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On Monday night, Rep. Raecker, R-Urbandale, spoke to members of the Boone community at the high school auditorium about Character Counts. Boone Schools just instituted the program, begun by former Iowa Governor Robert Ray this year. This session introduced interested parents and community members to the program. Raecker and Ray worked closely in the early 1990s to adopt and develop the program.
"I really admire your community," Raecker said to the Boone audience. "The turnout is indicative of what kind of community you are...a community that wants to improve itself."
Raecker admits that he is not familiar with Boone in what specific social issues they face. Raecker says that he knows the national numbers, and that they are arresting.
According to statistics collected by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, a nonprofit, public-benefit membership organization in California, out of the nearly 25,000 students they interviewed, 62 percent admitted to cheating on a test within the past 12 months. Meanwhile, 82 percent of students also admitted to lying to parents within the same amount of time. And 83 percent owned up to copying another student's homework in that time.
Maybe those numbers are not perfectly applicable to Boone, said Raecker, but the underlying problems exist in Boone, around Iowa, and everywhere else for that matter. And those problems, he says, all have a common center.
An ability to discern right from wrong informs all of our choices, he continued, good or otherwise. And without a developed, clear cut understanding of the direct and indirect consequences of actions, students make choices blindly.
Character Counts looks to correct this by providing a common language for students, parents, educators and social leaders to employ when addressing matters of character conduct. It is to pervade all corners of the student's life so that they are talking about the same parameters of responsibility or caring if they are at the pool, the library, in the school, or pulled over on the side of the road by a police officer for speeding.
Character Counts boasts six pillars of character: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship.
These six attributes are an umbrella for everything else that pertains to character, whether it is participating in civic life, not lying, having a positive attitude or admitting blame.
When it comes to responsibility, Raecker says, "We live in a reactionary, disrespectful society." By this he means to say that people hardly take the time to consider if how they act or react is justified, fair or acceptable. Character Counts depends on willingness for people to judge themselves.
More than anything else, Character Counts creates good people through habit. Teaching, enforcing / encouraging, advocating and modeling are what Character Counts will use to promote its value system. The last of the list, modeling, is the most significant. Hypocrisy can extinguish all credibility.
Just how Mahatma Gandhi had to first stop eating sugar before he could fulfill a mother's wishes of instructing her child to stop eating the teeth-rotting product, leading by example is a strong bet when it comes to teaching youth.
Raecker says that making good people out of bad people is tough. Fortunately, he says, Boone appears to have a sizable population of good people. And making good people better is an important first step before those good people can lead by example.
Cory Frolik can be reached at cfrolik@newsrepublican.com.
