Moral Courage in Schools and Society: Four Thoughts Holding Us Back

Two students are walking down the hallway, in opposite directions, and an administrator looks on. The students are of different races, different genders, and one is crying.

In that moment, the student who feels fine has a choice, cognitively. Do they try to understand why the other student is crying? Or do they chalk up their distress to the fact they are a woman? White? Black? A senior? A freshman?

Cognitively, this is an interesting moment.

Empathy takes effort. When we engage our imaginative capabilities to understand another’s position, we engage in a cognitively complex task, heavy with effort. It causes us to shut off some of our other capabilities, some of our other heuristics, and embrace the complexity of the world.

Complexity and effort are important for achieving big tasks, but we are not an unlimited wealth of energy or efficiency. We save the heavy energy actions for special situations: fight-or-flight, birth, deep focus; we don’t deploy them lightly.

It is far easier, in a stressful situation, to fall back on the heuristics that give us comfort: the things down in our bones that we know are true about the world.

Some may call these stereotypes, bigotry or bias, and they could be, but a more truthful, more charitable reading of the situation is this: iIn an effort to be efficient and not to get emotionally exhausted, we often rely on short-cuts to conserve energy or protect ourselves against emotionally or cognitively taxing activities.

When we are calm, in a peaceful setting, maybe with light music playing, it is easy to deploy empathy and imagine how just about anyone feels.

In a complex situation, a crisis situation, a fight, or in a classroom, time and energy are tight and it is much easier to rely on a shortcut than to waste precious mental strain on imagining something about someone else.

These thoughts though are not random. From my work with teachers, district leaders and government agents, there are a number of repeated types of ideas that we, as humans, seem to rely on.

Confronting these thoughts is critical for all who want a less factional society, but especially for instructors where each action has the potential to invest or disinvest a student.

There are four types of thinking that we must be on the lookout for: chosenness, reliance on arcadia, unknown expectations of utopia, and misdeploying attributional thinking. Each of these mental traps gives comfort: Each allows us to side-step the challenging and effort-filled process of empathy and, in the end, treat each other worse.

It is not personal failure to act on these thoughts, but evidence of a lack of examination. It is my hope that by bringing my observations to the fore, we can all move through the world with more effective intention.

The Allure and Pitfalls of “Chosenness”

One of the oldest and most alluring ideas holding us back is the idea of “Chosenness.” In this situation, success collects and compounds; not viewed as the result of complex systems—some within, some outside our controls—but instead a result of some sort of external or divine providence.

There are some among us that are disproportionately gifted in work or play. But this goes beyond just simple accomplishment; accomplishment is seen as evidence both for and of that person or group’s specialness.

We can see this play out when we label some kids good and others bad. We see this play out in the rise of white supremacy.

It seems like a silly idea: Out of all the humans on the planet, this group or this one is special somehow and chosen by some outside force.

The deployment of these kinds of thoughts can have some far reaching and incredibly powerful impacts on the way we think.

The world, as I said before, is complex and pulling something off, even something as simple as getting food or teaching a kid to read is actually the sum of many small choices and interactions.

One of the hardest parts of adulthood, any 20-something will tell you, is that there is no one playbook, no one set of how-to manuals that lead to success. So every action, except those we are so sure of, are always a type of experiment. Every action is a check to see how things work and see if how we think they work is in fact true.

With the unknown comes doubt.

With doubt comes hesitation.

So, what if we did in fact have a plan? What if we truly had something to tell us we were on the right path?

It would cut a lot of self-doubt.

That said, it also makes justifying mistreatment of others a whole lot easier.

Even if something seems morally reprehensible, if I am chosen, if my path is the right, the discomfort I feel in witnessing is just part of the plan and not an imperative to act.

Chosenness is self-reinforcing.

To enhance our schools, our society, so that all can reach high potential, we can’t hold ourselves back by looking for those who have some unknowable “it”.

I think of the “good kid” I catch teasing another student behind my back and my initial instinct to excuse because of all the other “good stuff” they’d done. The sheepish look, the realization that the facade is threatened, usually means the student goes back to trying to reinforce their “good kid” image.

It Was Better “Back in the Day”: How Arcadia Cuts U Off

Some of our richest text resides in our minds.

Our experiences, our memories, our skills; the map of where we have been is written on how we think and what we can do.

There is nothing wrong with recognizing or even enjoying our memories of the past or “how things were.”

I see this daily when we criticize upcoming generations for not knowing how to read an analogue clock or doing long division the way we were taught.

It is easier to say, “well, the kids are dumber now,” than to recognize that the challenges of today are different than those of the past, and the knowledge and skills that once led to reward may have changed.

That said, time inevitably passes, for us all. And with that passing time comes change. Even if it is as mundane as changing a dying lightbulb to keep a sign lit, maintenance and changing circumstances requires us to act even if only to stay where we are.

But, in every new time comes new challenges.

We tend to remember rewards more than the effort it took to get said reward.

And so, we can easily set up a mental trap for ourselves. Things have changed and we are experiencing challenges, so our discomfort must be a product of the change. And so things that are new are likely foolhardy or not informed by our vast experience.

In short, maybe doing things the way we did “back in the day” holds promise.

But this is more misplaced nostalgia and an artifact of our cognitive structure than it is an empirical data point.

That said, there are times in history where headstrong ambition overcame the need for historical perspective. But not every time, and not in every situation.

We can’t write off the new generation as ill-equipped simply because they have different experiences than us.

We can’t not engage in the challenge of change simply because we remember the world is a touch rosier.

Unlimited Potential: Imaginative Failure of Utopia

In all of life, there are challenges. If we don’t feed ourselves we get hungry; if we don’t get interaction we can become depressed; if we don’t pay our bills we go into collection.

The challenge of survival is ever present.

Will we ever be delivered? Will we ever know peace?

Possibly.

But possibly not. Perhaps some suffering or challenge is inherent in life.

Yet, the idea of utopia, of reward in the future, is an alluring one.

Technology is always moving forward and it has relieved some of our ails of the past (see smallpox, asthma inhalers, food processors) and so, in that pattern, all of our current ails will be eventually alleviated by what we find out in the passage of time.

Possible.

We could find an unlimited source of pollutionless energy. We could find a side-effect free cure for all types of cancer. We could find an unlimited source of sustainable food.

But these are more dreams of escapism than data points for eventual societal advancement.

Any poker player knows, you bet on the cards you have—not the ones you could get. There are so many things that could happen, both good and bad, that it is more advantageous to everyone to go off the known information you have, not what the future could be.

Why is escapism so bad?

It encourages us to neglect the actions we need to take today with the promise they will be taken care of at some point in the future.

This takes away our agency, but protects us against the acknowledgement that much of our situation can be affected by our choices and actions.

In the classroom, I see the move towards utopian thinking primarily when looking at our education technology purchases.

Our kids can’t read? A program will magically solve that.

Our kids don’t know grammar? Give them all Chromebooks.

Instead of understanding the complexity of a situation leading to deficiency in outcomes, we look for a “silver bullet” of technology to solve it rather than looking for and addressing root causes.

There is nothing wrong with hope for the future. Some technologies will, in fact, make life easier, but the fundamental struggle inherent to life will never be taken away.

It takes moral courage to face that truth.

It’s Because They’re Bad: Attribution Error Multiplied

Why do bad things happen?

We all wonder—in the hospital at our family member’s side, or when a storm downs a tree right into our windshield. There must be some karmic reason for this all: We have the ability, in thought, at least, to take something that happens to us and move it from the realm of randomness to the realm of things we can understand—if not fully control.

A season of heavy rains is less frightening when you know the cycle of El Niño. It’s been extremely wet the last few years: Is the world going to hell or is there a complex cycle at play? Knowing the latter gives comfort when experiencing the former.

So are bad things completely random?

Not quite.

We all know the person who consistently makes poor choices. The drunk whose bank account is dwindling. The cheater who still downloads a new dating app to “check out” even though they are happily partnered.

Recognizing things as the result of bad choices allows us to learn, both in our own lives and in the lives of others.

Cautionary tales are a legitimate form of social learning.

That said, though, sometimes we look for attribution in situations where complexity should warrant caution.

The beggar on the corner could be shaking the can because he made some poor financial decisions or, more likely, the winner-loser structure of a highly competitive society allows some to slip through the cracks, amplifying the consequences of some likely unwise decisions.

The class troublemaker could be a “bad kid” or they could be living in a home with inconsistent discipline structures or history of abuse. Or they’re bored.

How we think about the situation, though, often determines how we will respond.

If the kid is a “bad kid” then there is little to be done. Discipline can’t change a fundamental fact about a personality as much as detention can change someone’s eye color.

If, though, there is something more complex going on, then perhaps the right intervention will get them what they need to be productive in class.

Similarly, I have seen this in my coaching. If someone is underperforming, it is easier to blame them as somehow inherently deficient than as a product of a system I have created.

But what do I gain by attributing an error to something fundamental?

Many things: mental comfort, an excuse to ignore, and escape from personal culpability.

But what do we gain by challenging this type of thinking?

Possibility.

The Antidote: Additive Thinking

At the heart of each of these types of thinking is reduction: reducing a complex and noisy world to simple ideas, easy to comprehend, frees up our mind for in-the-moment processing.

But there are times when we need to take the extra moment and deploy empathy.

In living truth, the world is complex. Most endeavors, from growing food to getting a hair cut, are a result of many additive executions that lead to overall success, rather than a few single “correct steps.” Success is additive: like playing a game of soccer, the winner is the team that does the most right things in the most right situations, not the one that makes no mistakes.

And so, when we think of our work in schools (and in broader society), we must see ourselves as gardeners rather than editors.

We cannot be on the hunt for things that are wrong, but instead on the lookout for opportunities to stack success.

To do this, though, requires mental courage and focus. It requires us, in times of noise and difficulty, to push past our initial impulses to protect and soothe. It seems like something worth practicing.

Returning to the school hallway, when a student or administrator is stressed that the tears of a student might seem like “one more thing” to process through a heuristic (she’s emotional, hence she is crying), there is also an opportunity.

If we choose to deploy empathy, taking one more mental step than we would otherwise, we might actually be able to solve the issue or at least engage in a way that the crying student knows they are cared for.

Any single moment means very little, but think of the trajectory of a student whose career is dotted with moments of empathy or one whose career is marked by disregard. Who is likely to do better in the long term?