Good Learners

“Now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”

- John Steinbeck, East of Eden

At first, I planned to dive deeper into my reasoning behind writing these blog posts, and what exactly I’m trying to accomplish with them. But, after about a week of frustratingly filling a Google document with unfinished thoughts, between which it was nearly impossible to establish connections, I arrived at a conclusion. I don’t have one. At least, I don’t fully understand it. And because of that, rather than vomiting all of my confusing, paradoxical, and quite harebrained ideas into this post, and promptly losing the interest of my (obviously very large) audience, I’ll keep it simple.

Let’s start by exploring a question that I’ve found increasingly relevant as summer comes to an end and the new school year begins:

Can we teach good?

(Side note: If you’re like me, and blatant grammatical errors bother you, the wording of that question may have jumped out to you. I’d like to clarify that “good” is being used as a noun here. It’s not a question of our ability to teach well, it’s that of whether or not good, as a concept, can be taught.)

I think the short answer is yes, it can. If we so choose, we can make it a really easy subject to teach. All we’d have to do is lay down the lines between right and wrong (always easy to discern those), convince young people that the world wasn’t (but also was?) created for them, and explain that good varies widely depending on religion, culture, perspective, and sometimes even the time of day. Easy.

Regardless of how badly I wish it were that simple, it isn’t. Yes or no won’t do it. If our society's current state of anger and violence could be chalked up to a lack of knowledge, then we’d have a relatively smooth road to peace. But, it’s a much more complex issue than that. I suppose a better way to word the question of “Can we teach good?” is “Does the study of morality deserve a place in formal education?”.

In a way, a very futile way, it may already be there.

Think about your time in school (pre-college). Who were the “good kids” if not the kids who simply didn’t get in trouble? Maybe, for some, getting good grades was another requisite for earning the coveted “good kid” title. But, beyond that, all it took was the avoidance of punishment. Be quiet, pretend to pay attention, don’t get in fights, and you’re probably fine. If the administrators didn’t know your name, you were a good one.

Now, what about after graduation? What about “good people” outside of the education system? Is anyone who avoids legal trouble or a criminal record automatically good? Do the standards of goodness remain true to those that are upheld in schools? 

There seems to be an explicit disconnection between what it means to be “good” in school, and what it means to be a “good person”; for about 13 of the first 18 years of our lives, and almost half of our waking hours in that time, we’re fed a very shallow representation of goodness. Which, to me, seems extremely counterproductive. It’s as though the minute we graduate, we make the transition from “student” to “person”, and revealed to us is the fact that goodness goes far beyond avoiding punishment. Once that becomes clear, so too does the subjectivity of it all. In other words, the only thing that’s clarified about what it means to be good is just how unclear it actually is.

So, maybe an elective course called “Morality I” is a bit frivolous. But, would it not help us if, for the entirety of our school years, goodness is demonstrated as something to be desired? If from the start of kindergarten, when our social lives are amplified tenfold, it’s evidenced that being good to each other and ourselves is equally as honorable, and productive, as getting the A? 

As one of the most precise reflections of our societal values, schools function in ways very similar to businesses: How well can you produce work congruent with the teacher’s standards, and at the curriculum’s pace? How consistently can you meet deadlines? The more time you spend doing work, the more valuable you are. I mean, most schools claim these values– in a cleverly subtle way– in their statements and slogans; almost always including something like “We aim to create productive members of society.”

Productivity is, of course, deeply valuable. However, I find it increasingly difficult to argue that it’s a more favorable human quality than goodness. Especially in today’s world. A world in which productivity is being redefined by automation, and goodness trivialized by the masses.