The Major Threat to Character Education Among College Students: And What Can Help

One of the most intriguing parts about my job is exploring students’ understanding of their virtue development. Recently, our research team has asked college students to provide an example of when they engaged in a virtuous act (e.g., sacrificial love, patience, generosity). We then enquired about what motivated them or helped them carry out the act.

One of the surprising findings from this research pertains to the contexts students mention they practiced a particular virtue. For instance, out of 335 examples from students in eight different university contexts across the nation, only two students mentioned engaging in their act of patience or sacrificial love in a church context (for more on our research on agape love, see here). By church context, I mean a program or activity initiated and run by a local church.

Instead, sacrificial love and patience transpired in the contexts of roommate relationships, friendships, student organizations, sports teams, band, classmates (especially patience with other students in group projects), family, and other contexts. Lauren (all names are self-chosen pseudonyms) shared with us a common context that represents the first one. She talked about giving up her time reserved for being a good student to be a good roommate.

Last year, my roommate and I didn’t have a lot in common. She was a little bit more introverted. More nervous than I was to go out and be in large lecture rooms or walk round campus when it’s during a busy time and there are a lot of kids. So, I would walk with her sometimes, times when I might have been doing homework otherwise, things like that.

Sarah shared a similar tale in the context of her position as a student coach for a fencing club team:

I’ve kind of sacrificed any of my personal growth as a fencer to be able to teach other folks how to fence. I just don’t want to be …. I don’t want to be selfish and say, “Oh, well, I need to get better, so I’m just going to ignore you.” So, I kind of place other people above me and just think … over breaks, I’ll go back to my club where I’m just a member of the club and I can just fence people till my heart is content.

In fact, it was largely in four educational contexts where students practiced their patience and love: residence life (e.g., with roommates), student groups, classrooms (especially with group projects), and relationships with staff, teachers, or administrators.

This finding reveals a couple of things that I would hypothesize are generally true. First, we primarily learn virtues such as sacrifice or patience in the context of relationships with common goals and environments. Often these are team environments, such as sports, band, or other student groups with common ends.

This is why Robert Putnam’s findings about the demise of voluntary organizations in his famous work, Bowling Alone, are so concerning. Outside of family and friendships, these communal organizations are the primary places where and through which we learn to give sacrificially for the flourishing of others and the common good or learn virtues such as love or patience. Yet, as I recently heard Ryan Burge say in an Association for Christians in Student Development talk that 66% of students are not part of one of these organizations. That reality is a major threat to our students growing in virtue.

Second, one might expect that the church would be one of those primary voluntary contexts where college students would mention learning how to be patient or sacrifice specifically, not simply for a group goal, but for another person’s well-being, or where they would show patience. Various Christian ethicists and philosophers expound on how church liturgies or practices help us develop virtue. Yet in the interviews that my research team conducted, it was not. I think this finding would hold in other similar studies.

Now, I think there are a variety of reasons for this finding (many of which have to do with the fact that college students may not volunteer in church and be part of those leading the church). I am going to argue that, considering this reality, we need to have a realistic understanding of what attending church does when it comes to the moral formation of young emerging adults.

The Church Is Currently Not the Playing Field for Virtue; It Is the Locker Room

I think the source of our problem is that we misunderstand the current function of the church in the lives of college students. By church, I am referring to the particular activities and context of activities such as worship, preaching, small groups, Christian education, counseling, etc. I will use a sports metaphor because I think it is helpful. The church for college students is less a playing field and more like the locker room. What do I mean?

First, the locker room is where the coach seeks to motivate. Now, the choice of motivation is up to the coach, but the most effective ones inspire rather than deride players (although critique may have its place at times).  I would say the same is true with the church. It is in church that students acquire a transcendent motivation for virtue. For Christians, this motivation comes from understanding what the triune God has done for us. The church reminds us of that motivation and our cultivation of gratitude—which we find to be the key virtue for many positive outcomes. Even practices celebrating sacrificial love in the Lord’s Supper are really practices meant to shape one’s motivation, which then hopefully shape one’s desire to engage in the practice of virtue.

This understanding of the role of the church is more helpful than seeing it as a practice site for virtue. It also centers us on what is most important for the church, and perhaps even Christian student groups, to be doing. They should recognize the priority of shaping one’s heart motivation via multi-sensory encounters with the biblical narrative.

I also say this because scholars have questioned the extent to which practices form our motivations. The foremost expert on excellence noted that acquiring such excellence requires something called deliberate practice. Yet, deliberate practice itself does not necessarily motivate one because it is hard work.[dfn_note]Ericsson does acknowledge, “The practice itself may lead to physiological adaptations that produce more enjoyment and more motivation to do that particular activity. That is nothing but speculation at this point, but it is reasonable speculation.” Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 192.[/efn_note] One needs a stronger motivation than that produced by the practice itself.

Now I want to be clear that one can also acquire other motivational scars from being in a fallen locker room or motivational contexts—one of the only “motivational” moments I remember from my old high school basketball coach is him insulting me for a stupid play I made. The fact that I remember that moment in my late 50s tells you everything you need to know about the lasting influence of a bad experience someone has with church during high school or college. It can easily stay with them for their whole lives.

Second, beyond motivation, one acquires other things in the locker room, such as the cognitive understanding and reasoning needed to succeed in the sport. Similarly, in church, our students also acquire the theological language of virtue, how to reason Christianly about virtue, and how to love Christian virtue for the right reasons in the right way. That reasoning then hopefully influences actual game practice.

Third, locker rooms are also places where coaches provide a cognitive understanding of how to change one’s strategy or thinking regarding one’s practice in the game. The same is true for students’ moral lives. We know this reality from our research. When we asked students about what resources were helpful to them in overcoming collegiate moral challenges, some of the groups mentioned were church staff, small-group leaders, and other church-related mentors.

Overall, I think if we recognize the important motivational role of the church, along with its role in providing theological language, reasoning, and wisdom, we will have more realistic expectations about its role in moral formation. It is currently not the practice field. It is the locker room.

Should We Also Try to Make the Church the Practice Field for Virtue?

I think it is also important to ask the question of whether the church context should become the practice field for college students. I think it should, but it would need to add elements we did not find in our research. For example, one can imagine church college groups doing various types of service that would help students practice all kinds of virtues in real-time (e.g., tutoring, helping widows, serving the poor, helping with young children, etc.). Yet not one of the students we interviewed mentioned engaging in that kind of activity or connecting that activity to the practice of a virtue such as love or patience. That should make us rethink whether we are spending too much time in the locker room with college students at church and not enough time alongside them on the practice field of life.