needs. For all the talk about inherited values and innate reasoning, he argues, character is ultimately who we are expressed in action. Coles is especially dismayed by the therapeutic perspective of many child psychologists and educators who neglect moral education for the sake of vague psychological constructs. For example, he tells of a teacher whose student was caught repeatedly cheating on exams. The teacher refused to deal with the cheating because she believed the girl was under "stress."

As Coles sees it, a child's moral education comes chiefly though day-to-day experiences and through observing adults — not through rules and regulations, abstract classroom discussion, or "kitchen compliance." Coles insists that the most persuasive moral teaching adults can provide is by example, that real moral counsel is conveyed through action, or what he calls "the witness of our lives." Formal lectures, reprimands, reminders, punishment, churchgoing or synagogue attendance, and other sources of moral instruction can also be useful. "But in the long run of a child's life," he writes, "the unself-conscious moments that are what we think of simply as the unfolding events of the day and the week turn out to be the really powerful and persuasive times, morally."

Copyright 1998 by Scott London. All rights reserved.