Teaching Honesty in School Requires Rewarding Honesty

I have heard complaints, as we all have, that students do not appreciate honesty; kids aren't as honest today; kids don't respect truth. It is easy to see how kids could get disillusioned. They see dishonesty frequently rewarded.  Our politicians lie to the public and then get elected. Sometimes it seems the better liars are the more successful politicians. John Edwards is a master at it and was nearly elected President of the United States. Negative role models are all too common for our kids.

As schools, we need to make sure we reward honesty and punish dishonesty, and not the other way around.

For example, earlier in my career, I was teaching at a school where a group of seniors were drinking. The police arrived and delivered a botched breathalyzer test to everyone at the party. The school had already made the mistake of deciding it would only penalize students who were drinking at a party of under-age minors, and not everyone who was merely present.

The police presented to the school a list of students who had tested positive for alcohol, but the tests had been performed improperly. Their results were inconclusive.

So the school methodically called every student to the office one at a time and asked each if he/she had been drinking alcohol at the party. They probably all had been drinking. That was the purpose of the party. But some students confessed to drinking while others denied it. The school concluded the affair with punishment for every student who had confessed.

Several students from the party went on to receive rewards near the end of the year that they would not have earned if they had confessed. What a poor lesson to teach our kids.

The message here was clear and something that would stick with kids through to adulthood: honesty can get you in trouble, and it is lying that shall set you free.

So does your school provide a better consequence for students who confess? Do kids earn a reprieve through honesty? Are students regularly complimented and praised for honest answers? If not, then the school is sending the wrong message.

What Came before Milton's Paradise Regained?

I had an English professor in college who was a large influence on my life and who helped me to get through college. He was a calm and soft-spoken gentleman who loved British poetry. He thrived on talking about Shakespeare and Milton. One day in class, I was seated at his right hand and answered one of his questions. He pardoned himself that he had not heard me. He explained that he had spent too much time hunched next to a machine gun, and it had taken some of the hearing in his right ear. This made me curious, but I was too intimidated to inquire further. I was easily intimidated by professors back then. However, his comment remained stuck in my mind, and I wondered what experience had placed him for long hours close at the left of a hammering machine gun.

It was not until my 30-year class reunion that I got part of an answer to my curiosity. I was a classmate of the professor's daughter, and I met her at the reunion. I decided to ask her what she knew of her dad's military experience. She replied that he was (and is to this day) a U.S. Marine who fought it out during the dark and tentative days of the war on the bloody island of Guadalcanal.

This struck me. Here was this mild-mannered gentleman with a fondness for poetry who had been baptized by fire in a life or death struggle on a remote South Pacific island. I still cannot picture it. But maybe his time next to a pounding machine gun was at the Battle or Bloody Ridge. Or it could have been a number of other places.

My point is this: he was another example of the millions of members of the Greatest Generation. He defended his country. He experienced unimaginable death and savagery. Yet he came home and put it all behind him. He earned an education, including a Ph.D., made a home for his family, and devoted his life to helping young men and women earn their college degrees and learn about the beauty of the English language. He is yet another to whom we owe such a debt. And the only way we can repay the debt is to live our lives and help others in the way that generation had wanted us to forge ahead.

I Don't Do Diaries

Many times in my life, I have begun to keep a journal or diary. I have never managed to keep it going. I don't have greater hope for this, but I'm going to take a different approach. I am not going to journal on schedule, and I am not going to stick to a central theme. I intend for this blog to be a chance for me to reflect upon my own thoughts and beliefs. It is not for everyone, nor do I want it to be.