When Laura Weimer arrived at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, Calif., nearly four years ago, she heard a rumor that reaches every freshman’s ears:
Anyone caught picking a rose in the Mission Gardens would be fined $250. Weimer picked a rose. “Did I think about it? Not then,” she says. “I think about it now.”
There’s been amajor change in the way Weimer, 21, thinks about the minutiae of everyday living: Whether to spoil a garden, yell at a friend, cut off a motorist on the freeway. She is one of 11 Santa Clara undergraduates enrolled in a model program sponsored by the school’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. They study the art of ethical decision making and then attempt to teach that skill to about 120 Independence High School students who, in turn, teach similar lessons in the classroom to more than 1,000 San Jose elementary school students.
As the program ends its first year, planners are evaluating whether ethical thinking is beginning to ripple through the triple-tiered community of young people. More than that, they are trying to make young people realize that they need to do more than think about moral dilemmas in the abstract; they need to apply the ethical decision-making process to the nitty-gritty situations of life. Do they pick that rose or let it bloom?
Planners are encouraged by the choices students are making. Some who never thought to look at their actions through an ethical lens are suddenly doing just that:
“It permeates, it sneaks into their work, this ethical perspective,” says Bill Rice, director of the Independence High School teaching academy, which for the past decade has trained students interested in teaching careers.
All 120 high school ethics trainees attend the academy, and Rice often sees their new moral outlook reflected “in their writing, in their conversations. They’ll use words like `commitment.’ . . . `You had a commitment to call me, and you didn’t.’ “
One of many, the program is a product of the loose-knit character education movement that tries to teach moral behavior to millions of students at a time when many Americans perceive the country to be morally rudderless.
It is part of an expanding smorgasbord of ethics programs sponsored by Santa Clara’s Markkula Center: a summertime “ethics camp” for teachers, workshops on “how to raise an ethical child” for parents. A variety of the center’s programs casts university students as moral “reflectors” and mentors.
Recently, the Independence High School students–who can continue their ethics course through graduation–visited Santa Clara University to tour the campus and talk about long-term goals with their college mentors.
Some jokingly described themselves as “ethicsed out,” yet seemed pleased to confess that all the “ethics talk” had left an impression on them:
“Three years ago, if there was a hard exam, I would’ve cheated,” said Natalie Do, 15, an Independence sophomore. “Today I’m teaching these little kids to be ethical, and now I’m going to cheat? You can’t teach one thing and behave the opposite.”
The 11 Santa Clara University students who teach ethics to Do and the other Independence High students are part of a program called LEAD, which stands for Leadership through Ethical Action and Development.
Here’s how the partnership works: The university students bring several popular children’s books to the high school and help the teaching academy students extract moral lessons from the texts. These lessons tend to be about teamwork and cooperation and doing the right thing:
“They’re not particularly profound lessons,” says Steve Johnson, the Santa Clara professor who directs the LEAD program. “I mean, we’re talking `Harold and the Purple Crayon’ here. But they’re right for grade schoolers.”
The university students help the Independence High students devise lesson plans for teaching the texts to the grade-school students. Then once a week, the Independence High students fan out through San Jose’s elementary schools.
The lessons are supposed to help the young people identify and cope with obstacles to ethical behavior in their own lives: anger, stress, put-downs from peers.
Johnson figures that young people of all ages and backgrounds can benefit through learning coping skills for anger and impulses that short-circuit moral behavior. A former Los Angeles high school principal who has spent years working with youths in detention centers, he also knows that constant moralizing can become a little too squeaky clean after a while for many young people.
“You can’t just have kids discussing `who gets thrown off the life raft when the food runs out?” ‘ he says. “You have to go where they live. You have to give them skills to resist getting into fights or doing drugs or whatever it is. A cynical friend of mine once said that what all this ethical and moral training comes down to is, `It’s nice to be nice.’ We have to do better than that.”
