Relatively
Few teachers plan to end up in middle school. As a result, the students who briefly live on the boundary between childhood and adolescence are most often guided by those who stumbled into the intermediate grades themselves and share the students' uncertainty about the entire process. Not quite children, middle school students are not easily wrangled and even less easily entertained, but not quite adolescents, they find themselves clinging to familiarity while reaching for change. Their teachers, meanwhile, are caught between the nurturing world of elementary school and the relative rigors of high school, always seeking the appropriate balance for the students in front of them, who act childish in one moment and then greet profundity in the next.
One of the beauties of teaching middle school is that the students have not yet been thoroughly convinced about the distinctions between disciplines. Since they have just recently left a classroom where a single teacher embodied the truths of grammar, science, poetry, mathematics, and history, these students do not sense that knowledge is separated in siloes. Truth is not sorted into various binders and bordered by ringing bells, nor is understanding limited to the closed universe of a single field.
In my eighth-grade English class, therefore, I aimed to incorporate a vast body of knowledge. Certainly we covered the list of standards related to reading, listening, speaking, and writing—but we did not limit ourselves to these, since the goodness of learning to read and write is that one can learn anything and convey it well. To satisfy curiosity that crossed disciplines, my class explored rock climbing, aesthetics, architecture, board games, Latin texts, logic puzzles, baroque art, cooking, guitar, improv, podcasts, Supreme Court rulings, gardening, theology, and whatever else occurred to us as we spent our time reading, listening, speaking, and writing.
As a Catholic school teacher, I cared little for whether my students remembered particular details from the novels we read, nor did I fret about which of the many elite private high schools they'd be accepted to. I was unconcerned with their spelling quizzes and their standardized tests. Indeed, I was blessed to have the privilege of not needing to care about them as students much at all—but instead as people. To each of them I said honestly—however sentimental and treacly it may sound—that all I cared about was that they learned to be good.
In one stretch of the year, my students and I would explore ethics in the context of several situations—true, contrived, and fictional. Listening to an episode of Radiolab about Memorial Hospital in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, we'd debate how to handle triage in a crisis. How should we allocate scarce medical resources when we cannot save everyone? Later, we'd look at Kohlberg's Heinz Dilemma, which asks us to hold several virtues in tension, deciding whether stealing a life-saving medicine is justified if one cannot pay for it. Do good ends justify immoral means? Finally, we'd look at a short story from the 1960s that explores the fairness or unfairness of various punishments in the face of a student who blatantly cheats on a test in defiance of his school's honor code. What is the purpose of punishment, and how does it relate to justice?
In the course of these discussions, it became clear to me that the biggest obstacle to my students becoming good was that they didn't believe there was such a thing as goodness—at least not objectively.
My students, who were quick to point out contradictions in the way rules were enforced with respect to dress code or dodgeball, hated to confront the contradictions in their own convictions. As soon as students learned the word "subjective," it became a battering ram to knock down the oppressive walls of absolute truth that teachers demanded. "What's right for one person," they'd tell me, "may not be right for another. It's subjective."
The default view of nearly every student I encountered is this: Everyone is empowered to enact their own truth, and indeed the highest good is to live out one's own truth authentically—as long as it doesn't impose on anyone else's truth, of course. And that is the most potent problem with objectivity for my students: A truth that is true everywhere and always threatens the autonomy that individuals have to author their own lives and shape their own realities.
Furthermore, my students were firm believers in MLK's assertion that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. They loved the celebration of historical moral progress, for which evidence was clearly available: the eradication of slavery or the increasing rights of women in civil society, for example.
However, the obvious question arises: How is one to measure progress without a goal? In other words: If there is no objective truth or goodness, how do we know that any moral development is tending toward greater goodness? After all, that is no goodness to tend toward. We can't maintain both that goodness is whatever we shape it to be and that it has clearly defined contours that form a shape we can all recognize and walk toward.
This is, of course, the problem with much of modernity. We hear endless talk about ensuring that we land on "the right side of history," but this very phrase presupposes an objective truth we are reminded is impossible. As moderns, we are called to defend justice while denying a universal account of justice; we are asked to praise beauty while noting that beauty cannot be defined objectively; we are tasked with increasing freedom without regard for what freedom is for.
Modern people, as Chesterton notes, have no means of understanding or unifying the virtues they hold dear:
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
Our world is a wasteland of dangerously unmoored virtues: love without counterbalancing responsibility, charity absent faith, liberty lacking self-constraint. All of this comes down to a fruitless desire to create God in our own image, or instead to try to replace Him with a polished political system or a well-functioning economy or an all-encompassing formula.
The moral arc of the universe does bend toward justice, but it is not long. Morality does not take shape over the course of history, but has existed—perfect and unchanging—forever. Virtues are never actually in tension, though in our limited understanding and slow-growing wisdom, we must navigate apparent contradictions with care. Objective goodness resides within the heart of every person, and though our fallen nature demands that we reckon with evil—and perhaps deny goodness itself—we are endowed with love by Him who loves us, we are drawn to beauty by the one who is beauty's source, and we are assured of truth not only by faith, but indeed because of the reason and rationality that is our great gift.