Kelby Mason, philosopher, ethics teacher and trainer, was lead author for our high school curriculum, before we launched the high school ethics program in 2021. Here’s his writing process.
Q: What do the following have in common:
- attractive people judged more trustworthy
- what does nodding mean in Turkey
- Roger Ebert idiot plot
- shame culture guilt culture
- apology displays in dogs
- what is this thing you humans call friendship
- influencers ruining nature
- famous examples of not accepting an apology
- indigenous Australians on importance of role models growing up
- how far away is the heat death of the universe
- what happened to Jeremy Bentham’s head [look it up yourself, it’s pretty interesting!]
- famous female political prisoners
- mismatched couples in ya fiction
- average daily earnings Uber Eats
- Trump tweet ‘we cannot let the cure be worse than the disease’
- cross-cultural facial expressions
- Paul Rozin glass of spit.
A: They’re all things we googled while writing the Stage 4 (years 7 and 8) high school ethics curriculum.
Since 2011 Primary Ethics has been teaching ethics classes in primary schools across NSW, with (as of 2023) 2600 volunteers in 500 schools, reaching 43,000 students weekly, from Kindergarten to Year 6. It’s quite a challenge keeping that machinery running each week, but at least once Professor Sue Knight had written an entire curriculum of over 100 lessons to cover all the primary school stages, we could relax a little, knowing that would be all the ethical thinking school students would have to do.
Yet it turns out that high schoolers face ethical problems too — who knew?! And, kidding aside, the ethical issues they confront are not the same as the ones facing primary kids. Plus, they can think bigger and deeper about the ethical issues we all face as individuals and as a society.
So we googled a whole lot of weird stuff (which didn’t all make it into the curriculum) and made a curriculum for year 7 and 8 students. These classes give students who’ve done ethics in primary school a chance to develop their critical thinking and group discussion skills even further, while thinking about issues that matter to them as teenagers and to society. And for students who didn’t have the opportunity to do ethics in primary school, it introduces the fascinating, puzzling and stimulating world of ethical thinking and discussion.
In high school ethics, students get to think and talk about a bunch of big important questions like:
- Should we lower the voting age?
- Is peer pressure always bad?
- Who should decide how much time you spend playing video games?
- If you could live forever, would you want to?
- Is there anything wrong with leaving rubbish on the moon?
- Can you put a price on human life? Are young people’s lives worth more than old people’s?
- Does the environment have rights like humans do?
- Does it matter if everyone disagrees with you?
- And would you drink a glass of water with your own spit in it?
Yep, that spit one stayed in – believe it or not, the emotion of disgust is ethically interesting!
How is it ethically interesting? Well, you’ll have a take a high school ethics class to find out.
To find out more about our high school ethics program and express an interest, go here and click on the High School link top right.