The Golden Rule: Doing Good

The Golden Rule - generally paraphrased as some variation of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" - is one of the most universal of all human injunctions. Virtually every major religion recognizes that individuals share fundamental rights simply as a result of their being human beings and that those rights should be respectfully taken into account when making decisions about how humans should act toward one another.

This ethic of reciprocity is also central to education. For in addition to reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic, it is essential that schools also convey values about how students relate to each other, to their local communities, and to the global community. For as poet John Donne meditated, "No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." In other words, as much as we might want to believe in the omnipotence of the individual, the fact is that, among humans and in nature, interdependence is the rule and not the exception.

I believe that educators have responsibilities to inculcate not only students but also society with the values of empathy the Golden Rule manifests. And I mean empathy not sympathy. I'll never forget Ms. Lee, my middle school English teacher, whose stentorian voice echoes in my ears to this day, making the class repeat after her: "Sympathy is feeling sorry for; empathy is feeling sorry with." Her point was that sympathy could be construed as a type of noblesse oblige, which entailed a potential smugness at being better off that those less fortunate, while empathy required putting one's self in someone else's shoes.

While sympathy can still be beneficial to others - think of tossing a handful of change into a beggar's tin cup - empathy has the potential to change one's life because it necessitates the suspension of self and the acceptance of another's struggle as one's own.

As an educator I make a similar distinction between community service and service learning. To my mind, community service, while potentially valuable in its own right, has to do with a kind of one-shot approach to beneficence. At a school, community service can be the act of the act of volunteering for a car wash to support the local food bank or the act of cajoling parents into writing a check to the Red Cross for the Hurricane Katrina victims.

(Please don't misunderstand me: these acts are important in that they serve to assist others, and obviously I would rather students participate in community service than do nothing. In addition, oftentimes community service raises awareness and motivates students toward exploring empathy. My point is that it is not the acts of community service that are in question; it is the attitude that accompanies it. If doing community service makes students feel better about their ability to assist others, then that is positive. But if doing community service allows students to feel better about abrogating their responsibility to their fellow humans, then that is problematic.)

As an educator, my understanding of service learning is that it differs from community service in that it does not stand alone but is integrated. For instance, if in science class, third graders are monitoring levels of pesticides in streams, and they use that data to shame the local golf course into substituting their chemicals for organic compounds, what they accomplish is not only doing good things for the environment but also a better sense of what their responsibility is to an interdependent world.

Perhaps these third graders will continue their advocacy and convince their parents to get rid of their chemicals or perhaps they will be stimulated to pursue careers as Lake Tahoe hydrologists. The educational purpose of service learning is analogous to the lessons suggested by the ancient Chinese proverb "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day, but teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."

We all should strive to teach our children how to fish not only so that they will be self- sufficient when they grow up but also because so that they appreciate the relationship between fishing and self-sufficiency.

--Steve McKibben
10/16/05