How did narratives about character education in the United States change between 1985 and 2016 and what does this reveal about the changing meaning of character over this time period? Policymakers and pundits have frequently invoked ideas of “good” versus “bad” character as they attempt to blame individuals for their own circumstances. It makes sense to trace these narratives in their various forms, beginning with the discourse around character and children. Character education programs are a natural object to study in order to capture these narratives. Despite this, sociologists have largely ignored character education, which leaves a significant gap in the scholarly knowledge about both character education and the social construction of designations of “good” versus “bad” character more generally. In this paper, I address this gap by examining the narratives around character education between 1985 and 2016. After analyzing 600 articles from Education Week and the New York Times mentioning character education, I find that there is a significant expansion of the ways in which advocates argue for character education in the schools. Whereas earlier narratives encouraged character education as a means to teach students how to be good, moral people starting in the early 2000s, these narratives expanded to include teaching character as a means to improve academic performance. This finding is significant as we continue to see both education reformers pushing for character education as a tactic to improve achievements and policymakers and pundits invoking character flaws as a means to blame individuals for structural inequality.

在1985年至2016年期间，美国有关品格教育的叙述如何变化，这揭示了这段时期内品格变化的含义是什么？决策者和权威人士经常试图用“好”与“坏”的品格来讨价还价，因为他们试图将自己的情况归咎于个人。从有关性格和孩子的论述开始，以各种形式追溯这些叙述是有意义的。角色教育课程是学习自然叙事的自然对象。尽管如此，社会学家还是在很大程度上忽略了品格教育，这在有关品格教育和更普遍的“好”与“坏”品格的社会建构方面留下了很大的差距。在本文中，《教育周刊》和《纽约时报》提到了品格教育，我发现倡导者在学校中倡导品格教育的方式有了很大的扩展。早期的叙事鼓励将品格教育作为一种教导学生如何做人的方法，而有道德的人则始于2000年代初期，而这些叙事则扩大到包括教授品格作为改善学业表现的一种方法。这一发现意义重大，因为我们继续看到，教育改革者都将品格教育作为提高成就的策略，而政策制定者和专家则将品格缺陷作为谴责个人结构性不平等的一种手段。