Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums THINKING BIG About Gifted Education Ethics and public schools

Individual lawyers get smooshed by ethical violations all the time.

It's definitely "rational" to practice law ethically if you actually like and care about your law license.

Thanks, everybody, for all of the great discussion. I am so glad that the U.S. Constitution came up. At home, we are always debating the literal text versus all of the law that has developed outside of the original text.

Also, I feel as though the ten commandments were common in our area when we were children coming from a Judeo-Christian perspective, but now, for this generation we need to expand that as our area has become much more diversified and that list may not be as basic and inclusive as it used to seem.

I think we have just been discussing issues as they arise case by case based on facts.

So that's why they change to politics. Huh.

Either way, how did the 'formal teaching' of Ethics go?

I am hoping it's like Aikido: you can be extremely good, but also savvy, and use other people's badness to disarm them (without hurting them) as needed...

Hoping.

Some may say that those who choose to believe the moral code of the Bible or Torah are free to follow their faith and "we" have no right to "expand that", suggesting they include information from other sources as being on equal footing.

This is separate from considering what may be taught as ethics in public schools.

Some may say that aikido is based upon a direct personal attack and a defender; By contrast relatively few things in life are a direct personal attack. Many differences may consist of equally valid viewpoints which individuals may discuss as equals without labeling the other as bad.

ETA: Not to say that "bad" doesn't exist. It took awhile to find but there is this old thread with an article linked in the original post which discusses kiddos without conscience, empathy, or compassion. Interestingly they exhibited strength in manipulation, what some may call leadership, and also organized "teamwork" in their scary, dangerous, antisocial behavior. Fortunately the article contained hope in the sentence "Physiology isn’t destiny.”

These children may be the opposite of those who exhibit a common trait in gifted children, often listed amongst identifying characteristics, which is alternately described as "advanced moral reasoning", "well developed sense of justice", "moral sensitivity", "advanced ability to think about such abstract ideas as justice and fairness", "empathy", "compassion". Links to lists of gifted characteristics include several articles on the Davidson Database here and here, SENG (Silverman), SENG (Lovecky).

Is there one agreed upon list that parents are using that is all-inclusive, based on humanity and not any one of its specific religions?

(We are always debating whether any set of beliefs (even human non-beliefs) constitutes a religion.

Are you just using the legal definition of religion? Which case sums it up?

Is humanism a set of beliefs?

We are back to the ABCs here. For now, we have not found one list that includes everyone, so maybe, ethics are always relative and we will always have ethics problems to solve.

I am going to research another professor who studies ethics (as opposed to religions) and see if she has written any books.

Thanks for all of your input.

Depending on who you ask, Snowden was either a systems administrator (says NSA), or an "infrastructure analyst," which is a roundabout way of saying professional hacker (says Snowden). These two roles would teach significantly different definitions of "ethical."

As a systems engineer I can say that ethical teaching is a BIG thing in this career. It's primarily left to the individual businesses to teach, but this is one place where the businesses find it very worthwhile to invest in some training, on account of it's your IT people who have the keys to the kingdom to do whatever harm to your business they see fit. Regardless of how you feel on whether he was justified in his actions or not, Snowden is a good illustration of the kinds of harm an IT insider can inflict on an organization. It just illustrates one kind of harm, though.

I say "was" in the first sentence because, assuming that he experiences his personal best-case scenario of returning to the US and being exonerated in a trial, there's no chance he'll ever find like employment in a public agency or corporate environment, so his pool of likely future employers in his past role is extremely small. He will never be trusted around non-public personal information again.


Washington DC is a direct subsidiary of Wall Street, so it's hard to say where one ends and the other begins.

Main Street is for bread and circuses. Wall Street provides the former, and Washington provides the latter.

My personal definition is that religious beliefs are those which have to be taken on faith, rather than on evidence.


More a philosophy, I'd say.

With regard to our town's treatment of gifted children (which I think is in indication of ethical treatment), it is politics, politics, politics. Everything people complain about with gridlock in D.C. applies to some extent to our little town. I don't know if I could work for either--too much politics.

Please keep this discussion on gifted education and try not to veer into politics/religion.