Someone ruins something you love.
You’re upset. They haven’t apologised.
You find yourself thinking: How would they like it if I did that to them?

Children know this feeling. Adults do too. And if someone tells us to leave it alone, there’s an obvious objection: Why should they get away with it?

It’s a question worth taking seriously. Would doing the same thing back be fair? Would it help the other person understand? Would it matter whether they meant to cause the damage?

Underneath the urge to get even is a question about what people owe each other. That question comes up when someone does something kind for us, too.

Someone invites you to their birthday party. A few months later, you’re planning your own. You aren’t particularly close, and there’s only room for a handful of friends.

Do you have to invite them?

Does accepting an invitation mean you owe one in return? Can you be grateful without returning the favour? What do you owe your closer friends, who might miss out?

Children encounter these dilemmas in classrooms, playgrounds and friendships, long before anyone introduces words such as obligation, reciprocity or retaliation. Taking their questions seriously means making room to explore the reasons behind them – and to discover where those reasons lead.

Are we even?

Our topic Getting even, developed for Year 3 and Year 4 students, begins with a familiar idea: one good turn deserves another.

It sounds reasonable. When someone helps us, helping them back can show gratitude and strengthen a friendship. But follow the idea a little further and it becomes less straightforward.

If I help you, have I earned the right to expect your help? What if you can’t help me back? What if I only helped you so that you would owe me something?

There’s a difference between appreciating someone’s kindness and keeping an account of favours. Philosophically, this is a question about the relationship between gratitude and obligation. We can feel thankful without believing someone has a claim on us. Yet refusing ever to help someone who has helped us can seem unfair too.

Motives complicate things further. Does helping count as generous if we do it only to secure a favour later? And does a good deed become any less good because we hope it will be returned? These questions reach into adult friendships, family responsibilities and working relationships as readily as birthday invitations.

Aristotle explored a related distinction in his account of friendship: valuing someone because they are useful to us is different from wishing them well for their own sake. This doesn’t mean friends should never benefit from helping each other. It raises a question about what the friendship is based on. Do we care about the person, or mainly about what they can do for us? A birthday invitation can bring that ancient philosophical question surprisingly close to home.

Consider the fable of The Lion and the Mouse. A lion catches a mouse who accidentally wakes him, then lets her go. Later, the mouse finds him trapped in a net and chews through the ropes to free him.

Are they even now?

Perhaps. But before we can answer, there’s another question: did the mouse owe the lion anything? Letting her go might have been generous. Or perhaps choosing not to hurt someone who accidentally disturbed you is simply what you should do.

A familiar fable suddenly offers more than a familiar moral. Students can consider whether the mouse helps because she made a promise, because she owes the lion, or because someone needs help. Those reasons might lead to the same action this time, but they might lead to different answers if the lion needs help again.

“Now you know how it feels”

Getting even takes on a different character when someone has hurt us.

In The Fox and the Stork, a fox invites a stork to dinner and serves soup in a shallow dish. He can lap it up, but her long beak makes eating impossible. The stork later invites him back and serves food in a narrow jar. She can reach inside; he cannot.

There is a satisfying symmetry to the story. The fox gets a taste of his own medicine. But does that make the stork’s response right?

The thought that someone should understand the hurt they caused deserves serious attention. So does the wish to stand up for ourselves. Simply telling children that retaliation is wrong can leave an important objection unanswered: Why should the person who hurt me get away with it?

Discussion gives that argument room to be examined. Will the fox understand how the stork felt? Will he think her response was fair? Or will he feel wronged and plan another trick?

Part of the difficulty is that we can judge the same response in different ways. We might ask whether the fox deserves it, whether it will prevent another trick, or whether deliberately humiliating someone is wrong even when they have behaved badly. What someone deserves, what an action achieves and how we should treat people are distinct questions. Their answers may pull us in different directions.

Two ruined things

A damaged possession brings the question closer to home. A child, Sasha, has a favourite book knocked into a puddle by another child, Reese. Sasha doesn’t know whether Reese did it deliberately.

Sasha’s sister suggests getting even: damage something of Reese’s so she knows what it feels like. Later, a conversation with her dad raises other questions. Would that make Sasha feel better? What might Reese do next? Would Sasha feel proud of her response?

And beneath all of these sits a practical problem: her book would still be ruined.

Damaging something of Reese’s might feel like balancing the score, but it would leave two ruined things. That opens up a distinction worth thinking about at any age: is getting even the same as putting things right?

Reese eventually apologises and replaces the book. Yet even this resolution leaves questions open. What if she couldn’t afford a replacement? Would an apology be enough? Could Sasha accept it and still feel upset? If the damage was an accident, does Reese still have a responsibility to help?

Here, different ideas of justice come into view. A retributive view asks what response someone deserves because of their wrongdoing. A restorative approach focuses on the harm caused, the needs of those affected and the responsibilities involved in putting things right. Restorative justice gives those affected a part in deciding how the harm should be addressed; accountability involves acknowledging harm and making amends.

These approaches need not disagree about every response. Replacing the book could be both something Reese owes Sasha and a practical way to repair the damage. Nor is retribution simply another word for revenge: believing that wrongdoing deserves a proportionate response does not automatically justify personal retaliation. When we demand that someone “take responsibility”, what exactly are we asking them to do?

Giving children something worth thinking about

A child asking “Why should they get away with it?” is raising a question about accountability. A child asking “Do I have to invite them?” is wondering what they owe another person. These questions deserve attention because the competing considerations are real. Gratitude can conflict with freedom to choose. Standing up for ourselves can conflict with avoiding further harm.

Our Getting even topic gives Year 3 and Year 4 students space to explore these tensions. They can consider what makes a response fair, explain their views and encounter reasons they may not have considered.

For teachers, these conversations offer opportunities to hear what matters to children. Two students might agree that the mouse should help the lion, but disagree about why: one points to her promise; another to his need. That difference opens up questions about what each thinks we owe other people.

Children do not need to settle every issue to make progress. They might recognise that wanting to do something is different from having a good reason to do it. They might distinguish an accident from deliberate harm, or accepting an apology from no longer feeling hurt. They might reconsider a view – or find a clearer reason for holding it.

Adults have plenty to think about here too. We keep track of favours, struggle with apologies and sometimes want someone to know exactly how they made us feel. The questions children explore remain live questions in our own relationships.

Where do you draw the line between getting even and putting things right? And if you volunteer in a classroom, have these conversations ever made you reconsider your own answer?

What happens when children are given the space to listen, question, respectfully disagree and build on one another’s ideas?

By Brett Henebery

The Educator has featured Primary Ethics and the growing evidence that classroom discussions about ethical dilemmas can help children recognise ethical issues, think more carefully and confidently share their ideas.

Delivered by trained volunteers in around 500 NSW public schools each week, ethics lessons help children develop critical-thinking and respectful discussion skills, skills that matter more than ever in our rapidly changing and increasingly polarised world.

Imagine a circle of eight-year-old children wrestling with a question most adults would prefer to dodge.

Is it ever okay to break a promise?

There’s no answer sheet. No lecture. Just young people listening, disagreeing and building on each other’s reasoning.

That’s the groundbreaking model behind Primary Ethics – the volunteer-run program now teaching more than 500 NSW primary schools every week.

New research from the Australian Catholic University, the largest study of its kind, found that programs that promote discussions of ethical challenges can help students recognise ethical issues and think more carefully about what to do.

“The Primary Ethics curriculum was designed to help students consider everyday ethical dilemmas using carefully developed lesson plans and pedagogy that equips volunteer teachers with practical skills to facilitate constructive discussion in the classroom,” Laura Ramos, Chief Operating Officer at Primary Ethics, told The Educator.

“The clearest sign that ethics lessons are making a difference comes straight from Primary Ethics volunteer ethics teachers – in what they share about how students are responding in the classroom and how this shows up in the playground.”

‘Students are feeding off each other’s ideas’

Petersham Public School, located in Sydney’s inner-west, is seeing the benefits of ethics education from Kindergarten right through to Year 6.

“We have wonderful volunteers who make Primary Ethics possible at Petersham Public School,” the school’s Principal, Lisa Sands, told The Educator.

“As Principal, I work thoughtfully to manage organisation and supervision arrangements to ensure that all students can access the SRE/SEE offering of their choosing.”

Kindy teacher Nathan Grange, part of the volunteer ethics team at Petersham Public School, said he has noticed how his students are learning by speaking freely and asking questions within the structure of the ethics lesson.

“Students care about what is happening in the stories, they are listening and feeding off each other’s ideas,” Grange told The Educator.

Amy Butler, the school’s Year 3-4 Ethics Teacher, is an educator who has also seen the benefits of these lessons first hand.

“In the final reflective class last year one of the students said, ‘ethics class has made me more confident to share my ideas outside of ethics class.’”

Year 5-6 Ethics Teacher, Sue Cameron, the classes are having cut-through, even if some students are using what they’ve learned in a joking way.

“I have heard some kids just after the Ethics Class saying, ‘I respectfully disagree with you, because…’ They were making a joke of the phrase, but they have definitely taken it on board!”

Read the full article: https://lnkd.in/g26qkNpW

“Primary Ethics’ latest event was – seriously – a matter of life and death.”

By Rose-Anne Manns

Old people should have more control over deciding when they want to die, provocative author Lucinda Holdforth argued at our ‘Big Questions. Better Conversations’ event in Sydney in September. But there’s a problem: we don’t like talking about death.

Lucinda, whose book Going On and On: Why our longevity threatens the future was published earlier this year, reflected on her experience as a former ethics teacher, where nine- and ten-year-olds were capable of talking about tricky issues. ‘The process of dialogue is powerful and so important at a moment when information is coming at us from screens one-way.’

The dialogue she wants adults to have is how to avoid the many downsides of ageing – for individuals, their carers and society. ‘Australia is one of the top 10 countries in the world for longevity,’ Lucinda said. ‘And we’re second only to the US for the period we spend living with frailty and disease – an average of 12 years when care is required.’ These facts have implications for a groaning medical system, a squeezed sandwich generation and an economic burden on generations to come.

Or, as her interviewer Kelby Mason put it: ‘Getting old sucks.’

Lucinda says giving choice to old people is part of the solution: ‘We should be able to say “I’m done.” But in the name of kindness, the system takes away our agency.’

Everyone should know about advance care directives, which outlines what you want done in the event of a life-threatening injury or disease, she says, and doctors should follow them instead of ignoring them.

What did the audience think?

An entertaining ‘Think Pair Share’ exercise drawn from Primary Ethics’ high school curriculum got participants talking amongst themselves about whether we might advance to the point where we can treat the body as an endlessly repairable machine that could last 1000 years. Is old age something that can be cured or prevented? Or should we accept it as a natural part of life?

Even if we could fix age-related damage like brittle bones and dementia, Lucinda still didn’t think living to 1000 was such a good idea: ‘Who are the people who want to live forever? [Biohack entrepreneur] Bryan Johnson, [longevity spruiker] Peter Attia … Putin and Xi have discussed organ harvesting. If that’s the company I’d be keeping, I’ll pass!’

What do the kids think?

My students also took a hard pass when I taught the ‘Who wants to live forever’ topic at high school earlier this year, but for different reasons. Sustainability was a key concern. If old people take longer to die off, but fertility remains the same, population will grow, putting more pressure on the planet’s resources. Stagnation was another issue they raised. If old people are healthy enough to stay in their jobs for longer, fewer young people will take their place, meaning fewer fresh ideas and less innovation. Social inequity was yet another worry. They debated whether it would be unfair if only rich people got access to anti-ageing treatments.

Even after weighing up counter-arguments about the value of retaining the wisdom and experience of elders, my students were adamant: they don’t want to live forever and they don’t want us to either.