Building Moral Character
by Patrick McIlheran
Carmen Bell gives high marks to the Milwaukee high school that her daughter Naomi graduated from last year. Ask why, and she starts with phrases you’ve heard before.
The teachers were supportive and caring. But many teachers in many schools are supportive and caring. Teachers pushed students to excel. Again, admirable — and widely professed.
Then she says this: Teachers at Milwaukee Lutheran High School are “very open with their faith.” At chapel in the gym when a child overwhelmed by the message would start crying from joy. Or in everyday interactions with students. It wasn’t pushy, but the school was demonstrating to the children that “we serve a living God,” she says.
Bell, who describes herself as a believer in Christ, thinks the element of faith made a difference for the students, for her daughter. “Why wouldn’t it make a difference?” she says. “It should make a difference.”
Findings released last fall by a long-running project studying Milwaukee schoolchildren suggest faith makes a big difference. When children who have little or no religious upbringing attend a private choice school (roughly nine in 10 such schools in Milwaukee are religious or following a religious tradition), it serves to “suppress criminal tendencies and paternity cases of students later in life” to about as great a degree as having had a highly religious upbringing.
Read the full column here.
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