From the Upper School Principal

Some days, I have to bite my tongue to prevent myself from saying, “But that’s horrible; you can’t believe that!” You’re the parent of at least one teenager, so I know you recognize the sensation. A 15-year-old trying out a new idea is going to say some things that make the adults around her uncomfortable.

My experience so far in teaching Ethics to Class III students has been challenging, stimulating and often humbling. Unlike the English classroom, which I navigate comfortably, the Ethics classroom is territory where the learning is messy and the teacher – or at least this teacher – is not necessarily the authority. Helping students talk about open-ended ethical questions is harder than helping them sort out the meaning and methods of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Listening to them sort out whether they are more true to a buddy or to something as abstract as a rule is fascinating, often encouraging, and occasionally deeply upsetting.
Twelve of us are working together to teach the Ethics course this year, as we continue a search begun last year to bring a chaplain appropriate for Milton to the faculty. In a burst of summer optimism we made the decision to try this plan. We’d spend this year planning together and teaching individual sections; when the chaplain was hired, he or she would carry the course forward from where we leave it.

The Ethics team is an extraordinary group of veteran teachers: Elaine Apthorp, John Banderob, David Foster, Maria Gerrity, Andrea Geyling, Louise Gilpin, Mark Hilgendorf, Rod Skinner, Geoff Theobald, Carly Wade, Lukie Wells and me. I think it’s safe to say that none of us finds it an easy course to teach. Sharing our expertise and our opinions is secondary to listening to our students as they work things out. The goal, to put it a little too simply, is to lead our students toward careful ethical reasoning. We do that by presenting hypothetical situations and specific cases, and by talking and listening to them talk. The teacher is part facilitator, part provocateur, and part someone who helps them see what they don't know. Would you tell on a classmate who cheated? Would you tell if his cheating hurt your grade? Would you tell on him if you didn’t like him? Is there such thing as a good lie? What are rules and why do we obey them? How do we deal with double standards? When is it right to disobey a rule? Is it right to disobey a rule and then seek to avoid punishment?

We’ve talked about obedience vs. personal responsibility and we’ve talked about events in the news. We spent one class on the sniper cases and the Attorney General’s decision to move those cases to Virginia, to increase the likelihood that the death penalty will be applied if the suspects are found guilty. We talked about the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, and the question of following orders vs. following conscience. Recently we have begun a conversation about affirmative action, in light of the recent national discussion of the Bakke case in California and the Grutter case at the University of Michigan.

Each week, in each discussion, I hear remarkable things that make me hopeful and irrationally proud – as if I am somehow responsible for Class III Ethics students’ statements. And each week I hear something that makes me want to cringe, something I hope a student doesn’t mean. It would be discouraging if I didn’t remember my own adolescence, the trying on of ideas and testing out of arguments. It takes years and a tremendous degree of self-awareness to learn empathy; we see flashes of it in the Ethics classroom, and that makes me hopeful. Plus I have the advantage of teaching seniors – these same emerging folks two years later in their schooling – and admiring their thoughtful, caring sophistication about questions my sophomores are wrestling with for the first time.