Our school has, as one of the main planks in its platform, a desire to inculcate“ethics” into our students. But our school is secular in its composition. This complicates the execution of any plan to teach any set of ethics.

            It is my impression, after the last decade of work here, and perhaps this particular decade, that one can impress ethical standards into the K-8 classes, perhaps K-6, but that any such efforts– coming from an institution like ours – are doomed to failure in grades 9-12.

            Mainly,this is because the school itself has no ethical foundation upon which to base any standards we wish to cultivate in the student.

            Secondarily,the types of families who send children to schools like ours are precisely those that have no uniformly sound ethical foundations in the home. This is notto say that they are bad people; only that they have no uniform foundation for any sort of goodness they possess – and this has two consequences. ( A ) the parents are hard to organize behind any one ethical set of rules, and ( B ) the children of such parents, seeing no ethical supremacy of their parents’ views over any other, tend to become “ethically neutral” in their own minds: thatsort of “if it feels good, do it” and “as long as you aren’t hurting anyone else, it’s okay” ethic that is actually ethically inert.

            Thirdly,in this setting, parental support of school ethical standards is slippery and unreliable.  What little support can be gathered falls apart from one precept to the next. As an example, some parents might be alarmed that any child has unfettered access to the internet and can share whatever they find with any of their peers who happens to wander by during lunch or after school. Other parents celebrate that kind of freedom.

            Where each family has their own set of rules and guidelines, any set of school guidelines are likely to make more families unhappy than happy. And this leadsto an overall resentment, among the students, for the ethical teachings of the school. There comes a point, eventually, when the student body has no “pride”in being a member of the school community.

            This is decidedly not a problem with mere education. Since all parents sending their kids to any school sort of believe by default that they want their kids to be“educated,” there is a communal cohesion behind the academic standards of the school.

            And at religious schools, the parental community tends to be more in accord with the ethical standards of the school (e.g., a Jewish or Catholic school). But secular schools cannot hope to have that cohesion.

            In the younger grades, through about grade 7, this is not so much a problem, as the parents – and students – by and large are willing to defer to the administration and faculty of the school in matters of school ethics (stealing,violence, etc.), and the students still have some focus on authority figures as reliable guides.  But by grade 8,students are developed enough that peer opinion gains ascendancy, and rebellion against the faculty and administrative standards become more prevalent, and,eventually, in high school, routine.

            And“peer opinion,” regarding ethical matters, is foolish at best. Unlike academic subjects, which can be book-learned, ethical standards are hard-won over generations of accumulated wisdom. Throwing over wisdom for fashion is a problem in every generation of high school students. In a secular school, there is no compelling reason for them not to do so.

            Thus,there is no way to predict, from one class to the next, which classes will be more or less ethical than the classes preceding and following them. Each class ethic is a “catch as catch can,” luck-of-the-draw affair, depending on the mix of ethically sound families to ethically relative families in any one year.

            Thus ethical efforts, proceeding from a secular administration, impressed upon a secular student body of adolescents, which come from secular families, are doomed to disintegration, and foundational collapse. There is no “there” there,for the ethical standards to be based upon.