Terrence D. Olson

Most sex education, however well-meaning, has failed to achieve its dual purpose: 1) Promote the understanding that personal growth, development, character, relationships and sexual interaction all relate to the quality of life most people long to experience; and 2) prevent negative, harmful, self-destructive choices which undermine the quality of an adolescent’s family relationships and future opportunities.

Being uncivil is not a cause of conflict—incivility and the contention associated with it are symptoms of something else. That something else is a way of being with others that assumes incivility is regrettable, but often necessary and justified. To justify bad or destructive behavior is to make ethically defensible that which is typically unethical. Civility is not merely being polite or controlling negative emotions. Nor is being polite necessarily being moral. When civility is a utilitarian adoption of behaviors whose purpose is to get one’s way or to avoid disagreements, the words and smiles designed to keep the interaction from getting out of hand are more hypocritical than polite. If being uncivil is merely a breakdown of our abilities to control nasty feelings or impulses, they invite hand-wringing about the human condition, and disconnect civil attitudes and behaviors from their moral root. It is not the human condition of being imperfect that fuels modern incivility—it is the assumption that civility is impossible to experience precisely because of the human condition.

When Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke at Harvard’s Commencement in June 1978, he titled his address, “The Exhausted West.” He was talking about a culture—Western culture generally—in moral decay. In doing so, he acknowledged that he had been exiled from his homeland for four years, a land he described as having been in the captivity of Communism for his entire life. The exhaustion of which he spoke is a spiritual one, where the bounteous freedom, well-being, and availability of material goods led those in the West “to an almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment,” resulting in few people willing to “risk one’s precious life in defense of common values” (p. 22). According to him, the West had come to make something more fundamental than the common values that had produced the freedom and bounty of the West: a legal system based on the letter of the law.

In creating and delivering a public school curriculum that sought to reduce risk-taking behavior among adolescents, my colleague Chris Wallace and I sensed that the major factors in fostering or reducing destructive patterns of behavior were the beliefs, values and moral commitments of the students themselves. Although it is true there is not a one-to-one correlation between one’s beliefs and one’s behavior, the association of the two dimensions is strong. Nevertheless, we felt that to affect student behavior with a curriculum, the content could not escape examining values, beliefs and commitments—especially those related to the ethical and moral domain.

Being “non-judgmental” is often recommended as essential for a pluralistic society to become cohesive. “Taking offense” is regarded as understandable, if not inescapable, and even as a worthy response to offensive behavior. Yet, to take offense is to judge that another’s behavior is unjust, discriminatory, rude, immoral or even criminal. The truth is that it is impossible to refrain from making judgments. Even the recommendation to be non-judgmental is itself a judgmental statement. However, while making judgments cannot be avoided, the quality of the judgments we do make can be assessed. That quality is not to be found merely in our words, but in the quality of our hearts—in the quality of how we see ourselves and others.