Ethical education: student study

A singular approach to plurality

Mathew White, IB coordinator at Geelong Grammar in Australia, explains the rationale for a new study of student attitudes to cultural identity.

What exactly is an ethical education? Is it learning to be good? Is it behaving in a civilised manner? Or is it a system of education that recognizes common virtues from different cultural backgrounds? The role of ethics in education has been much discussed, but little has been written from the perspective of students and teachers themselves.

Our students can now access vast amounts of information from a variety of sources and are bombarded by ethical problems daily. Modern technologies have created a new discourse and have had a direct impact on the way students establish, explore and evaluate their personal and academic relationships.

Some social commentators, such as Samuel Huntington, believe we are living at a time of collision between Western, Islamic and Buddhist civilisations, each with its own view on ethical education. The flaw in this is that it accepts a clash as inevitable, that our students’ world is based on division. If we are to challenge this perspective, students need to become more self-aware and open-minded, so they can take an active role in this debate.

 The IB prides itself on promoting the humanistic qualities of compassion, service and empathy for others. But our students will find themselves in circumstances beyond our imagining, so it’s vital they experience a system of education that equips them to take part in the emotional dialogue they will encounter in an increasingly globalized world. They need to develop autonomous moral frameworks so that they know they are acting in
an ethical manner.

To some teachers it may seem that discussion in theory of knowledge, peace and conflict studies or world literature is all that’s required to have an ethical education in the IB Diploma Programme. However, the pedagogy for such an area can be highly subjective and in the study of literature it can focus on the ‘exotic’.

In culturally diverse international schools, teachers and policy makers need to consider the implications of the approach they are taking.

Whose ethics are we teaching? How do we encourage students to consider real-life problems in an ethical manner? Should schools act as the crucible for the formation of ethics at all?

In international schools and multicultural Australia, students have direct access to cultural pluralism in the shared experience of day-to-day life with peers and teachers. But one drawback of international education is that it can appear to stress we’re all the same by overemphasizing aspects of common humanity and ignoring that each culture has its own distinct map of the world.

In an ethical education, what we need to emphasize is the strength in the plurality of identities throughout the world and that the ability of students to develop multiple perspectives is not only legitimate but also valuable in learning to appreciate opposing viewpoints.

Some discussion about education downplays the pluralistic vision, suggesting there is only one way to teach ethics and that it can conflict with the formation of national identities. But the true strength of an ethical education is that it can act as the foundation for peace and greater social understanding, transforming lives.

In 2006, after lively student discussion in my world literature class and hearing about their experiences of cultural pluralism at Geelong Grammar School, I realised these views had to be documented and analysed.

I am now planning a large research staff project as a Fellow in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne, with Associate Professor Kay Margetts, focusing on Geelong students’ attitudes towards cultural identity.

The data collected will help map attitudinal shifts among students at the school and some of the findings will be reported in future issues of IB World. Anyone interested in details of this research, can email me at: matheww@ggs.vic.edu.au