Teaching Ethics to Children
Should the lion save the mouse? We could all use a little 'thinking time'.
News & Reviews Magazine
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The piece you’re reading now is by Larissa Grinsell. Larissa is a writer, editor, and educational leader based in Sydney. She cares about giving young Australians the opportunity to develop religious literacy through effective, secular religious education. Larissa holds First Class Honours in Studies in Religion from the University of Sydney and has authored, edited or produced over 500 lessons on Religious Studies and History for secondary students across Australia and the UK. Since 2021, she has been the Head of the Content department at the teaching and learning platform Atomi Education. In 2023, she began teaching ethics classes for the non-for-profit Primary Ethics.
For the last three months I have spent every Wednesday morning with around 15 primary school students huddled around me in a circle. I’m not a real teacher—actually I produce learning tools for students and teachers—but once a week I make sure to rock up 15 minutes early to begin my ritual of shoving cloud-shaped desks against classroom walls (clouds don’t stack away very easily) and stringing together the long curve of yellow and red plastic chairs. The circle is critical. Every pair of eyes needs to be able to find every other pair in the room. Every voice needs to carry and be heard. There is no hierarchy or order to it; I’m part of the circle too. Once we form our tight circle, me and these kids are officially gathered together to hold a serious ethical discussion.
Ethics education is an astonishingly recent development in NSW public schools. Ethics class has existed since 2010, when, after close to eight years of lobbying, the Parliament amended the NSW Education Act to give students the legal right to attend ethics classes instead of 'Special Religious Education', commonly known as scripture. The very existence of scripture is a hangover from over a century ago, when religious institutions still played a large role in establishing schools. Both scripture and ethics are now offered free of charge in public schools, powered by volunteers, but it’s a strict choice of one or the other.
As of October 2023, there are 98 approved providers of Special Religious Education in NSW public schools. These providers span dozens of denominations and sects. There is just one approved provider of the alternative ‘Special Ethics Education’. Primary Ethics is the independent, not-for-profit organisation I volunteer with each week. They have spent a decade developing and refining the curriculum I deliver to the children.
Every Wednesday, I watch that curriculum lift off the page and into those kids’ minds. Our classes start with an ethical question or problem, and prompt students to consider what a ‘good life’ might look like in response to it. One topic might be about owning up, the next on helping others or telling the truth. The class uses the Socratic discussion method (the circle is ancient!) so my job is to facilitate and moderate discussion. I am not there to provide my own ethical views or make a judgement on any point of discussion in the room. We are in the business of posing questions, not necessarily answering them.
An ethics class is designed to prompt students to ask themselves and each other: ‘What does it mean to live a good life?’ Whether they can articulate an answer is secondary to the process of critically considering it. They are switching on the logic cogs in their brains. As long as students can provide a logical reason why they think something is true, their viewpoint is welcome in the circle. And if they can use this reasoning to build on top of others’ ideas or respectfully disagree, then ethics class is a success. The benefits are enormous and tangible, even when the answers in the room are incomplete or, as is often the case, hilariously naïve.
Last week, we covered ‘getting even’. The topic is all about fairness, retribution and even revenge. What is the right way to respond to others’ treatment of us? Is ‘getting even’ ever okay? How can we justify it? I read an amended passage from one of Aesop’s fables about a lion and a mouse. In the story, the mouse has wronged the lion in the past, so the substantive question is: should the lion save the mouse’s life when given the chance? I tell the class to take some ‘thinking time’ before their hands shoot to the ceiling.
Two students think the lion should be kind, no matter whether he likes the mouse or not, because it's the ‘right’ thing to do. There are meek nods from some of the quiet kids in the circle. Others form a crinkle in their brows. Upon reflection, they think the lion should save the mouse but that the mouse will then owe the lion in return. So, the lion is motivated by a future reward, not just kindness.
The next response genuinely surprises me.
‘Miss Larissa, I think it's a bit of a silly question, to be honest, because it’s a lion’s nature to kill mice.’
I stick to my script, which calls that I respond by asking for their reasoning: ‘Okay… tell me why you think that’s important to whether the lion should save the mouse’s life?’
Without missing a beat, the child replies: ‘Well, lions eat small animals. The lion was probably just hungry. I eat animals, too.’
I can't fault the reasoning—we haven't fully grasped the concept of anthropomorphism yet—and we move swiftly onto a new scenario about unreciprocated birthday party invites. That one's a classic.
Introducing Special Ethics Education was a big and important step forward in Australia’s education policy, and even in just three months I have seen how ethics classes stretch and form young minds. The challenges and problems we’ll face in future decades and centuries will be different to the ones we face today, and we need to raise a generation equipped to know how to think about an ethical problem, not simply how to apply an existing moral framework to it.
We desperately need to invest in teaching these ethical reasoning and critical thinking skills. But we need to extend the opportunity to learn ethics to religious children, too. All students deserve a seat in the circle, and not all of them get one.
As long as ethics exists in (at least a practical) opposition to scripture, children enrolled in a public school in NSW cannot enjoy equitable access to ethics education. Our government says to parents: you may give your child access to religious instruction or ethical reasoning, but they may not have both.
If I held the keys to the curriculum, I would integrate ethical reasoning classes into the formal primary school curriculum. I would offer students of all religions and no religion the chance to engage in Socratic method ethics classes. And, I would build on base ethical concepts with real-world applications across multiple faith perspectives. Children need to understand how religions work and what people believe, no matter the family or faith they are born into.
How might a Muslim person think about getting even? What beliefs might inform their views on the topic, and where do these beliefs come from? What about a Buddhist—how might their teachings shape how they’d respond to being wronged? Would a Christian and Jewish person think differently about the need to share? Might they have different reasons why they think it’s important to share?
These are the questions our education system needs to start asking all children to consider. In these conversations, we might begin to knit together both ethical reasoning and a practical religious literacy in our young people.
It’s a dual skillset that has taken me a hell of a long time to build. Kids are natural-born philosophers. As we age, we shed naïvety and get on with the world, largely accepting how it is rather than challenging why it is that way, and what it could be. Figuring out what ‘a good life’ looks and feels like takes effort. I’ve spent more than a decade making deliberate choices in my formal education and professional experience, just to begin to arrive at a critical understanding of it. And now that I am (somewhat) here, I can only imagine the kind of choices I may have made, the better-reasoned opinions I might’ve formed, the disastrous value misalignments I might’ve more skilfully navigated, if only I’d had a seat in the circle back then.
Interesting how ethics classes and religion classes are supposed to fill the same function--religion WILL shape your ethical thinking, but not in the same plastic way that ethics will. Hooray for the circle!
I’ve also taught ethics to science students at university, as a philosophy tutor. It’s an amazing experience watching them first panic that there’s no definite answer, and then expand into the discussion and find ways to defend their own position, or even try on an alternative position in the safe space of the classroom. The right answer is a good argument, and thoughtful people can revise their position! Anyone can follow rules. Learning to challenge and support your views is a superpower. X
Thank you for reminding me that I need to enrol my five year old into ethics class! I had to check a box to opt out of scripture, but didn't know I had to opt in for ethics until she came home asking why she wasn't allowed to do it. It fell into the life admin swamp but this article has just pushed it to top priority!