At the beginning of every school year, the latest and updated version of the “Student and Family Handbook” arrives at the email address of every member in the Fieldston community. It can be a daunting task to make your way through all of the guidelines and rules that foster such a strong sense of community at this school. This year, conversations about acceptable guidelines for AI and digital tool use and the new cellphone policy dominated the updates. While the cellphone policy has been polarizing, AI and digital tool guidelines are likely deemed useful (within reason) in this ever-changing technological world and its place in education. Another new topic? The Respectful Discourse Policy.
In the latter part of the 19th century, political and social ethics professor Felix Adler founded what we know today as the “Ethical Culture Movement.” The goal? To look beyond immediate concerns of family, class, ethnicity, religion and race and rebuild larger institutions (such as schools) to promote higher awareness and justice in human relations. The early work involved assembling a like-minded collection of reformers and kindred spirits open to new ways of seeing the world and who engaged the world in politics, good government, and labor work. The next step involved straddling world and age groups by creating a school. The movement sometimes humbly pioneered social work as a field with a a group of nurses dispensing care and food to people in less affluent districts. Later that behavior influenced the settlement house movement. By 1878, it evolved into a kindergarten that is now the Ethical Culture Fieldston School that we know today. The foundation of Adler’s philosophy is grounded in a “supreme ethical rule” described by him as “act[ing] so as to elicit the best in others and thereby thyself.”
If we consider Adler’s approach to human dialogue as improving our exchange with others as a direct means of improving ourselves, the Respectful Discourse Policy flows organically from this concept. The school policy establishes dialogue as a two-way street aimed at enriching conversation and elevating human behavior. In short, this policy seeks to create a culture of respect. Through recognition of power differentials and power dynamics from every individual in the community, elevated mindfulness of others is a direct means to an ethical culture the way Adler hoped. The policy also defines differences in opinion and disagreements as parts of dialogue that should not become a path to hate, miscommunication and isolated groups in the Fieldston community. In that sense, there is some consistency within the school’s longer tradition of listening and acting.
The ultimate goal of the school policy is to avoid devolving into a community that would tolerate hate speech or force students into accepting polarizing exchanges. Fieldston policy seeks a higher form of education for its students and hate speech is certainly not an acceptable part of it. This aware and responsible community the school policy aspires to create must respect itself and its students by creating universally constructive dialogue and the exchange of ideas. The policy asserts that discourse happens empathetically and sees beyond the smaller facts. Students must consider the larger context of their words and how others interpret those words based on the view from their own experiences.
What is interesting and progressive about this policy is that the school acknowledges that disagreements will happen. It asks that students have differences of opinion in the spirit of goodwill and learning. It’s a recipe for mutual admiration and respect despite differences. While the policy certainly prescribes a code of conduct for students, it also offers, as any ethical culture would, a promise in exchange. Simply put, students can expect “when harm happens…the school will meet it with care, education and accountability.” The question is: will a policy found on page 39 of a handbook be able to jump off the page and become a catalyst for real change?
