Integrity and Identity: Judgment and the Moral Self

Abstract

INTEGRITY AND IDENTITY In The Power of Their Ideas, Deborah Meier tells of talking to a student in her office after a hallway altercation. It became clear that “one of the kids was a ‘victim’— over and over he was the subject of teasing and other minor cruelties ... everyone knows about it, including us adults.” In speaking to the student who had done the bullying (my word, not Meier’s), she asked the boy, “Which side are you on ... his [the victim’s] or the tormentors?” She tells us that both she and the student were “startled” by the question. The boy answered that he “wasn’t really on any side.” Meier did not accept that answer; she asked, “If someone is being cruel to someone else, if someone is the victimizer and someone the victim, rapist and raped, abused and abuser — can you really be neutral?” To that, the boy answered, after a pause, “No, I am never with the abusers.” Meier then muses on two different questions raised by the events: “(1) Whose side am I on? and (2) what am I prepared to do about it?” She then points out that knowing what to do, or having the resources to do what she would like, is often difficult: “I see lots of things I don’t like being done to others — and I often pass by. But I still know ‘whose side I’m on.’” What should interest us about this story is that it shows an awareness of the importance of integrity — of knowing where one stands on moral issues — of who one is. And what should concern us is how rarely we talk in these terms in school, that neither Meier nor her student expected that to be the topic of their conversation. Schools are driven by a culture of obedience to rules, orders, and routines, not by questions of virtue and integrity.