ABSTRACT
One common and important way of prioritizing character education is how people talk about schools and kids. This set of practices, Rhetorical Prioritization, is not only about how people talk about character education. In many ways, using rhetoric to proclaim character education as a priority is the espoused theory. It is what people profess, whether or not they do it. This can take more than one form. If people profess something with their lips but do not sincerely mean it in their hearts, then they are guilty of being intentional hypocrites. Perhaps the most common first prioritization step is to agree upon, name, and make as prominent as possible a set of “core values,” “character strengths,” or “virtues”. Many years ago, Amitai Etzioni, the founder of the Communitarian movement, invited people to collaborate on a paper on character education. He argued that core values should be a local community decision. After all, that is the heart of communitarianism.
