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Teaching ethics to fifteen-year-olds: do I water sprouts or straighten warped wood?

Ji-woo Park Fellow
· 5 replies · 257 views
Moral psychologyChineseJapanese & KoreanConfucianismMenciusXunzi#cultivation#four-sprouts#human-nature#moral-education
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I teach ethics at a secondary school in Seoul. Our school is arguing about a new behaviour policy, and I realised the argument is the old one between Mencius and Xunzi.

Mencius says anyone who sees a child about to fall into a well feels alarm and compassion, before any calculation. Such responses are sprouts: real, but they need cultivation as a seedling needs water. Xunzi says look at what people do without cultivation: they pursue advantage and envy each other. Goodness has to be built, as warped wood is straightened with steam and a press.

Both agree cultivation is essential. They disagree about what it works on. And that matters for my school. One group of teachers wants more rewards, penalties and monitoring, because students will take what they can get. Another wants more trust and more responsibility, because students will rise to it.

I read that the infant studies sometimes quoted as evidence for Mencius, where babies seem to prefer a puppet that helps over one that hinders, have had mixed replication results, and that a large multi-lab replication found no preference. And the situationist experiments are about a different question, how stable character is, not what human nature is.

So I would like several answers, not one. If the evidence won't settle it, what should a school assume about the people in it?

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5 answers

  1. Chen Yuting

    Fellow

    Please don't read Xunzi as a cynic. His word for human nature, e, is usually translated "bad", but it is closer to crude or ugly, unshaped. And he insists that anyone in the street can become a sage like Yu, through study and ritual. That is a hopeful view in its way. It just puts the hope in the practices, not in the raw material.

    For your school, a Xunzian would not want only rewards and penalties. Xunzi thought ritual and music transform people from the inside. Surveillance would be the Legalist answer, and Han Feizi and Li Si, traditionally said to have studied with Xunzi, are the warning about where that goes.

  2. Rowena Abellana

    Fellow

    I teach the same age in Davao. Filipino has a word, loob, for the inner self, the place where kindness and shame live. In my experience, if you treat sixteen-year-olds as if there is nothing good in their loob, they believe you. Mencius's water is what I try to give. But I keep the rules too. Even sprouts need a fence when the goats are around.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Brian Otieno Ouma

    Contributor

    I teach in a prison. Institutions designed on the assumption that people only respond to punishment tend to produce people who only respond to punishment. Whatever the truth about human nature, what you assume becomes part of the environment that forms them. That is an argument for leaning towards Mencius even if you are not sure he's right.

    Helpful · 2
  4. Henrike Vogel

    Fellow

    A strange coincidence across traditions: Kant also used crooked wood. In his 1784 essay on universal history he says that out of such crooked timber as humanity is made of, nothing entirely straight can be built. But his point is political, about why perfect institutions are impossible, not Xunzi's point that cultivation can straighten us. Same image, nearly opposite moral.

    Helpful · 3
  5. Ji-woo Park

    Fellow

    Thank you all. I am going to the next staff meeting with Brian's argument, which I think is the most practical: our assumptions become the students' environment. And with Chen's reminder that Xunzi wanted ritual, not cameras. Korea officially followed Mencius for five centuries, and still built a great deal of ritual on top. Maybe that was not a contradiction.