Legal and Ethical with Carmelita Lamb

I teach ethics at masters and doctorate level and when we talk about ethics we talked about whether if it’s legal is it ethical it’s ethical is it legal because there’s a there’s a lot of gray area in that because certainly Jim Crow laws or legal slavery was legal boarding schools were legal but were they ethical and we they’re still laws on the books that could be questioned as far as you know the ethics involved behind the law and once so in thinking about that we I show students the trajectory of Education from about the 50s to eighties and we talk about how things like those children that walk in that alleyway towards a school those black children those little second and third grade children that walked as parents and students and a national guard everybody is screaming at them and I asked my students today would you send your second grade child in that kind of an environment just to go to school imagine the moral courage of people at that time of that generation of african-american people who thought of education so strongly that they would send their seven-year-old in that environment in regard to the boarding schools I there’s a number of interviews of course that have been done that have been recorded and are available and so I show them these interviews and many of them had no idea of what really a boarding school was all about and what that meant and I said is this is exactly what it means we’re going to your home today and we’re going to take your five year old and your six year old and your 7 year old and you will not see these children again until they are seniors if not maybe just their remains and they are not going to be able to speak English anymore they’re not going to be able to practice in their Catholic Luther in their Protestant faith they are going to be stripped of everything that they know and you have no say over it and they’ll be returned to you in the end whatever is left and they look at me like I’m insane and I said this is exactly what happened and so when you recognize that whole population those generations of students who were held to that type of educational philosophy if you will federal philosophy came back had no language had no religion had no self-identity is it any wonder that their society unraveled now we have individuals who don’t know who they are they don’t know how to parent because they weren’t parented they were institutionalized you know nothing at home that they’re supposed to know is anywhere near familiar so the reason why we talk about this is because when you have that native face in your classroom today in 2019 you have to understand all that’s gone on prior to that and so are you can’t you can’t prejudge you have to just understand where they are today there’s it’s really important and so my undergraduate students look at me like I have no conceived notion of what that means it looks like and I always tell them because I’m at the University of Mary I said this is happening just at the bottom of this hill this is not on the reservation this is happening right here in town so helping them broaden their perspective on all code and we have a number of cultures but certainly our biggest minority group here in our state is our native tribes and their personal trauma is not always received well and that is just it’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of deep reflection of these students and they need to see some of I think our undergraduates particularly need to see some of the horrors that happen for them to truly understand because they have no concept they’re only 20 you know their worldview is very narrow at that point so then we go in there even though the class is classroom management involves ethics it involves multiculturalism that involves caring and that’s the bottom line here you know what we need to do is care and our profession is surely it’s instruction and we all get that but if we don’t care about the student first there will be no instruction there we’ll all you can speak until you’re you can’t speak anymore but if you don’t care if the student does not perceive that you care about them and who they are and then you’re simply going through the motions for 180 days you know so I don’t know