I'm posting old Members' Library Home Page articles here to serve as an archive. This one was first published July 10, 2009, at http://members.characterfirst.com.
Luke Kallberg
Do people, left to themselves, naturally make the right choices or the wrong choices? In his 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, Nobel prize-winning author William Golding tells a story of several young boys stranded on a tropical island. Gradually they forget the restraints of civilization and lose their morality, killing two of the boys. On the other hand, the reality television program Kid Nation showed children working together in an unsupervised environment to sustain and govern themselves rather successfully.
It seems undeniable: sometimes people do right, sometimes wrong. The real question isn’t why there are both good and bad people, but where does the bad come from? Do people corrupt their environment, or does the environment corrupt them?
Obviously both happen in the world. But if we see an environment that is corrupting people, how did it get that way? Answer: people made it that way. People are the creative source of corruption.
Character First! responds to this reality by holding that people don’t just need to learn–they need to change. We emphasize an active approach to character development rather than a purely educational one.
- Educational materials are just one of four elements in the Character First! model. Are you part of the other three?
- Some of the Members’ Library articles are geared toward education, some towards action. Look at the How To Praise section and use it today!
- Each Relationships section has “Practical Applications” at the end of the article, and many For Kids and For Teens sections include activities and projects.
Luke Kallberg manages website content for the Character Training Institute.
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