Tapu Misa: Ethics too important to leave to chance

Producing ethical, principled citizens needs to become part of the education system. Photo / Dean Purcell

How do you turn out good children? A poster I saw at a preschool seemed to have it right. If you want your children to behave, it said, behave yourself.

That seemed like good advice when my children were at kindy and still susceptible to parental influence, but wasn't much use when they soon after hit the stage where almost everyone else's opinion counted for more.

By the time we reached the teenage years, our parental stock had taken a dive. We didn't know anything; we weren't cool enough to emulate.

Auckland teacher Gwen Francis has been arguing for years - to me, anyway, and the Ministry of Education - that producing ethical, principled citizens is too important a goal to be left to the whims of individual parents. It needs to become part of the education system.

We aren't born virtuous, she says, and we don't become ethical by osmosis, no matter how much parents might wish it.

So if we as a society want our children to grow into ethical human beings - and I think we do, given the widespread suffering inflicted by the morally challenged - we can't just leave it to chance. We have to teach our children ethical reasoning and decision-making.

Francis says the level of white-collar crime among the well-educated shows that the need to develop moral reasoning is as evident among high-income, high-IQ children as among poorer children.

At a high-decile school she taught at some years ago, many of the year 7 and 8 students felt that the measure of right and wrong in sport was whether they could "get away with it". Cheating was okay as long as the ref didn't see.

She also cites 2002 research which found that 80 per cent of business students at the Christchurch College of Education admitted cheating, including copying in tests or falsifying research results.

As American businessman Sanford McDonnell once said: "We must not graduate from our schools young people who are brilliant but dishonest, who have great intellectual knowledge but don't care about others, or who have highly creative minds, but are irresponsible."

We don't need to look far to see where ethical reasoning might serve us.

Some people I know send their children to schools they perceive as having the right values, trusting, I think, that the hefty fees they pay will ensure that their child emerges with the right quotient of virtues.

At King's College in Otahuhu, for example, they list their values as generosity of spirit, gratitude, honesty, moral courage, respect, spirituality and tolerance.

I particularly like moral courage, the value which seems most lacking in the dealings between the family of James Webster, the 16-year-old who drank himself to death this year, and the parents of the 17-year-old boy who was said to have supplied the bottle of vodka. Among those who refused to talk to the Websters were the 17-year-old's parents, who drew a legal veil around their son and declined to talk to the grieving family, other than through their lawyer.

I wish they were less concerned with their legal liability and more concerned with helping the Websters piece together their son's final moments.

I don't believe that blame can or should be sheeted home to any single individual, or that any of those involved should have to explain themselves to the media against their will.

The pressures that made James drink himself to death were more complex than a few kids encouraging him to drink to excess on the night of the party. But hiding behind their lawyer denies all of them the chance to come to terms with what happened.

It isn't only children who need ethical training. The refusal of Allan Hubbard to "own" the huge failure of his company shows a similar moral failing.

Philippa Foster, the head of the British Institute of Business Ethics, says an upside of the global economic crisis is that "ethics" is no longer a dirty word.

"People are quite willing to use it and recognise its importance," Foster said in a recent interview on National Radio. "People are openly talking about a need for change in behaviours and culture."

Foster was here to run seminars for the Institute of Directors on the oxymoronic "business ethics", which she defines as "the application of ethical values to business behaviour".

Why do business people need ethical training?

"You just can't legislate for everything so you're always going to have that grey area where choice and discretion is going to have to be exercised and that's really where you move into the ... ethical space.

"The other thing that goes with it is that there is still a question that people sometimes need to ask themselves, it may be legal but is it right?"

Tapu.Misa@gmail.com