[Yom Kippur is] a very different conception of moral responsibility from the one modern liberal societies generally favor. We tend to think guilt should track individual action and intention. I am responsible for what I did, you for what you did.
Yom Kippur preserves an older idea — that human beings are also implicated in families, institutions, communities, and histories, and that moral responsibility may extend beyond the narrow boundary of personal culpability.
As a teacher—a middle school teacher, primarily—I am fascinated by the concept of moral responsibility in an educational community. Occasionally, I read (OK, usually in the comments of some “self-researched” social media post) that teachers should teach, you know, content and only content.
It’s our job to drop facts into brains, then test those brains to see how the facts are holding up. Not to consider values or, God forbid, moral responsibility. To stay in our facts-only lane.
Leaving aside the obvious truth (to teachers, anyway) that knowledge without a place to apply it has a short shelf life and not much utility, I would suggest that all classroom interaction and all learning are impacted by our collective sense of right and wrong.
Everything that happens in schools reflects the prevailing norms and beliefs of that classroom, that school and that community. From scientific research to understanding literature to world history, right down to the playground and bus behavior—it’s all value-based. Students learn in context. It’s never about a disconnected bunch of facts.
Which means that even unpleasant emotions—shame, guilt, fear, ambivalence, boredom, anger, loneliness—will be present in the classroom, and dealing with them is part of the process of both teaching and absorbing new knowledge and skills. You cannot run a guilt-free classroom; every now and then, bad behavior will pop up and will impact the rights of the (edu-word alert!) learning community. Feeling remorse will be an essential step in regaining equilibrium.
The party line pushback against DEI is that white kids should not be made to feel guilty because their great—times five or six—grandfathers kept slaves or slaughtered the tribal folks who lived on the land where their subdivision now sits. Because they are not (to quote Mintz) personally culpable.
I belong to a handful of local organizations which begin their meetings with a land acknowledgement. And yes—it’s easy to let a spoken paragraph or two feel rote or performative. But—like the Pledge of Allegiance, or the Lord’s Prayer, which nobody seems to find problematic—it feels right to me to include this at every gathering, especially in a state that had functioning Indian Schools until the 1980s and contains a dozen reservations, with their own tribal governments.
There are plenty of non-historical things to critically examine for opportunities to balance the moral scales, and the current zeitgeist—where school board members openly fret about “weaponizing empathy”– is, IMHO, moving us rapidly in the wrong direction. And this unwillingness to take moral responsibility for the community will impact everyday life in the classroom.
Here’s an example: Vaccination rates are dropping precipitously here (and elsewhere in the U.S.). Sifting through the data, it’s clear that private schools and charter schools lag far behind public schools, where basic immunizations used to be mandated upon entering kindergarten. Vaccination protects your child—but also the unfortunate child who is medically unable to tolerate a vaccine.
Do people understand this? Is vaccinating your child who will (probably) survive measles just too much empathy? We’re certainly not getting any moral responsibility from our nominal political leadership.
I have many friends who are also retired teachers. And speaking of guilt, a frequent topic of conversation is whether we were too circumspect around what were considered “controversial” topics. Most teachers I know were careful—very careful—about expressing political beliefs and taking sides on moral questions.
But maybe that was wrong. Maybe we should have been standing for justice, modeling moral responsibility, channeling MLK’s observation: He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
So—a belated Shana Tova. And consider the idea presented by Yom Kippur—we’re in this together.
