Character education courage is such an important concept that I wonder if I can even scratch the surface in the few words allotted to me. Never mind. I shall try. Courage to move forward in character education demands it. Courage demands that a parent or teacher, or a school system, stop playing games and begin training children in character with as much thoroughness as we would have employed in the training of brain surgeons in whose hands we place our very lives.

Character education courage needs convictions. Preferences are not enough. Do we know the difference? An attorney informed me once that courts normally make the distinction this way. If you are willing to go to prison or die rather than change your belief, that belief is a conviction. If you would relinquish the belief rather than go to prison or die, that belief is a preference. If character education is only a preference, we will treat it lightly. We will not venture to do anything great with it. We will not persevere in it. We will never, certainly, withstand difficulty to teach it.

Character education courage is the same courage you might well teach your students. Do they have principles by which they live? They should. How strongly do they believe in those principles? Can they be readily swayed by peer pressure? Get down to the nitty-gritty with them. Teens hate lecturing, but I find they respond well to books that have clear character messages. Use Passport to Courage with your teens and let them learn from the young man in the book that it is hard work to have the courage of your convictions. Then give them a wee nudge toward practicing it.

We cannot ask them to practice it, though, unless we live accordingly. Don't you agree? Teens are especially quick to notice inconsistency between our preaching and our practice. They smell hypocrisy from a great many kilometers. Our character education courage must be our individual courage if we want them to believe us.