How should we teach the ESLRs?

Upon passing through the doors of the SMIC Middle High School building, one sees first the four words that comprise the school motto: Honor, Excellence, Community, and Joy. Adorning this simple declaration on two sides are the trophy walls: racks upon racks of glistening, shining cups of various shapes and configurations. Progressing further in, one would next see on either side a set of somewhat faded banners hanging from the walls: “Motivated Learners”; “Persons of Character”; “Healthy Individuals”; and “Global Citizens”. If you didn’t realize, you have stumbled upon the Expected Schoolwide Learning Results.

It was in 2013-14 that the SMIC administration first proposed the idea. “The original creation of the ESLRs was a part of the beginning of the WASC accreditation process,” Mr. Patrick Carroll, Academic Affairs Director, explained. “And one of the things the school needed to have was a mission statement: ‘What do we want to accomplish? What do we want our students to be?’” Thus, SMIC developed the ESLRs, as the embodiment of all the moral values and virtues to which the student body, and itself, would commit.

Along with this new mission statement came a corresponding program, a curriculum even, for our homerooms and lessons. “We’re working with a curriculum called ‘Random Acts of Kindness’,” Mr. Carroll continued, “…[we have] a kind of goal to use homeroom time as character education and development time, because currently we feel like, in many parts of the curriculum, that doesn’t necessarily show up.” Under the programs and guidance of the Student Affairs office, homerooms have since begun engaging in ESLR-themed discussions, video-showings, and activities on certain mornings, in a general effort to encourage the practice of these ESLRs.

Yet, for all the good ideas behind this new code of virtue, the response has been varied. “I personally don’t believe that these ideas can be taught, they seem more like life skills that people learn from experience,” high school senior Chris Liu (12C) remarked. “I think having too aggressive a plan for promoting [the ESLRs] to students may turn them off and achieve the exact opposite and generate opposition to its ideas.” While centered on great moral values, the ESLR programs have raised a difficult question regarding moral education: what exactly is the best way for a middle high school to educate its students to develop virtuous behavior? How can a school best shape its students to become the sort of person as outlined by the ESLRs?

Can it be achieved through such a cut-and-dry program? Such a structured and curriculum-based approach relies heavily on the assumption that virtue, and moral development, is teachable. The trouble is it doesn’t seem to be, not in the conventional sense of the term. Virtue is not taught, but emulated; and to truly substantiate and promote it, one must act in a way that best suits this.

Let us consider a hypothetical situation: if a young boy is told not to steal by his parents, and afterwards grows up to become an honest man, what is it that caused this sense of honesty? Is it exclusively because of the verbal instruction? Of course not: something else must take place within him on a deeper level to bridge the gap between verbal instruction and the formation of his later sense of character. It requires a kind of realization of character, of virtue: in the time between being told not to steal and becoming an adult who does not steal, our young boy has to have decided for himself that he genuinely wants to be a person of character. And therein lies the problem: for moral development to truly take hold, it must become inextricably, intrinsically a part of that person. And though direct verbal instruction and external education may help to a degree, it cannot alone attain this result, particularly in individuals of the adolescent age group.

Developmental Psychologist Eric Erikson proposes in his work that the key to comprehending the adolescent way of thinking lies in understanding that the adolescent psyche is in the midst of crafting and shaping its own autonomous identity. In the animal kingdom, the natural world, this age of adolescence is the age in which the organism prepares itself to leave the family and establish a new one for itself: it is the age in which the individual will be developing its capacity for surviving independent from the rest of the family. Thus, the kind of development a student goes through in the course of these years will form the basis on how he or she shall continue to develop throughout life. And indeed, this is precisely what it is the ESLR program hopes to aid: the development of a healthy identity— a firm foundation of self built upon a bedrock of strong morals. The primary goal of the ESLRs, then, should be centered on this formation of identity — of how the school can be a positive influence by nurturing within its students an understanding of morality and general goodness.

This, however, is also why the program may require some alterations: the development of personality in the adolescent stage is something deeply intimate and personal for every individual, and so as a key part of this development toward independence, the adolescent mind seeks to find itself for itself and, most importantly, by itself. There is a somewhat paradoxical yet adamant need for the adolescent psyche to be the one shaping itself. In order to best support this inclination toward autonomy, yet still be guiding the adolescent’s personal development in a beneficial way, it is therefore necessary to adopt an approach that is more subtle than explicit education, to adopt an approach that respects this need for independent thinking and creation of identity. Only then can moral development be made an intrinsic rather than extrinsic part of personal behavior. Indeed, if morality is only an external concept, something foisted upon us by a simple curriculum—a class to be passed or failed—it becomes not only loosely attached but also disingenuous; and the program would thus run the risk of producing persons of convenience rather than persons of character. Direct moral education simply does not speak to the teenage psyche; and it is this sort of misalignment that leads to the misgivings members of the student body have expressed.

So, then, how might we accomplish this goal? How can we best accommodate this need for autonomy in adolescent character development? Ultimately,  adolescent individuals require an environment in which they are able to observe, analyze, and eventually adopt socially-accepted morality into themselves by their own will. In short, the only way their social environment may positively shape their personalities would be by providing them with ample examples of virtuous behavior for them to emulate. They must be able to see those exemplars of character or motivated learners all around them, and so become moved to pursue the same characteristics, but of their own volition. It is vital, then, to create a general environment—made by both students and teachers—that naturally expresses the ESLRs.

The ESLRs are by no means a poor idea. I believe they are all most certainly worthwhile virtues for SMIC’s students to strive for; it is the means by which they are to be encouraged, however, that is rather more problematic. And I believe that we can begin by taking the concept of morality off the curriculum, and by returning it to where it naturally presents itself: deeply instilled within the very lifestyle of the school community–students and faculty alike.