Restoring purpose and patriotism to American education

This essay by Stanford education professor and Hoover senior fellow William Damon is based on his fine chapter, “Restoring Purpose and Patriotism to American Education,” in Mike Petrilli’s and my new (edited) book, How to Educate an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow’s Schools. Damon is a distinguished and much honored scholar who directs Stanford’s Center on Adolescence and whose research and writings focus on the development of purpose and integrity in people’s lives and work. This whole-hearted plea for thoughtful whole-child education offers both challenges and opportunities for policymakers and educators alike, and especially for today’s many advocates of social and emotional learning.

—Chester E. Finn, Jr.

As any teacher will tell you, motivation is key to learning. Highly motivated students will find ways to acquire knowledge and skills even in suboptimal circumstances. Students who have little interest in learning will be hard to teach no matter how well furbished the school.

The gold standard of motivation is purpose, because purpose is enduring and resilient. A purpose is a long-term goal that a person sees as both personally valuable and important to the world beyond the self.¹ A purpose motivates one to accomplish short-term goals that serve that purpose. If a student is dedicated to a long-term purpose such as becoming a doctor, the student is likely to pursue short-term goals such as studying biology, passing tests, going to college, and gaining admission to medical school. Along the way, that student will learn a lot.

The human species is built in a way that requires purpose for optimal functioning. This was the groundbreaking insight of Austrian psychiatrist Victor Frankl in his mid-twentieth-century masterpiece Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl rejected the reductionist views of fellow Austrian Sigmund Freud, contending that people are not primarily shaped by base emotional desires, early experiences, past traumas, or nagging conflicts, but rather are driven by what they believe in—actually, we drive ourselves to accomplish purposes that inspire us and give our lives meaning.

In the half-century since Frankl’s theory created a forward-looking line of thinking in psychology, research has confirmed the essence of his insights. Legions of studies have shown that, beginning in early adolescence, people committed to purposes show high levels of achievement, energy, resilience, health, emotional stability, and subjective well-being.²

Purpose is not a sole elixir for the good life; many other character strengths and skills are needed. Purpose alone does not ensure either good sense or ethics. But purpose ranks high on the list of character strengths that young people should acquire for productive and fulfilling lives.

Yet American schools today (with notable exceptions) are failing to encourage the all-important development of purpose among their students. My message in this essay is that the reforms most needed in American education are the kind that would improve the capacity of schools to help students find purpose in their studies and beyond.

In advocating for the cultivation of student purpose, I am emphasizing the importance of motivation, interest, agency, and individual choice. I believe schools are responsible for offering a broadly conceived education that imparts the moral, civic, and character strengths that enable young people to become productive citizens who dedicate themselves to the achievements they aspire to and the causes in which they believe. In K–12 education, this approach lies squarely in the camp that’s been known as “educating the whole child.” The assumptions behind it include a conviction that the cognitive skills and knowledge that are central to the educational mission can only be developed when students are motivated to learn, and that students will only be motivated to learn if they find personal meaning in the subjects they are offered. The whole-child approach also assumes that educators are responsible for more than cognitive learning in their students. Moral issues such as honesty and fairness arise in every classroom daily, and educating students to deal with such issues in an honorable manner is an essential part of a school’s responsibility. So too are issues related to personal well-being and good citizenship.

I write as a developmental psychologist, not a political scientist or policymaker. My research focuses on purpose across the life span. When I argue that schools should promote, and not deter, students’ acquisition of purpose, I consider this to be a position warranted by findings of developmental science rather than by an ideological stance or policy-wonk preferences.

But I cannot ignore one policy-linked irony of consequence: federal policy in the United States over the past quarter century has pushed K–12 schooling further and further away from whole-child education and toward a narrow curriculum and obsessive focus on test scores.

This counterproductive push took shape with legislation enacted in 1994—the Goals 2000 law and the Improving America’s Schools Act, which enshrined standards and tests in just two subjects (reading and math) as the basis for judging school quality and effectiveness. The push strengthened with 2002’s No Child Left Behind Act, was rein- forced in several ways in 2009’s Race to the Top program and was only slightly eased in 2015’s Every Child Succeeds Act.

If one were intentionally to try to design a policy aimed at discouraging student purpose, it would be hard to find a more effective approach. The policy shaped choices that educators made, or felt compelled to make, in school districts throughout most of the country. It’s distressing to think of the vast number of students who, during their formative years for acquiring purpose, were subjected to the mis-educative instructional choices promoted by this centralized, top-down, coercive, narrowly conceived, federal policy approach.

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From our studies and those of other researchers, we know a lot about the conditions that foster purpose.³ Here are the essential ones:

• Opportunities to participate in activities that one finds worthwhile, gratifying, and interesting.
• Opportunities to discover and further develop one’s talents.
• Discovery of aspects of the world that need to be remedied or improved.
• Opportunities to do so by making efforts to contribute something of value to the world.
• Observations of mentors who are making such efforts in a purposeful way.
• Instruction that fosters moral and character strengths such as honesty, diligence, and future-mindedness.

What did twenty-five years of federal policy signal as the top priority for US schools?⁴ None of the above. The policy’s most striking limitation was a narrowing of the curriculum that resulted from the emphasis that those who designed the initiative placed on the particular academic skills that they considered necessary for future employment. These skills centered on basic literacy and numeracy. These skills are obviously important, and schools should teach them in a rigorous way. I am in favor of teaching and testing for these skills in order to keep improving them. But the federal incentive system, however well-intentioned, relied so strongly on testing for these, and only these, limited skills that many school-based educators felt forced to focus on those skills exclusively. “Peripheral” subjects such as art, music, theater, civics, geography, history, and creative writing were deemphasized and even eliminated in many places. I have heard of schools that dropped their music teachers, or stopped funding their theater programs, in order to gain an advantage in the narrow types of student test scores that counted in the federal incentive regime. I was told of schools that no longer devoted resources to activities that foster students’ interests in entrepreneurship, such as projects designed to acquaint them with business skills and practices, and of schools that were not able to continue funding instructive extracurricular activities such as the school newspaper.

It is in such “peripheral” subjects that many students find personal meaning and interest. The narrowing of the curriculum drastically reduced the chances that such students would find purpose in their academic work.

Perhaps it might be argued that it doesn’t matter whether students find subjects such as art and music meaningful, since these subjects—unlike, say, algebra—won’t land the student a job. It may be that this was the mind-set of the policymakers in the Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama administrations who shaped and continued to reshape this policy. But think about it for a moment. In terms of national GDP, one of the largest industries in the United States is the entertainment media, which draw on skills such as those fostered by various arts. Who is to say that students who avidly throw themselves into learning the arts have fewer employment opportunities than those who feel constrained in school to study subjects—the STEM constellation, for example—that government policymakers speculate will make them employable? Equally misdirected, removing entrepreneurship education from the classroom eliminates an entire direction for employment possibilities—a direction that, as the Network for Teaching Youth Entrepreneurship has shown, can appeal to many young people who otherwise find little of interest in traditional academic work.

Students who feel forced to learn become poor learners, and poor learners don’t make for successful workers. Nor do such students end up feeling purposeful or fulfilled. A high school student we interviewed in one of our studies put it this way when speaking of her experience in a school that did not offer her anything matching her interests and personal aspirations: “I feel like a bird in a cage.”

So we come to whole-child issues of well-being, motivation, emotional stability, and mental health. Federal policy during this prolonged period took no interest in such issues, and none was measured during the policy’s reign. But we have evidence of how the cohort of students subject to such cramped schooling have fared in these essential personal qualities. A 2017 assessment by the American College Health Association reported that the current crop of college students expressed frighteningly adverse conditions related to their subjective well-being, mental health, and overall adaptation to college life.⁵ Over 80 percent felt “overwhelmed by all [they] had to do” in college and “exhausted” by their academic workloads. Three in five felt “overwhelming anxiety” in college, and two in five “felt so depressed that it was difficult to function.” Over half reported feeling “hopeless.” It is hard to argue, in this time of lavish college facilities and grade inflation, that this contrast can be accounted for by harsher higher education environments. There may have been other causes that contributed to the personal difficulties of college students in 2017, but one thing is certain: The cumulative effect of federal K–12 education policy since the end of the twentieth century has done nothing to arm students with character strengths that could allay such difficulties.

Even regarding the limited set of abilities that Uncle Sam emphasized, learning conditions promoted by the policy were counterproductive. The policy operated by creating incentives for schools to improve scores on “high-stakes” tests that held little interest or meaning for most students. Teachers, naturally, were induced to teach to the test, especially in schools and districts most vulnerable to the incentive/disincentive structure of the program. This led to deadly instructional practices such as drill and rote regurgitation, and objectives such as short-term learning rather than understanding and commitment. In keeping with the overall cynicism that the incentive scheme fostered, it also led to corruption in the behavior of some teachers and administrators. There were widely covered cases of fudging student scores, misreporting data, and other instances of actual cheating on the part of school staffers trying to give their own schools an advantage. So much for moral education by example.

Despite the highfalutin titles on these various federal laws—“No Child Left Behind,” “Race to the Top,” “Every Student Succeeds,” and so on—the policy moniker was fundamentally misleading. Toward what “top” was this program racing? The policy’s provisions paid no attention to excellence, giftedness, outstanding performance, or originality. Nothing in the policy was directed to learning that leads to innovation and creative achievement—capacities that are important for both individual success and the national interest. For anyone paying attention to this policy’s misleading title, the doubts surrounding the venture could only have increased. As if symbolically underscoring the void in federal education policy, the Obama administration closed down the Department of Education’s character education desk as soon as it took office.

Which brings up the essential though fraught matter of moral and character education. Although most parents would like to see schools impart virtues such as honesty and responsibility to their children, character education in public education has been hindered by progressive resistance to any instruction that makes claims about right and wrong in the face of cultural variation—even when such claims focus on values such as truth and obligation that virtually all cultures respect.

In recent years there has been an upsurge in social and emotional-learning (SEL) instruction in K–12 education. As an example of the whole-child approach to education that I favor, I welcome this addition to the K–12 curriculum. But SEL does not substitute for character education. Indeed, social and emotional learning without a backbone of strong moral values could provide students with the unacceptable message that it proper to use social skills for anti-social aims such as manipulation or exploitation.

In its most common uses, social and emotional instruction at the K–12 level has focused on communication strategies, self-control, “grit,” emotional awareness, goal-setting, and relaxation techniques such as meditation. Although potentially of personal value to student well-being, exactly what part of a child’s moral development might be stimulated by emotional awareness or relaxation training is an open question. My guess is that such feeling states have little to do with the acquisition of childhood morality. In the context of social and emotional learning, children need to learn the difference between morally right and wrong ways to use the skills that they are being taught.

Fortunately, there are recent signs of a reawakening of attention to moral education some of our schools, but we have a long way to go before American schools return to their once unquestioned mission of fostering character and virtue.

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Perhaps the most glaring failure of public schools has been their inability to accomplish another classic mission of American schooling—namely, citizenship education. This mission is as crucial now as ever; yet most schools today are failing at it, if they are even trying. Civics is one of the “peripheral” subjects deemphasized by the single-minded focus on basic skills during the recent heyday of the narrow curriculum.

During this period, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only one in four high school seniors scored at least “proficient” in knowledge of civics. For fourth and eighth graders across all academic subjects tested, civics and the closely linked subject of history came in last: “A smaller proportion demonstrated proficiency in civics than in any other subject the federal government has tested.”⁶ After some high-profile public figures such as Sandra Day O’Connor called this situation a “crisis,” the neglect of civics among public schools has abated somewhat: In recent years, Florida, Texas, California, and other states have added beneficial civics materials to their public school curricula. Still, many key concepts have not been addressed, and doing so will require taking on a number of misplaced biases that are widespread in education circles today.⁷

In civics, as in all subject areas, students learn well only when they find the ideas personally meaningful. Genuine citizenship education requires building a sense of civic purpose among students.⁸ The signs of civic purpose are knowledge of how one’s government works, an understanding of the principles underlying the present social order, a historical perspective on the social order, and commitment to the preservation and improvement of one’s civic society. In the United States, such a commitment means participation as a citizen in a democratic republic and a dedication to traditional American ideals such as liberty and equality.

Accordingly, there are motivational as well as cognitive dimensions essential for civic purpose. The key motivational component is a positive attachment to one’s society—that is, a sense that one cares about the society enough to contribute to it and, if necessary, to sacrifice for it. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, this aspect of civic purpose has been called patriotism.

Unfortunately, patriotism is not a popular word in education circles. In fact, patriotism is one of the most politically incorrect words in education today. If you think it’s hard to talk about morality and values in schools, try talking about patriotism. Educators often confuse the patriotic love of country with aberrant nationalism or with the militaristic chauvinism that twentieth-century dictators used to start wars and manipulate the masses. There is little awareness among educators and intellectuals that it was the patriotic resistance to dictatorships by citizens of democracies that saved the world from tyranny in the past century and is the best hope of doing so in the future. Some examples of antipatriotic sentiments among educators today include the following statements that I have quoted in previous writings:⁹ “This is not a form of allegiance that people need”; patriotism “motivates more death than justice” and “propagates the myth that America stands for the rule of law and stands for democracy”; it “can hardly be innocent: it is reproducing institutions which possess vast armaments”; “an education that takes national boundaries as morally salient reinforces . . . irrationality, by lending to what is an accident of history a false air of moral weight and glory”; “This nationalistic view is abhorrent.”

Educators at every level of schooling see patriotism as antithetical to a global perspective on humanity and thus an enemy of the humane goals of peace and justice. Many educators urge schools to teach children to become “citizens of the world” rather than of a single nation, and to adopt a “cosmopolitan” perspective rather than identifying themselves as Americans. Indeed, there is a turning away from American identity as a desirable mark of citizenship education. Consider this statement by a university professor: “Long-standing notions of democratic citizenship are becoming obsolete, even as we cling to them. American identity is unsustainable in the face of globalization. Loyalties are moving to transnational communities defined many different ways: by race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, and sexual orientation.”¹⁰

As global citizens, it is argued, students’ identification should be with the humanity of the world. While the lofty ideals of cosmopolitanism and world citizenship are understandable, they do not in themselves provide a realistic route to civic education. For one thing, the serious tasks of citizenship that students need to learn are all played out on a local or national level rather than a global one. We do not pay taxes to the world, we do not vote for a world president or senator, we do not serve in a world army or peace corps, and we are not called to jury duty in any world courtroom. When we write emails to our congressional representatives or vote and campaign for candidates running for elective office, these activities are part of our national civic life, not part of any global event. As the philosopher Michael Walzer wrote, “I am not a citizen of the world I am not even aware that there is a world such that one could be a citizen of.”¹¹ Eleanor Roosevelt, hardly considered a provincial chauvinist in her time, emphasized the standing of the nation-state as every citizen’s primary identification when she proposed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the United Nations in 1948.¹² Again, what was once seen as progressive advancement of liberty is now castigated as reactionary. One result of this ideological turnaround has been the resistance of American education to promoting in our students a civic purpose and a felt attachment to our broader society.

In much of education today, American history and social studies are taught from a critical perspective. Yes, it is important that young people learn about mistakes their society has made and how the society can do better in the future. But it is always important to attend to context and development sequence—that is, placing the criticism in context of the country’s achievements and principles, and presenting the criticism after the student has fully understood what is being criticized. Many students today learn about what is wrong with our country without gaining knowledge of its successes. Why would a student exert any effort to master the rules of a society that the student has gained no respect for and thus no interest in being part of?

To acquire civic purpose, students need to care about their country. As a foundation for citizenship education, schools should begin with the positive and emphasize reasons for caring enough about our society to participate in it and try to improve it. In this way, American students and those who teach them can share civic purposes energized by a motivating spirit of patriotism.

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Notes:

1. For more details on this definition, now widely used in developmental science, see William Damon and Matthew J. Bundick, “Purpose,” in The Sage Encyclopedia of Lifespan Human Development, ed. Marc Bornstein (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2018).
2. Stanford University Center on Adolescence, “Journal Articles,” accessed August 15, 2019, https://coa.stanford.edu/publications/journal-articles.
3. See Stanford University Center on Adolescence, “Publications,” accessed August 15, 2019, for comprehensive findings: https://coa.stanford.edu/publications/publications.
4. As a vast and sprawling program that relied on incentives and disincentives rather than specific instructional mandates, there was considerable variation in the ways these federal policies were implemented, from state to state and district to district. But there was a common set of aims that guided the incentives and disincentives, and these produced a set of practices that generally conformed to the initiative’s narrow vision. The numerous critics of the initiative identified the same limitations that, in effect, operated as antidotes to students’ acquisition of purpose.
5. American College Health Association, American College Health Association- National College Health Assessment II: Reference Group Executive Summary Fall 2017 (Hanover, MD: American College Health Association, 2018), https://www.acha.org/documents/ncha/NCHA-II_FALL_2017_REFERENCE_GROUP_EXECUTIVE_SUMMARY.pdf.
6. Institute for Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, “NAEP: National Assessment of Educational Progress,” accessed June 11, 2014, https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/.
7. For recommendations regarding needed civic education improvements, see the consensus report from eight experts on youth citizenship development. Heather Malin et al., Youth Civic Development and Education: A Conference Consensus Report (Stanford, CA, and Seattle, WA: Stanford Center on Adolescence and Center for Multicultural Education, University of Washington, 2014), https://coa.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj1076/f/civic_education_report.pdf.
8. Heather Malin, Parissa J. Ballard, and William Damon, “Civic Purpose: An Integrated Construct for Understanding Civic Development in Adolescence,” Human Development 58, no. 2 (2015): 103–30.
9. William Damon, Failing Liberty 101: How We Are Leaving Young Americans Unprepared for Citizenship in a Free Society (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2011).
10. Ibid.
11. Michael Walzer “Spheres of Affection,” in Martha C. Nussbaum, For Love of Country? (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002), 125.
12. Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001).