Pete Domenici: “I believe we are on to something. I believe people in your State and in my State and in every State in America are…”

“I believe we are on to something. I believe people in your State and in my State and in every State in America are beginning to understand that the time is now--in fact, it might be past--for us to empower our teachers and parents once again to inject a very common, ordinary idea into the classroom where our children spend much of their time. Students, in an attempt to learn how to be grownup, self-sustaining citizens need to be empowered in our classrooms, in various ways, with character education, plain and simple. Before this movement, many teachers were frightened to talk about trustworthiness, which means you should not lie, which means there is a virtue to honesty, which means that you ought to be loyal. When you make a commitment, you ought to live up to it. Many of our teachers and principals and superintendents were frightened of the notion that we would talk with our young people about responsibility.”