Brooks, David. The Road to Character. (New York: Random House, 2015).
This book is one of a growing number of works focused on the phenomenon of high-achieving students and their headlong rush to qualify for ever greater levels of accomplishment and to garner the attendant prestige and financial rewards. Of concern to educators are the loss of engagement in authentic learning and, more deeply, a thoughtful consideration of what enriches one’s life. Brooks introduces this issue by making a distinction between “resume virtues” and “eulogy virtues.” The former emphasize accomplishments in the outer world of action. The latter are internal qualities—the content of our character for which we hope to be remembered. He goes on to examine the tensions between these two fundamentally different value systems and the risks associated with privileging resume values to the exclusion of eulogy values. Illustrative of this risk is the college admissions scandal of 2019 in which parents padded their children’s high school resumes with fake credentials and paid bribes to assure their children’s acceptance at elite universities. While such extreme parental manipulation of social systems may be rare, Brooks points to the dangers of a more pervasive style of “merit-based” parenting, particularly among upper socio-economic families. In this approach, children are driven to excel because they have intuited and internalized the message, “I am loved as long as I perform well.” Under tremendous pressure to excel in many arenas, such students often seem caught in a rat race for more advanced courses, higher grades, and wide-ranging extracurricular activities. Engaging such students in meaningful learning poses special pedagogical challenges for educators. Brooks offers no easy answers to these concerns, but provides a language through which educators can discuss the balance between externally and internally focused values. Beyond that, Brooks’ analysis offers affirmation to those who have been drawn to the profession of education, not merely as a job, but as a vocation:
No good life is possible unless it is organized around a vocation. If you try to use your work to serve yourself, you’ll find your ambition and expectations will forever run ahead and you’ll never be satisfied. If you try to serve the community, you’ll always wonder if people appreciate you enough. But if you serve work that is intrinsically compelling and focus just on being excellent at that, you will wind up serving yourself and the community obliquely. A vocation is not found by looking within and finding your passion. It is found by looking without and asking what life is asking of us. What problem is addressed by an activity you intrinsically enjoy? (p. 266)
The scholar-practitioner quality of ethical stewardship is grounded in just such an intrinsic satisfaction of contributing the societal value of education and the learning needs of their students.