Bankrolling Ethics Education for the Next Generation

As a fourth-grader, Clifford Heinz learned about ethics in school. By the time he was a senior, he had been forged by a set of moral standards he never forgot. Now 81, the great-grandson of Henry Heinz, who founded the famous ketchup company, is among the country’s leading benefactors of ethics education for children. “I feel society has lost the concept of ethics,” says Heinz, whose lion-like eyebrows and thick brown hair give him the appearance of a much younger man. “Adults should be teaching their children, but they’ve lost the concept themselves.”

His commitment might not seem unusual if Heinz were a graduate of religious schools where moral education is expected. But the two distinguished private schools and alma maters he supports--Polytechnic School in Pasadena and the Webb Schools in Claremont--are independent and secular. “Ethics is the daily living out of religious beliefs,” he says. “You don’t need to put it in a religious context. Just live the concepts.”

Heinz is in Southern California for the holidays, from Geneva, where he and his wife, Barbro, now live. His suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in Newport Beach twinkles with Christmas decorations and poinsettias. A retired investor who says his main occupation is playing golf, he is best known by educators for the C.S. Heinz Foundation he oversees.

Twelve years ago he gave $300,000 to UC Irvine for the study of economics and peace. (He attended Stanford University but lived in Los Angeles and Orange County most of his life.) Three years ago he turned his attention to the lower grades, with grants of $500,000 each to Webb, a high school, and Polytechnic, which has students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.

It was a good stroke of timing. Ethics education programs in public and private schools have become a pressing concern of many educators who see moral decision making as an endangered skill and consider such troubling realities as campus violence, teenage alcoholism and cheating to be symptoms pointing to a lack of early education in the virtues. Schools around the country have developed programs in character development, value education and community service to foster in young people a clear sense of right and wrong choices.

“In the past three years, there’s been another acceleration in interest,” says Peter Relic, president of the National Assn. of Independent Schools based in Washington, D.C., which represents 1,100 schools and offers workshops in how to teach ethics, research data on education trends and networking services.

For example, the Hawken School, a private grammar and high school in Cleveland, offers a bioethics course in which doctors, environmentalists and population experts discuss issues such as cloning, toxic waste management and euthanasia with students.

In addition, says Relic, “there is an increased emphasis on adults teaching children by example.” The Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore offers seminars in ethics for adults. Teachers and parents are coached to be role models for children. Another trend is to infuse the curriculum with character education, rather than teach specific courses in ethics. This is the approach at Webb and Polytechnic, which both stress an honors code that emphasizes honesty and faithfulness.

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Webb had an honor code from the time it was founded in 1922 by Thompson Webb and his wife, Vivian. He came from a family of educators in the South, she was the daughter of a Methodist minister. The code was basic: Don’t lie, cheat or steal. It is being tested every day as the 345 students at this boarding school in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains leave bedroom doors and school lockers unlocked, and backpacks unattended on the ground outside the library.

A 12-member honor committee helps enforce the code. Seniors and juniors apply for the job and have to be approved by faculty and fellow students. Part of their responsibility is to help decide how to discipline students who break the rules. They seem to make decisions from a firm but compassionate point of view.

“In 90% of cases, students know the right thing to do but choose not to do it,” says Matt Lauria, a senior. “They’ll say, ‘I wasn’t thinking,’ or ‘That’s not who I really am.’ I don’t buy it.”

“We see a lot of students not taking responsibility for what they did,” says Zina Deldar, also a senior.

Disheartening? Not for them. “You learn as you go,” says Lauria of how the honor code works. Girls make weekend retreats to talk about the school’s standards of good behavior. Junior and senior boys spend time one-on-one with the freshmen.

“A lot of people come here thinking the honor code will be a hindrance, but it’s the opposite,” says Lauria. “It makes this a much safer community.”

Many of the programs have been put in place since Susan Nelson became head of schools in 1991. “What drew me was the strong basis in clear principles,” she says. “But I saw a school running amok of them.”

Nelson believes that her generation of baby boomers had a lot to do with the slide in ethics. These are parents raised in prosperity who have never known want, questioning all authority, more interested in being friends than parents to their children. “Those are some of the things that got us here,” says Nelson, a thoughtful conversationalist whose soft tweed jacket suggests a conservative but relaxed style of governing.

Polytechnic School feels like a village of California Craftsman houses in a quiet, residential neighborhood. Fifteen years ago the school faculty drew up a basic honors code that emphasizes values such as justice, truthfulness and charity. And three years ago the school added a faculty position for a full-time ethics coordinator. Teachers and parents spent a year working out their plan for a more focused program in ethics education.

“Teaching moral education in a nonsectarian school is complicated,” says John Braman, the Heinz Fellow of Ethical and Moral Development, who joined the faculty two years ago after working with Outward Bound and teaching in the East. Some parents said that ethics should be taught at home, not at school, but the school responded that it was an opportunity for parents to get more involved.

Braman places ethics beside cultural diversity. World crises, from wars to failed attempts at peacemaking, show that justice, good and bad choices, sometimes depend on whose side you are on. To help children prepare for such a world, Braman leads a course in conflict resolution. “We educate to resolve arguments without resorting to fights,” he says. “We look at conflicts as opportunities for moral growth.”

He also advises teachers on how to teach morals in what Braman refers to as “teachable moments.” Resolving disputes in class and responding to late homework are opportunities. “We want to fortify our students to be future leaders,” he says.

Last year, Polytechnic established the Academic Integrity Advisory Committee. Juniors and seniors volunteer to serve. “The committee came about because the faculty and students needed to talk about integrity,” says Carmie Rodriguez, director of the middle school, who has been on the faculty for 25 years. Questions of cheating, of students protecting friends who had broken a school rule and other difficult cases are aired by the committee with the faculty.

The panel also raised broader questions about life at the school. “It came out that students would be less likely to cheat if they trusted the teacher,” says Stephanie Lowe, a senior who is on the advisory committee. The committee also conveyed student concerns that some teachers might pigeonhole students.

“We looked at what the faculty expected of us, and we were able to critique it and give feedback,” says Ryan Thornton, a junior. This led to a constructive give and take on both sides. “That was a good feeling.”

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From time to time Heinz meets with students. He is in a position to tell them that high moral standards can make a difference. His own code of honor is not complicated. “Always tell the truth, always be considerate of others, never cheat, because it hurts you and everyone else, but you most of all, in the end.”

Raised Presbyterian, he once talked about morals and values with the Dalai Lama when the Tibetan Buddhist leader visited Southern California. Heinz came away more certain than ever that morality is a universal language. “I told the Dalai Lama, based on my conversation with him, I could be a Buddhist,” he says.

Heinz’s best role models were his father, Clifford Stanton Heinz Sr., and his grandfather, Howard. His father taught him how to think and act, he says, but died when Clifford Jr. was 15.

Heinz’s grandfather was a role model in business. He recalls his grandfather’s decision to use clear glass containers for his ketchup--”so you’d see what you were getting.”

He spent his young years living in Pittsburgh and Southern California. His mother remarried at one point and moved to Beverly Hills.

At Webb, his classmate Ned Mansfield recalls, “Cliff was a good dancer and a nice guy.” He played tennis and senior year he was assistant manager of the year book. Mansfield, a retired business man living in Los Altos, Calif., graduated with Heinz in 1937.

For reasons he has never made public, Heinz was disinherited from the family fortune as a young man. A private man, he is reluctant to talk about painful experiences he weathered in his teens and 20s, although they suggest that he learned about ethics from those difficult experiences. “I’ve seen a few terrible examples of how to act, and that also made an impression,” is all he will say about these formative years. Eventually, though, they led him back to Webb and Polytechnic, checkbook in hand. “I wanted to save others from the same experience.”

During World War II, Heinz made a fortune in the aerospace industry by building planes and parts for tanks. Later his name appeared in the society news, with references to his collection of vintage Packards and Dusenbergs.

As a parent--Heinz has three daughters and one son still living--he made a point to have daily family dinner with his children, believing that parents are a child’s first teachers of good values. “We would be together and we would discuss things of substance,” he says. “Politics, business, the issues of the day.” And he is delighted that Webb and Polytechnic teach ethics through experiences, more than text books. “That’s what students need,” says Heinz.