Moral Intelligence

How do you teach your kid the essential virtues to build a solid character? Mine has just turned 3, and to my suprise, he immediately he started to ask questions about the good and the the bad. What an interesting sign of the emergence of reasoning and coinscience. Welcome to the pursuit of justice son. I wonder if this is the ultimate purpose of life? While observing him grow, sometimes I feel like I am actually learning more about life then he does. What an amazing experience. I remember reading somewhere that the four stages of awareness are:

• Unconscious Incompetence : You do not know what you do not know. Total ignorance. You basically have no idea about that is going on at this stage.
• Conscious Incompetence: You know what you do not know. This is actually not a bad place to be, considering most of the people, regarding most of the issues are not even here. Awareness is a good start.
• Conscious competence: At this point, you have already learned alot. But you still need to think before answering. And the theory is solid but not that rock solid. Every now and then you need to go back and think or read more about it.
• Unconscious Competence: What you know is now obvious and and natural to you. You would not even understand why you did not know in the first place. This is the stage of true mastership.

This actually just reminded me Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull that I studied in my English class some 20 years ago. I guess there is some similarity of thought there.

Anyway, these are not from the book that I wanted to mention which is Michele Borba's "Building Moral Intelligence". This is the best I was able to find after going through a dozen of similar books. She elaborates on seven essential virtues; Empathy, Conscience, Self-Control, Respect, Kindness, Tolerance, and Fairness.

As Heraclitus said "Character is destiny". The scary part is that, in most cases whe destiny at stake is not only the individual's own destiny. Actually with the amount of power and influence a single person can get hold of, one soul can define the destiny of a whole lot of people. What an aweful responsibility.