concerned with the meaning of actions and committed to the good of others as well as to
himself, is ultimately useless and often dangerous.
Postmodern culture is characterized by conflicting values and notions of what it means
to be "good." Schools must share with families and other social institutions the
responsibility of helping young people sort out these values and provide them with tools
for making ethical choices in a world that will continue to present them with fluctuating
and often competing values.
Most young people want to be good, want to behave in an ethical way, want to be
respected and respect others. It is up to adults in schools and elsewhere to foster that
impulse toward health and goodness that is, admittedly, buried very deep in some.
Schools need to assert that what kind a person you are is as important as what you know
and can do. Education does not equal goodness, and the importance of goodness needs
to be made explicit wherever and whenever one can. Nor does goodness, like any true
accomplishment, come from a timid failure to take risks thereby avoiding censure,
mistakes and, incidentally, any growth. Goodness, like playing the violin well, does not
come by default.
Schools need to teach young people that what we call our conscience, our awareness of
right and wrong, resides within and not in a set of external rules and laws, important as
these are to a civilized society. Young artists are asked all the time to listen to
themselves, know themselves, and take responsibility for themselves. No one else can
learn an actor's lines or appear for him in Macbeth. No one else can practice alone night
after night.
The development of character means encouraging students to be true to their own
beliefs and truths and acknowledging how hard that can be, especially when there is
great pressure to betray the self for others. The study of the arts is about clarifying and
being true to oneself, to ones own vision, even when there is little apparent support for
that vision.
How is all this "taught"? Not in ethics classes. Morality is embedded in life, not
separable into a discipline. Students learn what it means to be an ethical human being
by working with and observing adults who strive to live an ethical life and accept
responsibility for fostering that in students. Students learn about morality by observing
how adults act, how they treat each other in the hall or cafeteria as well as in the
classroom and studio. Adults are always under the scrutiny of the unforgiving
adolescent eye and, although they deny it, adolescents imitate what they see, not what
they hear. Arts students have an advantage in that they are quite ready to honor and
follow their teachers, and their teachers consider it part of their teaching responsibilities
to foster the development of a reflective self because art is the product of such a self.
Related to the issue of helping young people develop their ethical and moral selves is the
trickier one of spirituality. "Spiritual" experience in postmodern America ranges from
Born Again Christians to Timothy Leary's cult of LSD. The only area about which there
seems to be any agreement is that there is a common concern about the fact that