How can we help our kids find their way into moral complexity?
Sometimes, Religion teachers introduce kids to questions, not answers -- and that's a good thing.
Recently, the son of a favorite high school teacher reached out to me over email, hoping that I would contribute to a book of letters celebrating his father’s retirement. This kind of thing happens to me often – incidentally, I’ve always enjoyed talking to teachers, and the ones I had tend to remember me fondly.
This particular teacher taught Religion and Philosophy. Though the school I attended was nonreligious, all students were required to take two credits in the department in order to graduate. Since I’d attended Sunday School every week of my life, Religion classes in an academic setting didn’t feel very “religious” to me. I loved them for the way that they helped me to form myself and my beliefs – less of a formation as a student and more of a formation as a person.
For a variety of reasons, this teacher’s class pops back into my mind constantly. A few weeks ago, when I taught Michael Pollan’s “An Animal’s Place,” I remembered the first time I read Pollan’s work, an excerpt from The Omnivore’s Dilemma, in his senior year class. These courses didn’t just teach me the basics of Kant and Hegel, Genesis and the Five Pillars; they taught me to consider my habits of consumption, consider where my clothes and meals came from, question my purpose, and fashion the direction I would take once I could see just how complex it could be to live my life right.
I also thought of this teacher when I interviewed Jay Hutchinson, Chaplain at St. Andrew’s School (DE), several weeks ago. We haven’t finished editing the interview yet, because Jay is a busy guy – he teaches classes, coaches lacrosse, lives in a dormitory, and spiritually guides the children and adults at a residential school. Though I imagine it’s always been a complicated job, being a chaplain at an elite boarding school in 2022 must be a challenging, and – as Jay said himself – a morally confusing, job. His clarity of purpose, though, resonated with me, because it reminded me of my own teacher:
“When people ask why I do what I do, as a chaplain, I say: when we tell kids to be outstanding in the classroom and on the athletic field and in a dorm, why would we leave the spiritual life out of that? What wouldn’t we want excellence in the way that kids imagine themselves in the world? My wife is the Director of Wellness, and we’re both really compelled by this aspiration. In Chapel, I’m trying to get students to see the beauty of life and the value of connection.”
As I meditated on last week’s post, I recognized that the truly novel part of the student learning experience that I described was the idea of belief as a central, even defining force of human existence, one to which students should be exposed. I speak about this sometimes with a supervisor at work, who, like me, had a religious upbringing and has taught at overtly religious schools: without courses that not only teach belief as history, but challenge students to identify their beliefs and moral values in response to present day issues, schools can tend to leave an aspect of student well being and personal growth – what Jay calls “excellence in the way that kids imagine themselves in the world” – by the wayside.
Certainly, many nonreligious schools and schools without a Religious Studies program or department have fostered programs that draw their students into their core beliefs and responsibilities in the world. Individual teachers often work to connect course material to these greater concerns about student life – But what does The Scarlet Letter teach us about guilt? – and English teachers like me are especially guilty of driving students crazy with such questions. I’ve seen schools, especially schools with largely privileged students, start robust and often impactful service learning programs to engage students with these sense of responsibility and connectedness.
But I also think that a lot of schools shy away from this kind of work. Above, I wrote that my Religion classes in high school helped me to “fashion the direction I would take once I could see just how complex it could be to live my life right.” Sometimes, I think that the attention we give to students’ anxiety gets in the way of our ability to call them into the real complexity, the no-right-answerness of the world around us. I was speaking to a friend over the weekend about teenagers’ erstwhile hypocrisy about what they perceive as unethical behavior: everyone knows, by now, that children in the Congo work grueling hours in cobalt mines to produce the phones that American children carry in their pockets, but those same American children call for the unseating of a school administrator who stands firm on the number of hours in a week that tenth graders should spend working on their homework. This simultaneous sensitivity to what’s close and inattention to what’s distant is appropriate for a teenager, who’s still learning what it means to comprehend, or try to comprehend, the abstraction of problems that are bigger than themselves and their own immediate lives.
But isn’t it our job to teach them how to take that kind of perspective?
I remember how overwhelming it was to figure out how to live or consume or act once I began to learn about the ethics of clothing production, for example. I recognized that almost every article of clothing in my closet was chosen for a combination of its aesthetic feel and the fact that I or my parents were willing to pay the price listed on its tag. I also recognized, or was beginning to recognize, that I really like clothes, am interested in the way that people present themselves. Every layer of problem that seemed to have a solution only unearthed another problem, each unethical factory leading to a new set of shell companies burying ownership and responsibility of the problem (along with profits) in a new layer of obscurity. And even worse, I acknowledged that beyond the basic beliefs I knew and rested in through my childhood learning, I also held (or acted upon) a series of beliefs and assumptions of which I wasn’t aware – and those beliefs just didn’t stand up once I looked at the world around me.
The dizzying layerdness of problems like this leads to a form of anxiety; with climate change, for example, journalists talk about climate anxiety, which is an often very real form of dread that children often feel when they learn about climate change in schools. But just because kids experience anxiety when they learn about a world that’s much, much bigger than the one around them doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be called into it in meaningful, scaffolded ways. Freedom from anxiety is not safety, it’s ignorance – and it doesn’t do kids much good.
Which leads me back to people like Jay Hutchinson, or my own teacher, who work, as Jay says, to see “the idea that we all have souls, we all experience pain and suffering, and we have to begin to talk about that.” From a very early age, I was constantly anxious about my future and what I would do with my life (my parents are laughing while they read this. It has been, I know for a fact, one of the most frustrating challenges of raising me). Classes that acknowledged this challenge and engaged it are what helped me to fact and find a direction in response to, possibly even in spite of, the uncertainty and anxiety that really looking at the world and my responsibilities within it brought along. Where a discussion about polynomials or Hawthorne can help a student to focus on a particular artifact and make connections between it and the world more broadly, a teacher’s need to provide their students mastery experiences can often preclude the teacher from really introducing their students to the unmasterable parts of their lives: the ambiguous future, the conflicts that never truly end, the memories that we – individuals, communities, nations – can never entirely exorcise.
I know that the solution to this problem will never be, in many schools, to introduce (or reintroduce) a Religion and Philosophy requirement. I also know that many of those departments serve very different purposes that are different from Jay’s or my teacher’s, and I’m not interested in questioning those alternate purposes today. What I wonder, though, is how much people in schools are ready or willing to think about what Jay makes his daily work – real “excellence in the way that kids imagine themselves in the world” – their jobs, and what it would mean to teach that kind of inquiry in a lasting and impactful way.