Levin had also spent many years trying to figure out how to provide lessons in character to his students, who were almost all black or Latino and from low-income families. At the first KIPP school, in Houston, he and his co-founder, Michael Feinberg, filled the walls with slogans like \u201cWork Hard\u201d and \u201cBe Nice\u201d and \u201cThere Are No Shortcuts,\u201d and they developed a system of rewards and demerits designed to train their students not only in fractions and algebra but also in perseverance and empathy. Like Randolph, Levin went to Seligman\u2019s office expecting to talk about optimism. But Seligman surprised them both by pulling out a new and very different book, which he and Peterson had just finished: \u201cCharacter Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification,\u201d a scholarly, 800-page tome that weighed in at three and a half pounds. It was intended, according to the authors, as a \u201cmanual of the sanities,\u201d an attempt to inaugurate what they described as a \u201cscience of good character.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was, in other words, exactly what Randolph and Levin had been looking for, separately, even if neither of them had quite known it. Seligman and Peterson consulted works from Aristotle to Confucius, from the Upanishads to the Torah, from the Boy Scout Handbook to profiles of Pok\u00e9mon characters, and they settled on 24 character strengths common to all cultures and eras.<\/p>\n