&quotCharacter” Talk Is Not Enough;

As presidents often do when called to comment on breaking news, Bush shoe-horned his remarks into an unrelated photo opportunity (this one for Medicare reform). “Before I talk about the business at hand here,” he said, “I want to say how saddened we all are to know that two students lost their lives in Southern California, others have been injured, in a disgraceful act of cowardice.”

The expression of sadness was perfectly appropriate, because universally shared; this is one of the things we like our presidents to do. But the characterization that followed (“a disgraceful act of cowardice”) fell with a graceless thud. Coward and its variants have become an off-the-shelf imprecation of political speechmaking, hauled down to revile acts of international terrorism. Presidents like to stand tall in the White House press room and condemn the cowardice of Saddam Hussein or Manuel Noriega or Muammar Qaddafi. Applied from the presidential podium to a 15-year-old, however, even a murderous one, it carries the shrillness of a schoolyard taunt — the kind of thing that might have helped lead the boy into madness to begin with. There are many words to describe Charles “Andy” Williams and what he did. Chicken is the least of them.

For surely it was an act of madness — or of evil, to employ a religious category. Yet the president, a famously religious man, chose instead to cast it as a failure of character. “When America teaches their children right from wrong,” he went on, “and teaches values to respect life and the values that respect life in our country, our country will be better off.” He was wandering here into the Bushian verbal thickets that snared him so often during the campaign, but the meaning is clear enough. Had Williams known better the difference between wrong and right, had he been more competently instructed in the values of life, the knowledge might have stayed his hand. The failure of character was both his and ours.

This is a questionable claim, and out of place in a statement of national commiseration in any case. The Santee murders probably involved multiple failures: a failure of security at the high school, maybe, and a failure of nerve among the friends who heard Williams’s threats and declined to report them; a failure, too, of adults who might have seen signs of the boy’s disintegration and neglected to heed them. But it is implausible to say that what led Williams to bust open his father’s gun chest and bring the gun to school, to load it and discharge it into a crowd of his classmates, to reload it and then discharge it again and then again, and never once thereafter to utter a syllable of remorse — it is implausible that all this was a consequence of his insufficient understanding of how proper boys of good character are supposed to behave.

Most unnerving in the president’s remarks was that they sounded like a sly plug for “character education,” which plays a large role in his program for education reform and indeed is a cornerstone of his faith-based initiatives and of “compassionate conservatism” as a whole. Our statesmen, and presidents especially, are always on the lookout for ways to advance an agenda, of course. Within 72 hours of the Columbine shootings in 1999, President Clinton was plugging $ 180 million in federal funds to “promote comprehensive school safety strategies,” had reintroduced a handful of gun control measures, and had ordered up an emergency, 150,000-copy print run of the government’s indispensable pamphlet Early Warning, Timely Response: A Guide to Safe Schools. His Republican adversaries on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, immediately called for a televised National Conference on Youth and Culture to plumb the depths of the problems exposed by Columbine. Surely you remember the National Conference on Youth and Culture.

In contrast to this kind of policy hoggishness, President Bush’s mild pitch for character education classes seems admirably modest. Seldom, though, does the occasion for advancing an idea so clearly demonstrate its limitations. Character education is the latest in a long series of desperate measures (“values clarification,” “self-esteem development”) dreamed up by educators to reintroduce notions of morality into the country’s antiseptically secular classrooms. Yet even by the standards of modem education, CE (it’s an acronym now) is a wan and attenuated exercise.

At its heart is the odd premise that character is something we can fit children for and then easily slip them into, like a tailor-sewn topcoat (or a hairshirt). A school deep in the throes of character education looks like a Maoist reeducation camp run by the Teletubbies. Hallways are renamed “Responsibility Lane” and “Caring Corridor.” Students gather into groups to recite the “Pillars of Character.” Those who perform well are given “CHARACTER COUNTS!” T-shirts and colored ribbons and free ice cream. Banners are hung in the cafeteria demanding that children “PRACTICE RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS.” And so on.

Administrators and teachers I’ve talked to swear that character education meets the rather modest goal that has been set for it, which is to restore some semblance of civilization to the classroom; it discourages, they say, cheating, fibbing, and disrespect for authority. It offers definitive answers to such questions as, “Should you lie to your mom?” or “Should you crib answers to the quiz?”

But in the wake of last week’s shootings, and of last year’s shootings and those of the year before that, the relevant question is one that character education teachers quite understandably never thought to raise: “Should you raid your dad’s gun collection and shoot up your school?” It is hard for politicians and educators to admit that there are dark regions beyond their reach, beyond the reach of politics and policy — beyond the reach of presidents, even.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.