by Wendy Fischman
After reading David Brook’s recent column in the New York Times, we would be remiss if we did not point out that his conclusion that adolescents are “bad” at talking and thinking about moral issues is exactly what we report in Making Good: How People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work ((Harvard University Press,2004), nearly seven years ago. In this book, we highlight the findings of our research with young people—those in high school, college, graduate school, and just beginning their careers. Specifically, we interviewed nearly a hundred individuals, including young scientists, actors, and journalists, to understand what it took for them to carry out “good work,” work that is at once excellent, ethical, and engaging. Though these individuals often espoused positive values that we would all want to work and live by—honesty and integrity, meaningful relationships, and hard work and commitment, many of them also told us about incidents in which they easily compromised on these values. Interestingly, however, they didn’t frame their behaviors as compromise. Just as Brooks proports about young people today, the young people we interviewed (some of them now nearly 10 years older) felt justified to make decisions that “felt right” to them at the time. We found that by and large, young people did not have a “moral compass,” they often justified their own ethical missteps in order to get ahead in their respective fields, gain attention, win awards, and gain acceptance to college.
Based on these findings, we created the GoodWork Toolkit to encourage those who work with young people to talk with them about what good work is and its importance in their work and to society. We developed the narratives (based on actual participants in our study) and activities so that young people could grapple with the issues that threaten the incidence of good work with the hopes that the next time they confront similar situations, they will be able to recognize the problem, have the language to talk about it, and some strategies to navigate it. As Brooks comments (in summary of a different research study), young people do not have the “categories” or “vocabulary” to talk about ethical issues. Interestingly and poignantly, we recently talked with students in a course on GoodWork (the teacher is using the GoodWork Toolkit as the basis of her curriculum). In interviewing some students at the beginning of the course (to understand where they are starting in their understandings of excellence, ethics, and engagement), we asked students to talk about what ethics means to them and if they have faced any ethical issues in their own life. One student remarked, “I don’t know how ethics relates to my life…we haven’t gotten to that chapter yet.” Needless to say, we encourage those of you who work with young people to think about how to incorporate conversations about ethics and good work into your own settings, so that we can help these young people as Brooks writes, “to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading…”