How can we be more honest?

There's a myth that being honest is different from caring. Why?

A Thing or Two, the best podcast on air, just started releasing their 2021 holiday gift guides. Don’t read them. Always listen. Listen because Claire and Erica, the hosts, always give the perfect advice for gift shopping for kids and (especially) teens: they always say that what teenagers really want is to be treated like an adult. Even if you can’t give a teenager exactly what they want, because it doesn’t seem appropriate, when and where you can give them truly professional-grade art supplies, or tickets to a sophisticated adult show, or a chance to do something for the first time all alone -- that’s the best gift that you can give. 

The best way to treat someone like an adult is to trust them enough to be honest with them. Though I’m thinking about teenagers -- my students -- when I write, I’d say that the same goes for any person. To treat someone with dignity and respect is to risk being fair and honest, without agenda to harm or hustle. It’s a gift. 

Every year, as college decisions roll out, I try to be honest with kids about college. My own journey with the whole process was mired in a totally skewed, weird system that had to do with where I went to school and how I grew up. The more that I work in education, the more I see that college admissions are almost entirely reliant upon chance, and I think pretending it’s not is an insult to students and their parents. As my students marvel at how impressive the school’s college list is, I remind them that what they’ve been told is because “this school is so elite” is also code for “most of our students are full-pay applicants.” This thought makes them really uncomfortable. But with a few exceptions, kids are strangely really proud that someone was willing to tell them the truth about the world in which they live. They don’t like it, per se, but they know that they need to hear it. 

My mother once told me that “being happy isn’t a right, it’s a privilege.” This is the kind of adage that slips out of my mouth sometimes when I talk to students, and it always baffles them. A few days ago, when a student sipped on water the wrong way and had one of those coughing attacks, I said, deadpan and without looking up from my work: “if she can cough, she can breathe.” My students laughed so hard, you’d think I’d prepared the line.

It’s not that I’m heartless, it’s that my mother raised me to be a realist. We don’t all get to be happy all the time, and it really isn’t necessary to stop everyone else’s day to worry about you when there’s nothing actually wrong with you that your body’s cough mechanism won’t naturally solve in the next 120 seconds. And while there have been moments when I’ve seen the drawbacks of my mother’s blunt, realistic style, I’m also starting to believe that it’s useful.

In a grade-inflated school culture, I notice how easy it is to conflate care not only with the withholding of honesty, but also with active dishonesty. I’m tempted, because it feels easy and obviously caring, to fluff my students’ egos, which they think they want. Often, kids who receive little affirmation at home are especially hungry to receive it at school, and parents expect schools to be a balancing force for their kids, one that balances out their nitpicking and demands. But students learn, and classrooms become more equitable, the more honestly students can see what they do and do not understand. The trickiest part about this institutionalized dishonesty is that, deep down, no one wants it, but hypocritical actions and demands require it. If colleges must compare students against one another across schools, they invite dishonesty. If employers only want to hire a Vice President, suddenly every middle manager becomes a Vice President. Everyone knows that honesty can empower. We’re afraid of it because, so often, it goes all wrong. It’s easier to withhold honesty or, better yet, to lie. My mother didn’t teach me to lie.

It’s difficult to be honest these days, because we seldom recognize that honesty is a form of care. Care is important, possibly even vital; it’s the center of most world religions, if one truly reads religious texts, and most atheists value it, too. Part of what makes communicating honestly without losing the ethic of care behind it difficult is the chasm between the one providing the honesty and the one receiving it. If one party has more power than the other, flowing in either direction, indelicate delivery of that honesty can exacerbate feelings of powerlessness and activate defensiveness. Even without a clear hierarchy in an interaction, the translation that occurs between That Which is Said and That Which is Heard is manifold, as the idea in the mind translates into words, received through a medium (bodies/body language or, worse, email) that shapes the receiver’s perception. It is never possible to give honesty perfectly, to ensure that impact perfectly mirrors intent. When we conflate honesty for cruelty, it’s not because we’re “too weak to handle it,” but that something’s going haywire in the communication. These miscommunications happen with adults just as frequently as they do with kids. How, then, can we use honesty to care for one another?

I’m assuming that the intention of honesty is to care, because if the honesty doesn’t come from that source, I believe it’s better to stay silent until one can shift one’s motivation and orientation to a healthier frame. Remember, honesty is a gift if and when it comes without an agenda to harm or hustle. If I’m tempted to reflect back to a student that her endless demands for a tastier lunch reveal that she’s entitled, it’s important that I’m not doing so because I need her to leave me alone, stop complaining, and grow up a little bit. My honesty can do what it’s supposed to do once I’ve thought through the ways that stepping back from this vehemence will ultimately make her a more adaptable citizen. It’s easy to conflate being honest with shutting someone up, but usually that honesty leads nowhere except to factionalizing the other. It’s also easy to be honest in order to hustle: I can wield honesty as a form of manipulation, telling people the honest truth like I’m letting them in on a secret, working to build a bond because I’ve let my wall come down. If I’m honest that I disapprove of a policy in the workplace with a coworker, and my motivation is to make them feel that I’m “on their side” or see them as special, then is my honesty really of service to anyone? 

Honesty can be a treasure, a potent form of care, and even (to put it in the capitalistic terms that my Gen-Z kids would hate), a value-add. I’m trying to implement an ethic of caring honesty. There’s no way to do it perfectly, but it’s worth the try.