What is Right and What is Wrong?

"Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man who you may hae seen and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to them" Mahatma Gandhi

Elementary school students are growing up in a fast paced, information technology world. Technology is present and available to students everywhere; in fact we are finding that if children don’t have access to computers at home, they will go to a friend’s home or other public places, such as the library to use the internet. Kids are being allowed use computers, cell phones, as well as many other technology devices at very young ages with out supervision or instruction. With this growth of technology in our school, and home environments there is becoming a bigger need to teach children to have moral ethics.

Nancy Willard’s article, “What is right and what is wrong?”, addresses the developmental factors that affect moral behaviors in children, as well as how technology plays a role in ethical behavior. Willard submitted three factors, that children use to decide if an action is moral or not. These factors are: recognition that an action has caused harm, social disapproval and punishment by authority. Recognition that an action has caused harm allows the child to feel sorry or remorseful. Social disapproval is when a child engages in inappropriate action and realizes that others know what has been done, and then leads to the feeling of shame. Punishment by authority is when a child participates in inappropriate actions and the actions are detected by an adult figure and leads to a punishment. When using technology children are able to escape these factors. They take on an invisible person role while on the computer which can blur their ability to recognize that they are actually causing harm to others. There is little feed back gained from the computer which allows for slight social disapproval to take place if any at all. The invisibility factor also impacts being punished. If an action can not be linked to a child, the threat of punishment will have no effect because it is obsolete.

Due to the need to educate children to be moral users of technology, Willard suggests that we encourage children to rely on the thinking part of empathy when using technology. Our focus needs to change from fear of getting punished to not causing harm to ones-self or to others. To do this she suggests teaching children some basic ethical decision-making strategies. For instance; use the golden rule test, how would you feel if someone did the same thing to you?, or the mom and dad test, what would your mom or dad think? She also suggests thinking about your actions as if they were reported and printed on the front page of the newspaper, would you still continue to participate in the act? Use the “If everybody did it” test, what would happen if everybody made the same decision? And last of all, the “Check inside test”, how does it make you feel?

Nancy Willard has many more helpful insights to help educate and direct children to develop moral ethics. It is apparent that in the fast paced technology society we are living in that we need to address issues like this one. We need to do everything possible to help students become moral upstanding citizens, as they eventually will be the future leaders of our country.