INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL JOSEPHSON
In 1987, after selling his successful law school exam preparatory company, Michael Josephson started the Joseph & Edna Josephson Institute of Ethics in honor of his parents. Below is an interview with Michael about his partnership with the Foundation, why character education is politically neutral, and the four reasons he has chosen this for his life’s work.

Q: What have you learned about teaching character values that you didn’t know 10 years ago?

MJ: I’ve learned that it’s both easier and harder than I thought. It’s easier in the sense that once you truly take the time to understand the components of character, both the psychological components and the definitional components, it’s a lot easier to focus on things like trustworthiness and respect and responsibility. The more specific we can be about the virtues that define character, the more systematic you can be from the teaching perspective. It isn’t so difficult to design effective interventions that really do help instill core values in young people.

Q: And what was harder than you thought?

MJ: Knowing right from wrong is not the same thing as having the moral courage to be able to do it. Trying to instill, not only in the young people, but also in the teachers and then school administrators, a commitment to model this kind of behavior consistently has been a very significant challenge.

Q: What is the definition of character you use?

MJ: Character is ethics-in-action. It includes six core attributes: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship. These six things taken together constitute the quality that we identify with a good person, a person of character.

Q: What are your expectations for the Character Counts! program and what role do you see the “Foundations for Life” essay contest playing?

MJ: The essence of the “Foundations for Life” essay contest has really been the notion of helping young people focus on character and ethical implications in the context of maxims. The notion of a maxim, a short profound truth, moral truth, is a very effective way of introducing young people to deep thoughts and discussions. The essay contest is a method that gives them an opportunity to reflect on a selected maxim and the way we’ve designed the contest, they get to select the maxim. We’ve given 50 maxims for each grade and they’re sorted by complexity and difficulty because we also want these maxims to teach critical thinking and reading skills of the type that’s tested with the No Child Left Behind exams.

Q: What’s an example of the maxims that you are using?

MJ: Every maxim is graded on the basis of syntactical difficulty, like how hard it is to read and conceptual difficulty. For example, if you took a maxim like “Talk doesn’t cook rice,” synthetically it’s easy, the words are easy, but conceptually that’s a very difficult one, that’s a metaphor. The ultimate goal of the contest is really to get them to express themselves on these moral truths.

Q: Speaking of maxims, what’s your favorite?

MJ: My favorite is, “pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” If we do it right, that would cause young people to understand that maxim is about your responsibility to decide whether you’re going to let something that happens to you destroy your life and cause suffering, or you simply going to acknowledge it was painful and choose to move on.

Q: How big is the Character Counts! network that you are using to solicit essays?

MJ: Character Counts! is clearly the nation’s largest character development framework. We have about six million kids nationally, and about 5,000 to 6,000 schools that are rather fully integrated. Even when people are not formally using our program, they’re often using the words and materials. We give things away on our website. People can download everything for free. Our focus is not just to have the label “Character Counts!” on everything, it’s really about helping schools and not just schools, but youth organizations and sports organizations, find more effective way to stimulate character development.

Q: How many “Foundations of Life” essays have you received so far?

MJ: The deadline hasn’t arrived yet, but my best guess is 250,000. The way it works, they first judge them locally, so they don’t send all of them in to us. Then they send winners on to us and we judge winners.

Q: What don’t people know about the work you’re doing that you wish they did?

MJ: There are two different groups that don’t understand. One group is just very nervous and skeptical about trying to teach character to kids. They believe we’re going to inflict political values of some sort, we’re going to be too liberal or too conservative, or we’re too religious or too secular. We really need them to understand that character development is not a question of choosing sides. It’s a question of shared core virtues that are equally strong regardless of ideology and that by no means is character development value neutral, but it’s politically neutral. I think by and large we’ve succeeded at that.

Q: What’s the second?

MJ: The second kind of thing I think we wish people understood is that character development works as effectively, or even more effectively, in the later grades as the earlier grades. There’s a real prejudice that holds that you can deal with elementary school kids, but once they’ve already formed their values by the ages of six to eight, they’re done. Quite the contrary is true. True values, the kind that we operate on and that tend to be lasting, are formed as we get a little older and we’re making choices about our lives. Adolescence is an enormously critical period for value development. Kids are making critical decisions about sex, whether they are using drugs or not, their ideas on cheating in exams and fidelity. That’s one of the reasons the maxim-based program is so important, because it absolutely definitely works.

Q: Why have you chosen this as your life’s work?

MJ: I have a simple answer: I have four little cute girls now. And I care a lot about the world they’re growing-up in and who they’re going to date and marry. Without a moral compass, this nation has nowhere to go but down. There’s a great statement by Alexis de Tocqueville who says, “America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases being good, she will stop being great.”

Q: What’s the last book you’ve read that you thought had a good example of character in it?

MJ: Well, actually one of my favorites, and I just read it again recently is Living The Life That Matters by Harold Kushner.

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