This year our middle school students are taking part in a weekly Life Skills course, and I have the great pleasure of teaching our 8th graders each Monday morning. The theme of this course is ethical decision making, and I thought I’d share a real-life ethical dilemma that presented itself to Barnesville, one that I also shared with our 8th graders this past Monday.
Recently, Mr. Weintraub and Mr. Clark discovered a gas powered golf cart in the woods behind the soccer field. No, not the electric cart donated to the school recently, but a completely different cart! This cart, well used but in good working shape, lacked any identification other than a serial number. How and when the golf cart ended up there was a complete mystery.
I posed the question to our 8th graders – what should we do? Should we keep the cart? We analyzed the facts, considered the stakeholders, and weighed the various consequences of possible outcomes. There were those whose first instinct was to keep the cart – after all, it’s on the School’s property, it might have been abandoned, and it wouldn’t hurt to have a second golf cart! (Especially if they could ride in it themselves!). Then there were those who thought it best to return it to its owner. After all, who would get rid of a perfectly fine working golf cart? Was it taken on a joy ride and dumped on our property?
After 20 minutes of discussion, one 8th grader brought up an underlying moral principle to help guide our decision – the Golden Rule. Do to others what you would like done to you. This ethic of reciprocity suggested that if we were the golf cart’s original owners, and it had disappeared, we would want the School to make every effort to get in touch with us. This care-based principle ties directly with our character word of the month, kindness. It also suggests that as we seek kindness from others, so to do we seek forgiveness for our errors. Sometimes we accidentally lose things – think of the teller in the drive-through window who gives you too much change – and without kindness and forgiveness, we would never get them back.
In the end, our 8th graders thought of different ways to try to find the original owner – posting signs, contacting the police, even writing about it in Bits. And if, after trying our best to return this property to the rightful owner we were ultimately unsuccessful, then they thought it would be fine for the School to keep it.
And so I write to you – anybody missing a gas powered golf cart?
John Huber