The Need for Character

Let’s imagine for a moment that we’re all Math teachers – excellent Math teachers. We take our jobs seriously, so that we eat/drink/sleep teaching Math.

Let’s imagine further that a large portion of our students are not only excelling at Math, but one catches fire for Math, excelling to such an extent that he skips two grades, graduates from Harvard, winning a prize for his doctoral thesis, and lands a job teaching Math at the prestigious University of California, Berkeley.

I’d feel pretty successful. Wouldn’t you? I just might put his picture up on my desk, as an example of where disciplined learning can lead.

But let’s further imagine that as we read our morning paper, we’re shocked to find our former student’s picture on the front page, not accepting a Nobel Prize, but in handcuffs, tracked down and convicted as the infamous Unabomber who was convicted of murder. (The awards and honors I described were of course factual.) I look at his picture on my desk and slowly hide it in my drawer. After the initial shock, I believe I’d start thinking, “should I have seen it coming? Is there anything I could have done to have urged him toward serving others with his great intellectual gifts?”

Now I’m definitely not laying the blame for Kaczynski’s murders at the feet of his teachers. If we’d taught him, I don’t know if we could have turned him around or not. But his story does clearly warn me that if we only teach academics, we may find ourselves merely educating smarter criminals, equipping them to be more successful in leading future Enrons to steal our life savings, or even taking others’ lives. » Read more: Pursuing Education