Knowledge & Skills vs. Character & Ethics

I took a few moments to catch up on some RSS feed reading today and as I did I came across some very disturbing blogosphere news. Apparently, Kathy Sierra (Creating Passionate Users) has been the target of some very scary online threats (warning: links to post by Kathy that contains some strong language and a disturbing image). Robert Scoble writes about it as well and shares that Kathy is not alone in being a target.

This is disturbing, sick behavior, and it makes me sad.

Which brings me to the point of this post — as educators we do have a responsibility to educate students about character, ethics, and responsible actions online and offline…

Technorati Tags: blogging, curriculum, education, Kathy+Sierra, learning, Character+Education, Robert+Scoble, teaching, technology, Web2.0

Yesterday I was doing some prep work for my next meeting with my 1st year teachers and as I was skimming a book on solving discipline problems (“The Educators Guide to Preventing and Solving Discipline Problems” (Mark Boynton, Christine Boynton)) I came across a quote from “Teacher and Child: A Book for Parents and Teachers” (Haim G. Ginott):

Dear Teachers:

I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness. Gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.

So I am suspicious of education. My request is: help your students become more human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, or educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.

In this age of high-stakes accountability, what are we doing to ensure that character and ethics have a place in the curriculum — and that they are regarded as important as performance in math and science?

In our efforts to be advocates of the use of web 2.0 in the classroom, how often are we pushing for careful adoption/integration that incorporates discussions of online behavior, character, and ethics?

I feel very deeply for Kathy Sierra. I love reading her blog and I can’t believe that these kinds of threats, comments, and images were published anywhere on the web.

Educators are in a position to influence the development of character and compassion in our students. And don’t tell me that we don’t have time because we “have to get the math and science test scores up first!”

High test scores mean nothing if the students can’t discern between ethical and unethical behavior. High test scores and web 2.0 skills mean nothing if students are using the web to attack, threaten, and silence the voices of others.

Change Agency by Stephanie Sandifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You may copy, distribute, transmit and/or remix this content for noncommercial uses as long as you attribute the work to Stephanie Sandifer (with link back to the original post) and agree to license the work under the same or similar license.