This is how we want our children to be: 'don't bite,' 'don't push,' 'Susie needs help, please get her a Band-Aid.' We value good behavior and are disappointed when our children fall short. And we're proud when they protect another against a bully.

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Behavior

The most extreme example of tyranny is the Holocaust. We wonder what we would have done if we had lived in that time and knew what was going on. Many questions arise. How would I have acted? Would I have stood up for others? Would I have spoken out? Would I have risked my life for someone I had never met? Would I have jeopardized the well-being of my children for the sake of a stranger? Or would I have just turned away, kept my mouth shut and gone about my own business?

During the Holocaust there were people who, at great personal risk, saved Jews marked for annihilation. In a place where giving just a piece of bread to a Jew could mean immediate execution, imagine the commitment it took to hide a Jew, possibly for years. And add to it the danger that this meant to their families as well.

Renee Silver nee Kann was born into a Jewish-French family. By 1942 the Kanns realized that the Vichy government was a willing and eager participant in the Nazi program aimed at the Jews. Indeed, Renee's parents were so worried about their two daughters that they arranged for Renee, then 11, and Edith, 9, to stay in Le Chambon sur Lignon, a small village in a remote ountainous area in central France. By this time, Le Chambon had gained a reputation as a place of pious Protestants where Jewish children were being secretly sheltered. (I have more to say about Le Chambon in Chapter Nine.) So Renee and Edith went there to stay -- they had no idea for how long -- without their parents.

Renee was frightened and lonely. She heard nothing from her parents and she and Edith were being taken care of by two different farm families, a distance away from each other. About a month after arriving, Renee decided to leave Le Chambon and return to Lyon with Edith to find their parents. However, the apartment in which she thought her parents were living was empty. Renee was sure they had been arrested. To her great relief she found her parents staying in the one-room apartment with Mr. and Mrs. Caussidiere. The Caussidieres hadn't known the senior Kanns but they did know Renee, who was friends with their daughter. The Caussidieres, who worked as janitors, had opened their apartment in the Theatre Muncipal de Villeurbanne to the Kanns because they were afraid that the Kanns, who were Jews, were going to be arrested by the Vichy.

The Caussidieres' apartment was next door to the Vichy headquarters of what was the equivalent of the German Gestapo. Today Renee Silver writes, 'Nightly my parents heard the Police's telephone ring, saw them exit the building and later, across the small square on which the theater faced, saw people being loaded onto trucks and small buses. Many of their Jewish friends were taken away never to come back.'

There wasn't enough room at the Caussidieres' tiny apartment for two more people. After a couple of days the Kanns persuaded Renee and Edith to return to Le Chambon. This time the sisters stayed there for two months. Renee recalls the unassuming courage of the people in Le Chambon, the matter-of-fact way they hid the children. She remembers a time when the government authorities conducted a search in the village. The Vichy suspected that there were Jews in the village. Renee was calmly introduced as one of their nieces visiting for the summer. Another time she was sent on an unexplained errand nearby. When she returned, she found out that the authorities had come once more, hoping to detain and deport Jewish children.

Meanwhile, the senior Kanns knew that they couldn't stay in Lyon and needed to find a safer haven. They arranged for false passports for the entire family identifying them as Christians. They left for Switzerland where they lived with Renee and Edith until the end of the war.

'The Caussidieres saved my parent's life,' Renee Silver says. 'They did not act out of community spirit or to follow an example set by their pastor or minister. It wasn't a political act. They had no religious affiliation. They undoubtedly did not even think about the danger to which they themselves would be exposed. Sheltering my parents was a spontaneous act of humanity.'

Renee Silver is grateful for the courage and selflessness exhibited by the Caussidieres and the people of Le Chambon. They made it possible for them to survive the Holocaust.

There weren't many people like the Caussidieres or the villagers of Le Chambon in France or elsewhere in Europe, people, who at great risk to their own lives, were willing to shelter strangers. Few had the courage to do what was right; most endorsed the Nazi policies explicitly or implicitly, either because they supported such policies or were afraid to resist.

But there were Caussidieres and others like them and there was the entire village of Le Chambon where people risked their lives. So who were the rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe and why did they do what they did? Why would anyone put his or her own life in danger for the sake of someone who was a stranger? Social psychologist Eva Fogelman sought to find the answers. Fogelman, a founding director of the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers and co-director of Psychotherapy with Generations of the Holocaust and Related Traumas, wanted to know whether there were factors held in common by those who saved Jews. She wondered if the rescuers were a particular nationality, social class, religion, political affiliation or gender. No, is her answer. Some were intensely religious, others atheists, and others non-practicing Christians. Rescuers came from all classes and occupations -- farmers, executives, doctors, blacksmiths, social workers, dressmakers. Gender and politics were not factors either.

So, if none of these were determinants, what was?

Character, she says.

'[It was not] just a haphazard collection of individuals who chanced to rescue Jews, but people who have surprisingly similar humanistic values. It was not a whim that led these people to risk their lives and those of their families, but a response . . . that came from core values developed and instilled in them in childhood,' Fogelman said at a speech at an Amnesty International Chapter on Long Island.

As children they experienced one or more of the following: a nurturing, loving home; an altruistic parent or beloved caretaker; a tolerance for people who were different; a childhood illness or loss that tested their resilience; an emphasis upon independence, discipline with explanations, and caring.

The values they shared were altruism, independence of mind and respect for differences among people. As children, the rescuers were taught these principles as part of daily living. "This made virtue a habit," says Fogelman. She tells us that the parents of some of the rescuers had involved them in helping others by bringing food to a sick person or sleeping over at a house where a neighbor was about to give birth and her husband was not there.

Fogelman says, "Learned altruistic behavior, seeing all people as equals, gave the rescuers the ability to transcend the propaganda against the Jews and to see them as human beings just like themselves. They took the responsibility to help because they knew that unless they did something that person would die."

Her research confirms an earlier study by Samuel and Pearl Oliner. The Oliners questioned over 400 non-Jewish Germans whose names are registered in Israel at Yad Veshem, the center dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust. These were people, who at great personal risk, rescued Jews with whom they had no personal connection. Over 125 Germans who were not rescuers were also interviewed as a control group to see what differences there may be between those who acted heroically and those who did not.

As a group, the rescuers had a greater degree of empathy for the common humanity of all people. They were more accepting of pluralism and of various groups. They believed that the values which they prized most highly -- justice, equality and respect -- were to be applied universally. Their values were not held and acted upon only for those who were like them or were to be applied only to those with whom they had previous loyalties and ties. Rather the ethical value was to be applied to everyone. Also, the extent to which they cared and were moved by pain was significantly greater than that expressed by non-rescuers.

The Oliners note, however, that the rescuers weren't a monolithic group. In fact, they divide into three groups. About half were moved to action because they believed that they could not live with the guilt and shame that would ensue if they did not live up to the standards and expectations of those most important to them, their family and friends. To stand by idly, feeling but not acting, would be a crushing blow to them. They became rescuers because only such action would allow them to live with themselves. Their concept of what it meant to be a human encompassed being a moral person. Inaction would forever tarnish their character in their own eyes. In Jean Paul Sartre's terms, they acted authentically, true to themselves and, in this case, being true to themselves meant acting ethically.

Another group of rescuers, representing about 10% of the total, put their lives on the line because they were moved by ethical principles. They were mainly indifferent to the opinions of those around them. Instead, they had firm ideas about the correctness of moral principles, and their own integrity as thinking, independent people required that they act upon those principles. Since the principles were reasonable in the first place, they couldn't exempt themselves from the duty which flowed from those principles. Ethics wasn't a mind game but a passionate belief that doing the right thing was an absolute requirement, a demanding and now harsh imperative. What was abstract before the Nazis became the motivation for heroics when presented with a concrete situation. Those whose principle was justice were filled with anger, they hated the Nazis because they treated Jews as things instead of as people, as means rather than as ends. Those moved by the principle of care exhibited kindness.

About a third of the 400 became rescuers because they couldn't deny that Jews who entered concentration camps did not come out. They knew that when one person is taken away, arbitrarily, brutally, no one is safe. They identified with the strangers they saw marched off. Their sense of sympathy, compassion and pity moved them to risk their own lives to save theirs.

Was there anything held in common by rescuers? The Oliners conclude that the rescuers were people who believed they could influence events - in psychological terms, they possessed an internal locus of control. What they did or didn't do mattered a great deal. They viewed themselves as people who had some influence over the course of their lives. While they couldn't completely control their destinies, neither were they pawns in the hands of Fate. Many other Germans viewed themselves as victims, subject to the psychic wounds of defeat after W.W.I and the ensuing economic chaos. Psychologists refer to attributing events as beyond one's ability to influence them as an external locus of control. (I will return to the subject of locus of control in Chapter Six, 'A Matter of Respect.')

Furthermore, the Oliners write, 'An examination of the early family lives and personality characteristics of both rescuers and non-rescuers suggests that their respective wartime behavior grew out of their general patterns of relating to others.' Many of the German non-rescuers who stood by while Jews died didn't necessarily remain passive because they overtly rejected or hated Jews or other outsiders. Their acceptance of tyranny was mainly one aspect of their personalities. The non-rescuers were people who distanced themselves from any relationship they considered burdensome. Non-rescuers had constricted personalities, while the personalities of the rescuers were extensive ones. Non-rescuers hunkered down and closed up; rescuers opened their arms and took others in.

But how did rescuers get to be the people they were? Why does anyone take risks on the behalf of others? Sometimes when confronted with the acts of altruism we are left with less than scraps to help us understand the setting in which they were born. One person who leaves us with such a mystery was Chiune Sugihara, Japan's consul to Lithuania in 1940. Soon after the Soviets annexed the Baltic state and shut down the Japanese consulate there, Sugihara issued perhaps as many as 10,000 transit visas to Jews who wanted to escape from the advancing Nazis. Although he may have been sponsored for his diplomatic posting by the faction of the Japanese government that favored an alliance with Nazi Germany, Sugihara stood against all that, endangering not only his career but his very life. The only hint of Sugihara's motives comes from an interview given in 1967. He said, 'I acted according to my sense of human justice, out of love for mankind.'

Fortunately, research has helped illuminate some of the mystery by studying rescuers honored at Yad Veshem. The Oliners were able to question hundreds of rescuers of Jews in Germany in order to get more insight about the roots of altruism. They found that one of the keys to understanding rescuers was the rescuers' parents' method of discipline. Rescuers' parents relied upon reason and explanation. When their child harmed another, they suggested ways to remedy the hurt. Physical punishment was used sparingly. Instead they made great use of persuasion and advice.

The major lesson from Fogelman's and the Oliners' research is that altruism can be learned. Morality doesn't emerge from a vacuum. What the children learned every day from their parents through acts of kindness and tolerance and through encouragement toward independent thinking helps explain why they became rescuers. These values became ingrained and habitual. Altruistic behavior had been so instilled in them that personal risk was not a consideration. They had to do what they did in order to be true to themselves. Being a rescuer was almost a natural outcome of their upbringing. Says Dr. Fogelman, "At a time of worldwide upheaval, when civilized norms were held in suspension, a few individuals held fast to their own standards. They were not saints. Nor were they particularly heroic or often all that outstanding. They were simply ordinary people doing what they felt had to be done at that time."

The implications of the Holocaust findings can instruct parents seeking to raise moral children. We can help our children to be good people. We teach them every day by word and by example. When we assist others, we help our children to be caring. When we see people as individuals, we teach respect for differences. When we encourage independent thinking, we help keep them from being swayed by the mob.

These are values worth passing on to our children in any time. As Eva Fogelman concludes in her book, " . . . it is appealing to contemplate a day when those seeking moral heroes need only look as far as their mirror."

What Ethical Education Is

At the center of this book is the conviction that character can be shaped and stimulated by others, that parents, teachers and others play an important part in imparting moral values and that moral development is a natural process, as much a part of growing up as is acquiring an adult body. I say this despite the recent research on genetics and twins that suggests that far more is controlled by our inner environment -- our genes and biology -- than many have previously thought. In the age-old debate about nature and nurture, we are still largely in the dark regarding what belongs to the genes and what to the environment. This is just as true in the area of moral development as in any other area of human psychology, although most continue to side with the nurturers. This is the reason why concerned parents are so eager to have their children attend good schools and are willing to spend money, through taxes or tuition, to see that they have it.

In recent years there has been a push for character education. Many are upset by what they see in society, the daily news reports of scandal, deception and violent crime. What is happening to society? Where are our moral standards? Are we raising a group of selfish, hedonistic, uncaring children who don't know the difference between right and wrong? However, there is much disagreement about the solutions to the problem. Some criticize schools for not teaching values; some attack schools for teaching the wrong values. Some want schools to promote particular values; others believe that teaching values belongs in the home.

Is there such a thing as ethical education or is it a quixotic venture after a holy grail? The question has been phrased this way: Is ethics taught or is it caught? It is hard enough to teach children reading and arithmetic, physics and biology but at least in these subjects there is a general agreement about the desired outcomes. We know whether children have mastered the subject matter. No one disagrees that SATs measure math skills more or less accurately. There is less agreement about shaping character or imparting values. Moral education isn't like the neat lawn of math but like a weedy field with bogs and stands of trees. Whose values are to be promoted, which characteristics are most desirable? Who is to teach it? Should education be for the benefit of the individual child or for society?

It is my view that despite the apparent and substantive differences between liberals and conservatives there is one area where there is common agreement. Luckily, this is also the one area over which parental guidance seems to have a huge impact, a factor not inherited but learned. This factor some call moral character. Moral character isn't one thing, such as dark eyes nor is it one value, such as benevolence. It is more sweeping and dynamic than that. Good character doesn't necessarily mean being a likeable person, a gentle or sweet one. An ethical person may be neurotic, unhappy, a pain in the neck. But we can also specify some of the qualities of an ethical person. Good character is composed of the mix of the qualities of trustworthiness and kindness, responsibility and fairness. This may come in a sweet or rough package, but it is a quality that ultimately allows one human being to count on another. So while we may have little to say in whether our children prefer chocolate to vanilla, comedy to tragedy, out-goingness to introspection, math to literature, vulgar humor to wry, drums to violins, we actually have much to say about whether our children will be moral in the broadest and deepest sense of the word.

It is also my conviction that the qualities I am talking about are universal. They aren't merely a reflection of my own biases. I can present my reasons for taking this position by references to numerous studies in the field of moral psychology and many of these will be found in the body of this book. But here I want instead to present my position more personally. My wife and I were in the Peace Corps in the 1960s and at that time worked with peasant farmers in western Kenya in East Africa. Through our work in adult education, we met Joshua and Raili Ongesa. I was attempting to form a cooperative for soapstone carvers in Joshua's village and Lyn was teaching child care and nutrition. After two years, my wife and I returned to the States but stayed in touch with the Ongesas through letters and when we decided to return 10 years later with our two children for a five-month stay, the Ongesas arranged for us to live down the road from them.

For more than 30 years now we have maintained a relationship with the Ongesas, having returned to visit many times since. Joshua and Raili Ongesa speak no English, so we struggle with the Swahili that slips away from disuse or rely upon one of their children to translate our English for them. While they are monogamous, they come from families where polygamy is commonplace. One of his brothers has several wives and while we were there we knew the senior chief, who had thirteen wives and more than 50 children. The Ongesas have 12 children, live in a house not much larger than my living room; we belong to different religions. The two of them have never been any further than Nairobi, 250 miles from their home near Lake Victoria. Joshua tends a meager plot of coffee trees, serves as his church's president, and makes some additional money by carving soapstone objects. Raili manages the family's financial resources by going to market to sell maize, beans and bananas she grows. Despite these and other differences in our culture and life experience, my family and theirs have become more than friends. We now think of ourselves as family. A grandchild of theirs was named Morris after my late father-in-law and I have a picture of their youngest son on my wall. What attracted me to the Ongesas? Why did we become so close and remain so all these years? It is their sweetness and sincerity, their open-heartedness and decency, the generosity of their spirit and their kindness. I wish the world were filled with Ongesas.

I've sometimes wondered if I love them because they possess western virtues. I don't think this is so. When I asked other people in the Kisii who they admired and trusted, the Ongesas topped most of the lists. Similarly, many of the people I didn't like or trust in Kenya were the same ones that others spoke about derisively. What seems true to me is that a good person is a good person and a scoundrel a scoundrel wherever you go. To be sure there are cultural differences -- eating with the fingers or with forks, initiating into adulthood by circumcision or by getting a drivers license, eating termites or lobsters. But I think these are the differences that make life interesting. Underneath this resides the bedrock of character and this I think is similar throughout the world. People everywhere face the same problems in life: eating properly, fending off illness and recovering from accident, getting along with others. When we work well together humanity prospers. Those who promote this through their actions of beneficence, caring, sharing and justice are the people we most admire.

My own thinking about morality is that it develops along several streams at one time: the emergence of empathy, the acquisition of the ability to reason at increasingly complex levels, the psychological capacity to act on one's moral convictions and the internalization of social rules. This roughly follows the approach of one of the leading researchers in the field of moral development, James Rest of the Center for the Study of Ethical Development, University of Minnesota. There are four major determinants of moral behavior, Rest states. First is the awareness that our actions affect other people. Second is the ability to make judgments between possible courses of action. Third is being sufficiently motivated to want to do the right thing. And fourth is having the ego strength, courage and perseverance to follow through on wanting to act ethically. For the sake of clarity, we can look at each of these streams by itself. In real life, however, they are not so much separate streams as separate currents operating in the same body of water. Together they constitute what we call moral character.

Parents play a substantial part in their children's moral development. As with many other aspects of raising children, we can use some guidance, particularly at a time when so much is being said by those who are driven by fear or resentment and desire to return to a simpler time when answers seemed ready at hand and obvious. Some things about raising moral children are obvious but other aspects aren't. While there is no prescription, no formula and certainly no guarantee, I believe that there is an approach to ethical education that people can follow to help their children acquire the habits, judgment and ability to be moral. This approach establishes a framework of understanding and is, by its very nature, open-ended. This is as it should be for character development since each family is unique, just as is each person.

Parents and children also live within a larger social environment that also affects the moral development of children. So while parents have a large impact upon a child's moral development, they do so within a wider framework that either makes the task easier or more difficult. In a helpful society, parents find support for ethical values in schools, work, cultural institutions and so forth. There are times, however, when for families the work of raising moral children is difficult. Not impossible but difficult.

It is my hope that this book will help those concerned with the moral development of children to better understand the components of that ethical growth. I believe that this book will make clear that good behavior and being a moral person aren't always the same thing. What most people mean by good behavior, especially as it applies to children, is that the person follows the family's or society's rules. So what is often meant by being a good child is that the child does what he or she is told. 'Good dog,' we say to Rover when he obeys our commands. And a convicted criminal who is given probation for good behavior is a prisoner who cooperated with the authorities. In other words, good behavior frequently means conforming behavior. Ethical behavior, in contrast, may or may not conform to the rules of society, as was clear with the rescuers of Jews. A whistle-blower is not a good employee but may well be a moral person. Good behavior is ethical behavior only when the rules being followed are themselves moral. The distinction is an important one, for adults sometimes confuse wanting a child to behave well with raising a moral child. This book will help a parent and others concerned with children to better understand how to raise a child who she can be proud of, one who is not a bystander but a person of valor and worthy of being known as virtuous.