Duty, Honor, Country… More Than A Motto… A Worldview

The Character Building Project holds that our nation’s schools, including our elite universities should develop character programs for all its students. These elite schools can do so by looking to our military academies and religious schools who already train rising leaders to have the wisdom to know what is the right thing to do, the skill to do it, and the virtue to persevere until it is accomplished.

Post-secondary education is a time for all students to realize their full potential. It is a time for them determine their purpose in life, discover their talents, and develop the tenacity of will to pursue activities that will develop them regardless of any contrary distractions.

The goal of character education during a student’s post-secondary era is no small task. These programs within our nation’s military academies and religious-affiliated schools often must counter a student’s earlier exposure to 18 years of a culture of materialistic self-centeredness. They are doing this by developing the “servant concept” in the young trainees; that is, the students come to see self-sacrifice as a noble calling of spending one’s life in service to God and country.

The academies and religious schools expose their students to moral conflicts and place them in situations that require hard decision among less than perfect choices. They are taught not what to think, but how to think through moral issues. The curriculum teaches the individuals’ responsibility for knowing the difference between right and wrong, and then doing what is right without hesitation.

Their graduates are leaders of high moral character who can be relied upon to “choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.”  Such moral choices are required of the nation’s military leaders, for in battle, warriors must discern their duties rightly and then manifest the courage and resilience to persevere in fulfilling them, often under the most adverse of conditions. A warrior of good character develops the physical courage to fight in close combat along with the moral courage to always act in accord with the military profession’s ethics.

Character education programs such as those found at West Point and Annapolis help cadets and plebes develop their self-awareness by regularly reflecting on their life goals and the progress they are making toward fully developing their potential. These students, trained in character development feel confident they can master their own life’s journey, and they are more likely to assume the responsibility for their actions when they fall short of their goal.

Our nation’s religiously affiliated colleges too realize that their students can all benefit from character education.  It should not be confined to young men and women destined for war zones. Too bad many of our secular universities fail to see the important of such post-secondary training.