Social content: best practice vs. communities' right to choose

I woke up this morning thinking about how important it is to trust the earned wisdom at the bottom of the community, at least as much as we trust the wisdom identified in labs as “best practices.”

This comes up quite a bit at Ripple Effects in terms of decisions about what social content to allow in the teen program. Many schools, and even whole districts, want to delete everything in our program about sex, except abstinence. We don’t think that decision matches up very well with most teenagers’ actual experience. Recent findings about the up tick in teen pregnancies during the years of “abstinence only” policy suggest our decision to include material on sexuality makes sense from a best practice point of view.

Arguments that districts make to exclude that same material also makes sense: that it is the role of parents and churches, not schools, to educate children about issues that have a strong moral component; that huge developmental differences among teens (emotional as well as physical) make it inappropriate to address issues about sexuality in any universal setting; that there aren’t enough hours in the day to cover all the material needed to get every student to academic proficiency, much less to add non-academic subjects to the load.

There are valid counter arguments to each of these argument as well, but that is not the point. The point is that there is wide variance in social values among (and and often within) communities across the country. Respect for that social variance is a hallmark of this democracy. It makes a lot of sense to come up with national standards for math and reading. It makes very much less sense to try to standardize values about personal matters.

That is why we have built into Ripple Effects software, the capacity for a local administrator to delete what they decide they don’t want – for any reason. (In fact the tutorial on “faith,” a resilience factor, is just as objectionable to some as the ones on sexuality.)

I started out thinking I would write about respecting the wisdom at the base of the community. But this has ended up being neither about true wisdom, nor about the true base of the learning community, students themselves. Instead it has been about control, where to locate it and why. I believe in local communities’ right to choose. That doesn’t change the fact that I also believe some choices make better educational sense than others. To me, it is a matter of personal and institutional integrity to honor both sides of the equation.