The task of all educators is to help form fully realized human beings, who will bring skills, knowledge, empathy and courage to the world in which they live. Schools cannot teach character education as though it were a discrete subject, separate from the rest of the curriculum and unconnected to the heart of the students’ lives. Rather, the moral and ethical challenges and precepts we face and hold must be woven through every learning activity.
Much like true language learning does, learning ethical behaviour requires immersion into an environment where right action is examined and lived each moment by all teachers and learners, rather than encapsulated as a topic for study. Learning leads to right action in such a school, and right action leads to further and deeper learning.
Adoption of the International Baccalaureate program at Branksome Hall has shifted our outlook from just teaching about ethics to teaching and living ethically as a school community. Such learning requires rigorous thought and well-developed critical enquiry skills. In fact, rigorous thought is a prerequisite for meaningful and purposeful action.
Here is an example. Before the 2004 Christmas vacation, Grade 11 biology students were studying the effects of pathogens in the natural environment. Over the holiday, the tsunami assaulted southern Asia. When the students returned to school after New Year’s, they reviewed their knowledge of pathogens that were emerging in the standing fresh water of the affected areas, and examined the consequences for the people needing that water. Flowing from this deepened understanding was a compelling call to action, especially as reports at the time indicated that more than 150,000 people were killed. But the teacher did not immediately move to the question “What can we do?”
Instead he paused and asked students to research the number of deaths that occurred from HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa over the same period. Statistics kept by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services National Institutes of Health estimated that more than 82,200 had died. Then the teacher asked “What should we do?”, so students could explore the deeper layers of ethical decision-making.
As part of their study of justice and government, Grade 6 children at our school research a “good cause” in the city. They discover the complex political structures and agendas of “helping” organizations and must move beyond questions of form and function toward questions that probe the underlying organizational, financial and philosophical challenges charities face. Then students debate the obligations of governments to support such institutions. The girls must think through the benefits and challenges of democracy along the way, assessing the rights and responsibilities of some of our great philanthropic institutions.
Rachel Tobin, a Grade 6 student investigating the Hospital for Sick Children Foundation, remarked, “I never knew how important the foundation was. I didn’t know that the hospital couldn’t be the best in the world without the foundation. Raising money is really hard, then deciding what to spend it on is even harder.”
All students in the International Baccalaureate program must write an extended essay in the last two years of high school. Original thinking, which bridges traditional subject disciplines and requires a real life connection, is a core demand of the task. Some of this year’s essay topics include: “Invasive Species in Ontario and Their Effects on the Environment,” “Applying Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model to a Canadian Newspaper” and “The Nuremburg Trials as Precedent in International Law.” Each topic requires an understanding of the necessity of ethical action and the capacity to reflect, at an advanced level, on human behaviour.
At the heart of the IB program is a community service requirement. Community service focuses expressly on action and forces a link between classroom study and out-of-classroom charitable work.
Each student’s adviser and a community service co-ordinator guide her toward enriching service activities. A girl’s talents and skills, prior experiences and goals are all taken into account as she chooses a service project that is relevant to her and so increases her capacity to see herself as a vehicle for change in the world. Students strong in math may tutor inner-city children, a skier may teach the blind to ski, a girl interested in marine biology is given the opportunity to escort dolphins born in captivity back to the wild.
The school’s mission to cultivate an international perspective allows students to experience service opportunities in faraway locations so that they will meet the intercultural challenges of providing service to others first-hand. Branksome has “adopted” an orphanage for girls, the Sheela Bal Bavan Center in Jaipur, India, and groups of Branksome students travel there to tutor and sister the orphans.
A school is being built in the impoverished eastern cape of South Africa. Branksome girls tutor its pupils and, beyond that, plan to foster longer-term friendships with the children after travelling there. Because action must push toward further learning, all girls are required to submit a structured reflection on their projects and contributions.
Finally, the day-to-day life of the school itself — its timetable, its code of conduct, its hiring and teacher-training policies, its committee structures — all have changed in order to be congruent with the central ethical framework of the International Baccalaureate program. Democracy, respect and the employment of sound critical thinking must come into every administrative and teaching decision. At Branksome, the leaders are learners, and the learners take the lead.
We need our children to approach the ethical complexities of our world with confidence and competence. We can only do this, as we try to do at Branksome Hall, by making each new lesson or activity, each club, team or committee, a place where knowledge is critiqued, its uses understood and its consequences for action embraced and lived.
About Patricia Parisi
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