high school - Primary Ethics

Freewheeling and provocative – the joys of teaching high school ethics

Rose-Anne Manns on the joys of teaching high school ethics.

‘Should we always apologise for hurting someone accidentally?’ I ask my Year 7 students at Lindfield Learning Village.

‘Yes’, says one boy. ‘Saying sorry will make them feel better – it’s kind. It’s a good life skill.’

‘Well, it depends’, says his classmate. ‘If it was just some random dude I hurt, then sure. But my mates and I never apologise to each other – we just laugh it off.’

‘But some of your friends might hold a grudge if you never say sorry’, a girl responds. ‘What if everyone did that? We’d all end up killing each other.’

I sit back and say nothing for a full minute or so. There is no need to anchor – they are all answering the question. There is no need to ask for reasons – they’re providing them. There is no need to open to others – they are taking turns engaging with each other, sometimes building on a classmate’s idea, sometimes explaining why they disagree.

Such is the joy of teaching my high school ethics class. Most of the time, I simply wind them up and let them go.

I have been a Primary Ethics teacher for 10 years, covering all primary stages, and this year I finally had the opportunity to teach at a high school. It’s the most fun I have all week.

The younger kids sometimes need coaxing to reveal their opinions, and often need a fair amount of structure to reveal them logically. Not so with my high school students – they are well practiced in articulating their views, especially those who experienced ethics lessons in primary school.

It’s not that I’m a passive facilitator. I always have my trusty facilitation skills flowchart on hand, checking that the group is raising a variety of views and that individuals are considering those different views. I throw in plenty of encouraging feedback when someone responds directly to what a peer is saying. I praise anyone who comes up with examples and counter-examples to make their points.

Although I facilitate the discussion with a relatively light touch, I nevertheless keep a tight rein on classroom management. Adolescence is a time when some young people feel emboldened about challenging authority figures, ethics teachers included. I have to remind a couple of them that the ‘no putdowns’ guideline applies to their teacher too, when I catch them rolling their eyes at me or mimicking me disrespectfully. Others need repeated assertive directions about not rocking back on chairs or keeping their hands to themselves.

They soon settle down and engage enthusiastically with the content, which creates another challenge for me. Because they are so eager to express their ideas, the conversation can feel somewhat freewheeling, even when we’re on script. For example, there were peals of laughter when, earlier in the year, they presented sometimes provocative beliefs on how old people should be before they’re allowed to vote, leave school, drive a car, buy alcohol (Topic 1: You’re not the boss of me). Weeks later, they had an extremely energetic debate over how far lockdowns should go during a crisis (Topic 2: Life under Covid-19).

Because the conversation was so animated, I wondered whether I was losing control, so I put out a call to the Primary Ethics classroom support team to ask whether I should intervene to create a more serious vibe. A helpful chat reassured me that if the class is on topic and behaving well, then I should just relax and enjoy it as much as the students clearly are.

And so I do. Happily.

Googling the high school ethics curriculum

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.

Why pilot ethics classes for year 7?

Primary Ethics is the single approved provider of special education in ethics (SEE) to NSW Department of Education public schools. While our primary focus is primary schools, we’ve fielded many requests over the years from high school principals, parents and students themselves, who have sought a secular alternative to Special Religious Education that helps young people make sense of the world. In those early years, it was not possible for us to act on those requests. 2020 will mark the tenth anniversary of Primary Ethics and we’re pleased that next year we will be able to offer high school communities the opportunity to participate in the program, when we pilot ethics classes for year 7 students.

An ethics program for year 7 students will:

support students to develop skills in critical thinking, respectful discussion and ethical reasoning – skills which are transferable to the key learning areas of the secondary curriculum
support students in making the transition from primary to secondary school,
assist with development of interpersonal and decision-making skills as well as the consideration of ethical dilemmas that can loom large in the adolescence years
give choice to families by providing a high quality and valued secular alternative to SRE
promote lifelong interest and learning through providing a foundation in philosophical ethics that may assist students to undertake philosophy as a secondary elective or as part of a tertiary course of study

By undertaking a pilot program for year 7 students in a small number of willing high schools, we expect to gain important insights into the secondary school learning environment. In particular, the pilot’s purpose is to assess variations in delivery at secondary schools, such as length or frequency of lessons, and also to ensure the additional training ethics teachers will receive is best practice for managing a community of inquiry with students aged 12 and 13. The pilot will focus on Year 7, but once established, the secondary program will be made available for stage 4 (both years 7 and 8) students.

The pilot program, and any subsequent classes that are delivered after its review, would only be run in high schools where there is an existing weekly or fortnightly special religious education (SRE) program.

The pilot will only be run in schools where there is:

school support for SRE/SEE
family support for SRE/SEE
trained volunteers available to facilitate the discussion-based classes

Current legislation gives parents of all NSW public school students the right to seek ethics classes for their children, and it would be unjust to deny parents the choice of SEE while SRE is present. In high schools where religious education is woven into the fabric of the school community, we cannot sit on our hands waiting for a change in legislation that may never come. There is an opportunity to provide valuable education for students, and Primary Ethics is dedicated to supporting parent choice wherever possible.

If, during the course of the pilot program or subsequent delivery of ethics classes, there is legislative or policy change around the inclusion of SRE/SEE in the secondary curriculum, we would negotiate with individual schools and the Department of Education on an outcome that best meets the needs of the students and considers the needs of the school community and Primary Ethics volunteers.

We are currently seeking expressions of interest from high school staff, parents/carers of students who will be in year 7 in 2020 and existing or previous volunteer ethics teachers who are interested in participating in the year 7 pilot program.