ABERNETHY: How do you teach ethics to children? Can good character be taught in schools, or is it all up to the family? And can you teach ethics without religion? Professor Elizabeth Kiss teaches ethics at Duke University and is also an advisor on character education to the Durham, North Carolina, public schools. Reverend Stacatto Powell is pastor of the Washington Metropolitan AME Zion Church in St. Louis. And Dr. Steven Karl Reuben is senior rabbi of Keylot Israel congregation in Los Angeles. He's a child development specialist and the author of CHILDREN OF CHARACTER. Dr. Reuben, how do we create children of character?

Dr. STEVEN REUBEN (Author, CHILDREN OF CHARACTER): We create them primarily by living our ethics, living our values. Our children watch us every day to see what our true values are. If you're driving in a car and someone cuts you off on the freeway or the highway, how you react, the words that come out of your mouth with your child sitting in the back seat, it's teaching that child more about tolerance and community and respect and responsibility than any of the lectures you can give. How you treat your child with a sense of unconditional love and nurture their sense of self-esteem empowers them and inspires them to feel like who they are matters and what they are -- what they say matters and what they do matters. And that's what's really important.

ABERNETHY: So the question really is how to teach ethical behavior to parents?

Dr. REUBEN: Absolutely. It's teaching parents to be the kind of adult they want their child to grow up to be. I mean, that's what my whole book and many others are about. Be the kind of adult you want your child to grow up to be. And we do that with schools, we do that with religion, we do that with all kinds of associations and organizations within society to nurture parents to accept their own responsibility, primarily, to be the fundamental, primary role model for their kids.

ABERNETHY: Professor Kiss, schools are communities, and children learn a lot from what goes on in those communities. But what about in the classroom itself? Can you teach ethics? Can you teach ethical behavior as a course in school?

Dr. ELIZABETH KISS (Director, Kenan Ethics Program, Duke University): As a specific course, you know, today "We're going to teach ethics on Tuesday afternoons," I have my doubts. But I think if every teacher sees as a core part of their job to help their students become people of good character, then that can be very powerful. It can be integrated into the curriculum, but it's also as Dr. Reuben was saying, it's something that happens in the everyday moments of the classroom, in how you respond to the student's question and how you structure the atmosphere of the classroom.

ABERNETHY: Now, schools, specifically public schools, can't teach religion. Reverend Powell, can you teach ethics without religion?

Reverend STACCATO POWELL (Pastor, AME Zion Church): Not totally, because ethics without a religious foundation is trying to erect a house without first laying the foundation which the house is built upon. Ethics any other way is in the abstract. It's in the amorphous. And therefore, children may learn, but they may not necessarily implement what they learn.

ABERNETHY: You can learn what to do but not necessarily make it part of your behavior.

Rev. POWELL: Right. You may not have the motivation, you may not have the internal compass that religion gives in order to help you to act ethically toward others and act justly, even though you see your parents doing it, even though you hear your teachers say you ought to do it and to model it. In order for you to do it, you must have something innate that's spiritual that compels you to act justly towards each other.

Dr. KISS: I think, you know, you do need that inner compass, and ethics does have to come from the heart, but I disagree that it has to have a religious foundation. For many of us, it does have a religious foundation, but for some people it doesn't. It can be a commitment to human dignity. It can be looking at someone, an adult who cares about you in school, and saying, "That's the kind of person I want to be," and having that sort of deep motivation coming from your heart, to want to be that kind of person.