Three stages of a school's moral development

Religious Education, Winter 2001 by Schwartz, Earl

In addition, some custodial tasks that regularly fall to adults are given to students. Beginning in kindergarten, students are responsible for sweeping the lunchroom floor, cleaning and returning kitchen utensils, and washing the tables each day after lunch. Sharing responsibility for this work helps the students to see the custodial staff as full, respected partners in the common task of caring for the school's physical facilities. Garden and landscaping projects, student-refereed games, and other similar responsibilities reinforce the students' sense of the common good as an active and essential aspect of school life.

The growth of the student body from twenty-one in 1982 to well over two hundred in 1998 has made the work of sustaining a vision of the school as a learning community ever more challenging. Conversely, the growth of the community from "village" to "small town" enriches the challenge of building a broadened sense of common purpose.

STAGE TWO

Strong communities present both inclusive and exclusive characteristics. Early on in the Day School's development the concern was voiced that its warmth was purchased at the price of insulation from the surrounding communities, Jewish and non-Jewish, of which it is also a part. At the center of this concern was the question of how best to extend the moral education component of the curriculum beyond the relatively narrow confines of school life.

An inquiry from a rural Minnesota school district superintendent in 1990 offered an interesting opportunity to meet this challenge. The superintendent had heard about the Day School's curriculum and was interested in receiving help with establishing a moral education program in his district. The Day School responded with the suggestion that they work together to form a Moral Dilemma Exchange Program in which teachers and students maintained a correspondence with one another through the exchange of letters, video-taped dilemma discussions, and visits. The exchange would be centered on ethically charged incidents, issues, and problems drawn from school life, and would also include a cultural exchange component. The core procedure devised for the exchange was:

1. A class in one of the schools would videotape their discussion of a problem.

2. This videotape would be sent to the corresponding school.

3. The class that received the tape would first discuss the problem on their own.

4. After they had explored the issue, the second class would view the videotape and compare their reasoning with the thinking of the first class.

5. The second class would then send their response to the issue to the first class, along with their reactions to the first group's discussion of it.

The first year of the program resulted in a flurry of videos, letters, and visits between the two schools. Among the questions explored were what to do about friends who shoplifted, and whether the students bore any continued responsibility for seeking reconciliation with a classmate who had withdrawn from the school before the end of the year due to chronic conflicts with other students. Day School parents, students, and teachers were enthusiastically supportive of the program, and were thus unprepared for the frustration that followed when efforts to restart the exchange the following year were unsuccessful.