Of all the years in an individual’s education, I think that the most important years are those of childhood. During this period of infancy, children learn important lessons on how to interact with society. Children learn lessons on how to play nicely by experimentation and these lessons carry on into the future. Similar to the process of training pets, educating children is not about show and tell but about reinforcement of known behavior. Schools can’t show children what is “good” in the same way that an owner can’t show a puppy to sit. Childhood education gives individuals an opportunity to experiment and it is only through reinforcement of such learned behavior that one can learn what is right and wrong. This experimentation is the key to why childhood education is the most essential period for learning.

In my personal experience, kindergarten was a year I learned many lessons on how to interact with society. I learned not to buy friends, not to steal, not to cheat, and not to punish myself physically for bad behavior.

When I first started school, I was not very well accepted. Because I was the only Asian in my class I was initially excluded from everyone else. Everyone shared their lunch and snacks together but I didn’t have any part in this experience. Specifically, there was one group that I wanted to be a part of. This group had all the great things a kid could want: junkfood. I desperately wanted to be part of their group and so one day I asked them what it would take to be in their little clique. They asked me what I had to offer and naturally, I didn’t have anything they wanted. I offered them what I knew had value, which was money. Fortunately at that time, the largest currency I knew was a quarter and I barely knew how to count. The largest number I knew was 10 and I so offered each one of them 10 quarters. They agreed to it, and I had to find 10 quarters for each of them for the following day.
At home, I found out that my Grandma has a stash of quarters. I didn’t know I was stealing at that time, so I took about 30 quarters. I wrapped it up in bounty, and at school the next day I gave each member their little stash. After lunch on that same day, I was caught. One of the members told the teacher I gave him 10 quarters. The teacher then proceeded to ask me questions about the source and threatened to call my home.

I was scared and felt guilty. I didn’t know that I stole and the connection of my actions to the definition of “taking something that is not yours” was a shocking realization. I bit the top of my hand to punish myself for my actions. When the teacher came around again, I was lectured again about hurting myself.

If I hadn’t been caught that day, I would not have known what it means to steal. I wouldn’t have known that you’re not supposed to buy friends, and that self-punishment shouldn’t involve inflicting physical pain. These lessons were learned through experience and I am quite thankful for the series of events that happened that day.

At another point in my childhood, my brother told me about his experience cheating. For a spelling test one day, he found out that he could score higher if he opened his notebook in his desk. By looking at it while taking the test, his score was guaranteed. Inevitably he was caught and failed the exam. When he told me what he did, I learned what cheating was. Looking back though, I wonder to myself how a child would know what cheating is, if he or she has never been exposed to the act of cheating. It also leads to the question of “how does a child know what is right and wrong?”

To answer the proposed question, I think it is only through experience that an individual can learn to connect actions to notions of good and bad. Though anyone can learn at any time, childhood is the only time when such mistakes are forgivable. If an individual didn’t learn that a certain action is wrong as a child, society will continue to punish that individual as an adult. Childhood is one of the most important times in person’s life because of this freedom to experiment. It’s not that schools teach us, but it is that we teach ourselves. Schools provide the guidelines but we can only show ourselves what we can and can’t do.

Schools play a huge role in helping us relate to other people, especially in today’s society. These days, when you are not in school, social interactions are limited, especially for small children, who have little access to people outside their families. So school (playgroup through college) affords people the opportunity to learn/relate to others outside of the home.

Students, especially as they get older, are probably more likely to listen to their teachers than their parents. And to be totally honest, students may spend more time with their teachers than their parents – in high school, I was in school from 8:30-5:10 without extracurricular activities.  I would only have a few hours every night with my parents, and then I was doing my homework! Weekends were for sleeping or socializing.

If anything, I think we under-value the impact of teachers on their impact on our ability to relate to others.

Ok, let’s start with the basics: playing nicely and not hitting. These values are pretty universal, at least in western society. (I can see the argument for a society that encourages children to become aggressive as a defense mechanism, but it is certainly not out society.) These are overarching values that can inform how people act in their day to day lives forever, if we instill them deeply enough and reinforce them as students grow up.  Many of society’s ills can be traced back to the inability of some people to play nicely. Like the recent problems on wall street.

Playing nice is a childhood spin-off of the Golden Rule: “Do unto other as you would have them do unto you.” Or as I like to say, “treat others like you want to be treated.”  There are a few flaws in that – people’s tastes are different. But it really means that individuals should try to treat others as respectfully as possible. And don’t we wish that that was how society was actually run? Maybe if we instill it deep enough, children might grow up to actually emulate the ideas.

Because we stop emphasizing some of these lessons enough after kindergarten. Older kids learn to value grades more than morals. And older students might value money over either of those two values put together.

So, at the most basic level, schools can attempt to teach us how to treat people in general. Which is very important. But many schools in America, even in very urban environments, are incredibly homogeneous. I attended Jewish schools my entire life, and they were mostly full of white, Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern European descent. Most of us lived in a few neighborhoods, all of us spoke English fluently, most as their first language. Many of us were frustrated at time by the total lack of diversity. But  my school taught us about all sorts of cultures, about shared American history and values, about different systems of living and learning.

We didn’t just develop into well-rounded people, we became more empathetic people. We are able to relate to each other, we are able to converse using a common lexicon of understanding with people with very different backgrounds. And a lot of that is school. A lot of that is the standardization of school as well, because I could hold a conversation with anyone in this class about the struggles of the bio regents, or Shakespeare.

How has my school given me an appreciation and understanding of difference? Well, we learned about it. We learned about different cultures and civilizations in history and social studies and English and even in science and math, sometimes. We learned that different doesn’t have to equal bad, and we learned about each other and we learned about ourselves.  I think it’s incredibly important to learn about other cultures in enough detail to truly understand them, and school is the only place that we can hope for that kind of depth of knowledge. If you are only taught your own culture without at least gaining some sort of positive or neutral exposure to another, you may never really attempt to reach out to people you cannot instantly understand.

In my media studies class, we discussed how the first puritans who landed in America couldn’t understand the Native Americans they met. The culture was so alien, so incomprehensible, that they eventually declared it evil, and started the animosity between the new settlers and the original inhabitants that would last for generations. In today’s modern society, that should not be allowed to happen. And our first line of defense is education.

I’d like to reiterate and expand upon the post I mentioned in the forum this week to define the nature of a human. (Written by shipperx and quoted from here.)

I think it may be in what meaning one assigns to the term “moral compass”. Insofar as to vampires know right from wrong, I agree that they do know. On an intellectual level, they know. So if using “moral compass” in the since of delineating direction, I can see that point. On the other hand while having an intellectual construct of right and wrong, on a visceral, instinctual level they don’t ‘feel’ something is ‘right.’ That gut-level empathy is missing. So inasmuch as one ascribes a ‘compass’ to mean a integral property of a compass to point towards magnetic North (or in the case of a ‘moral compass’ an inherent bent towards visceral/gut level feel for morality or difference in moral direction ) then I do think that “moral compass” entails a sense of right and wrong that is different from an intellectual understanding of right and wrong that vampires possess by right of simply having a brain.

I propose that humanity is defined by the moral compass. So long as we have that gut feeling of right and wrong, that need to do what’s right regardless of what we feel that “right” is- after all, less than a century ago, many Eskimos resorted to female infanticide because in order to keep the rest of the family alive. Morally, that was right for them, so their innate need to do the right thing, and therefore their humanity, is still intact. Rationalization, too, is a major human trait, as the need to justify actions as “right;” as is guilt, which is a result of not doing something “right.” Animals, as far as we know, do what they do instinctively, unrestrained by right and wrong, and even what we might construe as shame is simply behavioral conditioning at work.

And what about aliens? Machines? Robots? Would aliens feel pain? Can robots be programmed to feel? Star Trek, significantly, addresses these issues time and again with their diverse group of aliens and artificial life forms, and though these can’t actually predict anything, science fiction presents us with sometimes plausible images of the future.

Data is an android from Star Trek: The Next Generation created to simulate (though never quite imitate) humanity, who spent many years striving to understand and emulate people. However, I don’t believe that he’s human, regardless of the many episodes spent attempting to prove his humanity and rights. He can’t use contractions because he’s been programmed not to (There are some exceptions to this, but I’d attribute them to writer and actor error). He can only feel emotions when he gets an emotion chip installed. His feelings and desires are all artificial, and because of that, his moral code is, as well. He has no gut feelings pulling him toward what he perceives as right; in fact, in the series he’s been manipulated by his fellow android Lore and his ethical program deactivated. Data is therefore not a person.

Interestingly, The Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager is merely a hologram, but is probably closer to human than Data. Modeled with a similar personality to his creator and similar ethical programs as Data, the Doctor has instead foregone his programming on various occasions to ally himself with other holograms, to fight for what he believes in at the cost of violating his first order of “do no harm,” and has striven to change his very nature (to the point of fighting for a position in command instead of medical) in a further attempt to do what he feels is right. Is he a person? It’s still debatable, of course, but he possesses more humanity than Data.

Next come the Vorta and Jem’Hadar, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s cloned minions of an advanced race. The Vorta have been created to serve as manipulators and diplomats; the Jem’Hadar as soldiers who blindly follow orders. To some degree, they lack humanity despite their status as thinking, breathing individuals capable of intelligent thought. They’ve been programmed to act as they do, and rarely vary from their programmed behavior. However, on various occasions these aliens, too, have proven that they’re beholden to what is right in their eyes; one Jem’Hadar sends his troops into a death trap because his Vorta supervisor orders it, and another does the same and then turns and kills the Vorta for doubting his loyalty. The variation in reactions to similar situations implies that the Jem’Hadar are capable of deducing what the right thing is, regardless of its programming, and selecting whichever action feels more correct to him. The Vorta, meanwhile, seem to be far more self-serving than the Jem’Hadar- in one episode, one Vorta is willing to lie to its creators to the point of killing one of them rather than to allow him to get in the way of the conflict at hand. Another one, labeled “defective,” chooses to defect to the enemy, believing that they are the right side in the war. Though I don’t believe that all Vorta and Jem’Hadar use their moral compasses, I think that they possess the ability to do so as a race, and therefore qualify as people.

I may have gone a bit off-topic here. 😀 In short, the most essential quality, the one that is the root of the nature of humanity, is the moral compass. It leads to rationalization (this is what’s right) and guilt (I didn’t do what’s right), to philosophy (what is right?) and originality (I will do what I feel is right, regardless of what those around me might believe).

What can school do? A school that encourages people to think, instead of just obey, can nourish and develop that sense of what’s right. A child might think that “right” is “what I want,” and it takes years before a higher morality emerges- mostly as a natural progression from interaction, but also from being taught by family and mentors to put others before himself, and what’s right above it all. The instinct to do right does emerge no matter what, but it can be suppressed, to some degree, in a restrictive educational setting. Remember the Hitler Youth? They were taught a different doctrine of right and wrong, to the point that most believed it whole-heartedly. It’s easy for a school to dictate right and wrong, and for people to act based on that. But do they lose part of what makes them a person then, by blocking out their personal, inner moral compass? Arguably so. Sending a Jem’Hadar to a school where it learns to play nice and obey teachers instead of its creators might destroy what it is, by forcing it to accept someone else’s “right” instead of its own. Conversely, a school where it learns to express itself and is accepted as is, without someone else’s values, would allow it to flourish.

And sure, that means that the Jem’Hadar will grow up believing that killing others because its creators have told it to is the right thing, but that’s not our decision. Introducing different ideas for it to contemplate is all right. But brainwashing them into it can strip away its humanity.