Values and Culture

If your family dog got run over by a car, would you cook it and serve it for dinner?

Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, posed this and other scenarios (all viscerally unpleasant, but not at all harmful) to subjects from a variety of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. Upon studying the reactions, Haidt concluded that a traditional definition of morality didn’t adequately explain the variety of responses. He writes in his article “What Makes People Vote Republican” that “the anthropologist Richard Shweder was probably right …(when) he claimed that the moral domain (not just specific rules) varies by culture. Drawing on Shweder's ideas, I would say that … morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.” In sum, while principles of justice and individual rights may guide our decisions about how to behave, Haidt exposes another side of the ethical coin: shared values that hold communities together.

Education leaders must remain keenly aware of this duality in morality. The public school is a community of varied values, with families and employees bringing several different cultures, creeds, and ethical codes onto campus. The leader’s moral imperative is two-fold: to create an ethical working climate that builds professional trust among employees while cultivating a sense of community ethics, reconciled from the many values that live in the neighborhood. The latter, in particular, must be pointedly addressed in order for schools to effectively grapple with modern education’s most egregious sin: the cultural achievement gap.

There are a couple of bedrock principles within public education – equity for all students, allowing young people to present their unique interpretations and applications of the curricula – but how often, though, do the backstage machinations of a school uphold these principles? Do all the employees get a fair opportunity to voice their thoughts? The “Organizational Communi-cations” game, in which members of a strict hierarchy relayed notes across tall cubicle walls to achieve an objective that only the “CEO” knew, clearly exposed this paradox. Our group’s “CEO” openly acknowledged that he felt his assistant manager needed to receive and then follow orders. At no time did it seem necessary to actually tell his staff what the group’s objective was, yet if we observed a teacher engaging their students in activities without a clear curricular standard in play, a stern reprimand would surely follow. Similarly, the secrecy of the group’s mission frustrated our “company” on multiple levels.

In another exercise, my team outlined a staff meeting focused on whether to enact furlough days or an across-the-board salary reduction. My partner and I were sharply criticized for marginalizing other ideas beyond those options even though the scenario handed to us specifically limited us to just the furlough-vs-salary question and we still added a separate suggestion box specifically to allow staff to contribute other non-agenda ideas! Here again, our staff clearly needed to see the full context behind the meeting, and they also needed to feel like true collaborators. I see no substantial difference between these leadership principles (clear objectives, context, collaboration) and the instructional practices of connecting to prior knowledge, articulating learning goals, and engaging in group-work. They all uphold the dignity of all stakeholders by sharing information, offering a forum for their ideas, and maintaining equal respect for all perspectives. From this standpoint, staff management follows the same ethical guidelines as classroom management.

One scene from The Emperor’s Club, wherein a teacher claims to have “failed” a student who has grown into an unscrupulous politician, sparked an intriguing class discussion about whether instructors have a duty to manage or mold the values of their students. Schools and districts need to delicately define its plans for providing an education in values. Much the same way a mission or vision organically grows from the community, the educational leader must shape a school’s ethical code by first acknowledging local moral norms. Most of these values grow from the cultural roots of a school’s families. Thus, instruction that relies on “color blind” techniques flatly ignores the innate morals of many, if not all, students. The achievement gap practically feeds off this kind of cultural ignorance. For instance, while America readily acknowledges that African-Americans today bear the historical scars of involuntary immigration, perhaps Latinos continue to under-achieve because Mexicans underwent a very similar kind of displacement. What began as a simple offer for Americans to purchase and settle parcels of land in 1823 devolved into a brutal campaign that led to America’s invasion and conquest of Mexico’s northern third. Half a dozen states were carved out of this annexed territory, yet how much pride was also carved from the Mexican psyche by this crushing defeat? Consider also that the current California history standards offer only cursory glances of the Mexican-American War in the fourth and eighth grade – no mention of it in high school! Latino students and families may well be unconscious of their own simmering resentment of classroom attempts to “invade” their minds and “annex” their culture; conversely, schools have yet to consider the history of Mexican-American relations as a possible cause of that resentment.

At minimum, the privileged plurality (for, statistically, we are no longer the majority) needs to reach out to Latinos and honestly address the Mexican-American War the same way we acknowledge slavery as a cultural factor for African-American students. This kind of cultural knowledge will cultivate the community values that a school needs to impart to its pupils. It’s more than an issue of ethnic sensitivity. It’s an ethnic sensibility – the ability to perceive the school’s community through a different cultural lens. This is the challenge for the modern, cosmopolitan public school: before you can expect students from so many cultures to value their own education, they must see their own values embraced in kind.