from
The World We Created at Hamilton High (1988)
by
Gerald Grant

What explains the variation in the ethos or character of schools? All schools are somewhat alike, yet in some respects each school is unique.

The Greek root of the word "ethos" means the habits of the animals in a place. Joan and Erik Erikson des describe it as "the organizing power of the social processes.....it is a certain spirit....almost like what the community is for." Ethos is the sharing of attitudes, values, and beliefs that bond disparate individuals into a community. Ethos varies greatly from one school to another. In one school, expectations will be high and children will be engaged and learning avidly; in a school a few blocks away, teachers may waste a quarter of the hour before getting down to business, homework will not be collected regularly, and many pupils will be absent.

These differences in ethos have significant impact on a child.

The ethos represents the enduring values or character of the school community; the spirit that actuates not just manners, but moral and intellectual attitudes, practices, and ideals.

Schools with a strong positive ethos are led by those who clearly enunciate a character ideal. A researcher was struck by the way Eskimo students from a particular catholic boarding schools stood out in her classes at the university of Alaska Fairbanks. When she went to the school to observe, she found that the leadership repeatedly enunciated an ideal of responsibility to others and stressed the development of character and intellect in a caring community....this orientation was emphasized not only in catalogue rhetoric but at every important juncture in the life of the school. Much effort is spent in communicating the ideals for which the school stands, and in encouraging a dialogue with a public about those ideals. There is a deeply embedded belief that education is inseparable from the concept of what constitutes a good life and a good community. These ideals are sometimes embodied in a formal statement of aims, such as this declaration by the faculty of Phillips academic at Andover;

                        In a community such as Andover, all must commit
                        themselves to the goals of the community and to
                         loyalty to each other.  Since education at Phillips
                        Academy is both intellectual and humane, the
                        students and faculty derive mutual support from
                        sharing of themselves and their ideals....yet the
                         happiness of everyone in the community depends
                        on consideration and awareness, restraint and
                        candor, discretion and shared joy. Collaboration
                        toward these imprecise but worthwhile ends is an
                        expectation which all in the academy hold.

Ideals are most often conveyed in less formal ways, by example and by story, especially stories of exemplary students, of founders or patron saints, or former heads or beloved teachers. For example, a typical article in the newsletter of a Quaker school we visited celebrated the retirement of a respected teacher, Palmer Sharpless;

                        Palmer came to George school with a good sense of who
                        he was and what he wanted to accomplish. This frame of
                         reference was nowhere more evident than on his application
                        for employment; " believe in frankness, earnest effort, honesty,
                        daily reference to ideals, constant and unselfish devotion to
                        the common weal. I plan to fight any injustice, discrimination,
                        or foul play that I meet in my daily community contacts. On
                        through endeavoring to better our own community will
                        brotherhood and peaceful living be realized for mankind."

Intellectual and moral virtue are seen as inseparable. The aim is harmony. A good school is not one that is merely effective in raising test scores. While intellect is important, maximizing test scores cannot be assumed to be the highest aim; rather, harmonious development of character must be the goal. There needs to be concern for rigorous academic education but also for qualities of

1. endurance

2. resilience

3. responsibility

4. resourcefulness, and

5. social responsibility

Teachers must have equal concern for mind and character; schools should be neither morally neutral factories for increasing cognitive output nor witless producers of obedient "well-adjusted" youngsters. There must be a balance in both the life of the student and the life of the school. Like a good parent the school does not want to squeeze a student too hard to raise his or her grade average at the expense of other aspects of development. Publications often feature craftspeople --- artists, musicians, carpenters, chefs, mechanics, or gardeners --- because they provide a concrete way of talking about moral and intellectual virtues. As my colleague Thomas Green has pointed out, "To possess a conscience of craft is to have cultivated the capacity for self-congratulation or deep satisfaction at something well done, shame at slovenly work, and even embarrassment at carelessness." This sense of craft shapes our concern for excellence. "It is what impels us to lay aside slovenly and sloppy work simply because of what it is --- slovenly and sloppy."

References to the spirit of the place were made frequently in both the private schools we studied. Teachers expressed a belief in the saving power of the community and exhibited great reluctance to expel or give up on a difficult student.

At the same time, teachers recognize it takes time for the ethos to make an imprint on the student. As a nun remarked of a recalcitrant younger pupil, "It takes a few years to make a Saint Theresa's student." And older students recognize that it has formed them "They've done so much for me; they molded me," said one Sturgis junior. "They want us to do something important, to make some impact, to do our best."

Adults make plain that they are responsible for shaping and maintaining that ethos, and that how they do so makes a difference in the lives of all in that community.

The ethos is also evident in the high expectations teachers have for students. A first-grade teacher told us, "Each day we make a point of asking them, 'What did you read last night?'" Another teacher who was trying to describe her first year at the school explained, "You always felt you had to give your best, there was an expectation that you would never slack off. I can't pin it down; it was just there."

.....another nun told us that the mother had committed suicide, then said, "I can point to any child in this room and give you a sad, if not tragic, story. But they still have to be educated."

There was a reluctance to accept excuses, an expectation that people would get down to work.

......the ethos is reflected as much by what people do as by what they say.....Even in difficult situations deadlines are to be met; students who are up most of the night getting ready for a play are not excused from handing in their history paper, and they are told that tiredness is no excuse for sloppiness. Both schools emphasize schoolwide rules of behavior and standards of conduct.

Order should not be a result of obtaining compliance at the cost of crushing spontaneity; it should be the expression of freely chosen worthwhile ends. Students are aided in acquiring those norms when reasons to observe rules are frequently given: you should not be late to class because you are disturbing the learning of others; you have an obligation to do your homework and be prepared for class not only for your own benefit but because it is part of your obligation to your classmates and to the progress of the whole class; courtesy to others consists not only in remaining quiet but in actively listening to what is being said. The degree to which norms have been internalized is evident when children are left to their own devices. When a class of Sturgis second graders was told they would have twenty minutes to wait in the hall before they could use the gym, one girl turned to the others and said, "Let's tell stories." They formed into a group, sitting on the floor, and without any prompting from the teacher the first girl began her story.

In these schools the adults stand unambivalently in loco parentis, and, like good parents, the teachers and staff exercise a caring watchfulness, concerned with all aspects of a child's development. Cooperation between parents and teachers is evident at every turn.....(teachers) act with an easy confidence that parents have faith in them and the goals they are trying to achieve......that trust also means that parents are not supposed to bargain or negotiate for their child to obtain preferred teachers

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Every school, public or private, consists in both an intellectual and a moral order. The intellectual order refers to the

1. skills

2. concepts, and

3. knowledge

that are taught or imparted to students; the moral order, to the impact the school has on their

1. conduct

2. character, and

3. moral beliefs.

All schools touch both the head and the heart of their students.

Some (intellectual) ends will be the same for all students:

1. to read with critical awareness and
2. to communicate effectively

The ends of the moral order have to do with the shaping of

1. character
2. ideals, and
3. attitude toward life.

The dominant values of the moral order of the typical public school (are) legal-bureaucratic, individualistic, and technicist. It was a legal-bureaucratic world in its reliance on written rules within a centralized administrative hierarchy

Bureaucratic legalism (is) the primary expression of the moral order of the school. The code of conduct held out to students was primarily a legal code. If something was not legally forbidden it was usually assumed to be tolerated.....

Bureaucratic legalism formed the basic substratum of the moral order, but it was (also) expressed in what Robert Bellah and his colleagues have called therapeutic contractualism. The public school, like the modern corporation, has been infected with therapeutic language and styles of interaction. Bureaucratic structures have been softened by a therapeutic, or "human relations" management style, and leadership is seen in psychological terms as motivational training. The therapeutic relationship has in many ways become the model relationship.

The therapist does not judge, but helps the individual to assess the costs and benefits of a course of action. Typically, the therapeutic approach is a transaction between individuals and seldom an appeal to values by which all are bound.

Within the school, this approach may mean that teachers are less likely to say that cheating is wrong than to inquire why this individual is cheating and refer him or her to a counselor. Therapeutic contractualism tends to relieve faculty of the responsibility of encouraging all students to live by worthy standards and to encourage the view that if a student gets into trouble it is a psychological problem to dealt with in a therapeutic relationship rather than a failure of the community to morally educate.....It diminishes the notion of responsibility for others and reduces it to a contract that can be negotiated on a cost-benefit basis, a contract that substitutes clinical expertise for an absence of a community view of good ends to be striven for by all. From the students side it may lead to a feeling of being manipulated in a therapeutic situation and to a confusion about what moral matters are public and what are private.

We believe that a school should be a positive agency, a community in which standards are upheld and in which character is partially formed.

.......what is troubling about the moral order of the contemporary public school is that it tends to be expressed only in limited ways. Under the bureaucratic-legal aspects, a school tends to be reduced to a set of procedures for guaranteeing individual rights and setting forth what is legally proscribed.....Under its therapeutic aspects, it tends toward a contractual relationship in which the individual considers the costs and benefits of a course of action and community is reduced to a series of dyads.

The alternative is an educational community in which all are bound by some transcendent ideals and common commitments to an articulated sense of the public good for which public education exists.  This community would be one in which the responsible adults honor individual rights and procedural guarantees but do not believe these are adequate to express the ideals toward which the community strives; it would be a community in which therapeutic contracts could not override some kinds of common expectations.....

A school with a strong positive ethos is one that affirms the ideals and imparts the intellectual and moral virtues proper to the functioning of an educational community in a democracy. It attempts to commit its members to those ideals and virtues in at least a provisional way through the

1. espousal of goals
2. exemplary actions and practices
3. ritual celebrations, and
4. observance of norms.

By virtues we mean those dispositions and qualities of moral excellence that are honored in a community.

(Some would argue that) it simply is not possible to reach agreement today on the most fundamental virtues or ethical guidelines. With the composition of public schools so extraordinarily diverse, how can we expect teachers and parents to reach agreement in the face of deep divisions on moral questions in the society at large?

We need to reach consensus, first, on the necessary moral underpinnings of any community engaged in educational activities; and, second, on those virtues and ideals that are proper to the functioning of an educational community in a democracy.

In the first category fall such things as

1. providing a safe and secure environment
2. assuring the basic order of community so that education can take place
3. persons must not be abused physically or psychologically
4. individuals must not be allowed to abuse themselves with drugs or alcohol, because educational activity will be impaired
5. honesty and truthfulness are included, for educational discourse cannot proceed if one party is dissembling

In the second category are both those virtues characteristic of democratic education and the ideals toward which we strive. Among such democratic virtues would be

1. fairness to all in attempting to assure educational benefits
2. respect for all persons so that we do not exclude some from the dialogue or take a prejudiced view of how much they are likely to contribute or benefit from it, and
3. a sense of justice with respect to rewards given or withheld

What can save this activity from indoctrination is the manner in which these standards and ideals are taught. If adults teach them in an authoritarian manner as a fixed and unvarying code that must be stamped into the consciousness of children, then they can be charged with indoctrination. They will be saved from such an indictment if they give reasons for the standards, based on universalizable principles undergirding the educational endeavor, and present them as provisional......teachers initiate students to such beliefs in nonbehavioristic ways, not fixing a particular moral content for life, but showing students that as adults they will have the responsibility and freedom to reevaluate those beliefs.

The adults primarily responsible for a given educational community should be continually in the process of reflecting upon and renewing their world. It is not a responsibility that they can abdicate, for education, as Hannah Arendt has written,

                        is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to
                        assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin
                        which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young,
                        would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether
                        we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave
                        them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance
                        undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to
                        prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

The final outcome is unknown. These trends may prove to be irreversible. Perhaps in the long run, the minimalist bureaucratic model will prove to be the only model that such a "new rules" culture can sustain. American reformers have tended to overestimate what schools alone can do to cure the ills that afflict us, and my own hopes for schools with a strong positive ethos may be similarly skewed. On the other hand, schools are rightfully in the center of most cultural and symbolic battles. Much of what we become as a nation is shaped in the schoolyard and the classroom. If we believe that history is open, then the renewal of the moral order of public schools is one place to make an effort to counter some of the depressing trends (we see).