I’ve noticed that at each of the colleges I’ve visited over the past few months, one thing seems to remain constant: the unbridled enthusiasm of the tour guides about quite ordinary features of their schools that, to them, are “very unique”. Each time, the students talk about their excitement at the school’s great extracurricular options, their amazing early-action application process, their professors’ copious office hours, or whatever else happens to fascinate them. In particular, I noticed that many of the students would focus on their schools’ honor codes and other such institutions. As I listened to the speeches get more and more repetitive, I couldn’t help but let my mind wander back to thoughts of my own high school career and the attitudes towards honor that have helped define it.
It’s fascinating to me to compare my two high schools with regard to personal freedom and the strength and order of their respective communities. I’m reminded of something one of my favorite old teachers from California — Eugene Mizusawa — would talk about when he started philosophizing about schools and why he was where he was. It was the middle of our freshman orientation, and some administration bigwig had just made a speech to the Class of 2006 about what a wonderful place The Athenian School is, invoking the school’s mission statement and dissecting it piece by piece. When he was through, Eugene went up and talked for a moment about how yes, the school is a wonderful and special environment, but that every school’s mission statement is just the same: a vague document that describes the same basic framework and principles of every independent school in the country. I don’t think that’s quite literally accurate — Athenian never advertised anything about “Judeo-Christian heritage” that I can remember — but overall I’d have to say Eugene was right. The speeches we hear about honor, and the materials published by the school on the subject, are as cliché as anything to come out of the mouth of a chipper young admissions officer. Though Eugene’s not here, I have a feeling that, if he were, he would come up with something along the lines of this corollary to his mission statement theorem: the amount of trust and respect between faculty and students at any given independent school is approximately inversely proportional to the amount of time its administrators spend talking about honor. I say “approximately” because my sample size for this conclusion is two, but those two points match the approximation yielded almost perfectly.
Athenian didn’t really have a one-word phrase to match Webb’s catchphrase of “honor” that I can recall. The closest we could come would probably be something along the lines of “mutual respect”, but that’s also somewhat sketchy. We had a code of conduct that probably talked about honor a little bit, but there was never anything even close to school-wide obsession we have with the subject here. And yet, somehow, we still managed to have take-home tests and to leave backpacks at the foot of any convenient tree. Sure, the lockers locked, but I’m still trying to wrap my head around the notion that this could be a bad thing. Besides, the student mailboxes, where teachers would deliver scads of confidential materials, were still wide open and only disturbed on one occasion that I can recall. We had monthly open forums for students and faculty to speak their minds to the entire school; there were elaborate procedures in place for all students to have a voice in the school’s government. Students and teachers were on a first-name basis (which led to some hasty corrections during class scheduling with Mr. Hurst, who was the first Mr. Anything I had spoken to in years). There were no expulsions while I was there, and there were certainly no speeches from administrators to the whole school after the fact about how this certain person didn’t fit in to the Athenian community. Although the community was by no means utopian, I think it’s fair to say that the behavior by the students there was generally quite decent and honorable without any specific, well-defined idea of honor set before them.
Before I had ever even visited Tennessee, I got the idea that things were going to be run differently at Webb. The message was clearly communicated that this is a school that loves tradition, honor, and values. If the view book and application materials didn’t get those points across, they were certainly driven home when, in June of 2004, our family came and toured the middle and upper schools. One of us noted that the lockers in the middle school by definition were not lockers; the administrator leading our tour informed us that the kind of student who would violate another’s property that way probably isn’t the kind of student that really belongs at Webb.
This was the first real-life indication to me of how seriously people take the honor code here, and just how much the culture at Webb is defined by this code. But what is The Honor Code, and what is Honor, at this school? Alex Bresee summarized it as well as anyone: in quoting Danny Jones quoting Michael Abbott quoting David Meske, Alex ended up with something along the lines of the following kernel of truth: “All honor is, and all honor ever will be, is not lying, cheating, or stealing. There’s nothing to it!” And I think that’s a great definition — it’s well-defined and encapsulated, it’s fairly simple to remember and easy to follow, and it’s pretty catchy, too.
So, then, what does an honor code do, and is Webb’s implementation really something the school should be as proud of as it is? Honor as its own reward makes for nice heartfelt speeches from school administrators on paper, but in reality, what comes of this amazing bond of trust between school and students? Lockers are left unsecured in a grand display of Webb’s pride in its system; regarding those who lose property, we hear sorrowful speeches lamenting our school’s lost innocence and trust almost as often as we hear the refrain of “heeey, if anyone happens to have picked up a calculator, could you please return it to my locker some time?”. Elsewhere in the system, a naïve assumption of honor is used as an excuse for what are in some cases absolutely unacceptable practices. Witness the disastrous loss of the original October edition of the newspaper, and the subsequent revelation that none of the students’ work on Webb’s file servers was being backed up at all.
So Webb has a couple of areas where faith in the honor system to solve problems seems impractical or impossible. That’s fine — it’s not like anyone is blindly, unquestioningly following it and fighting on its behalf, right? That’s what I thought, until my second close encounter with the beast. It was a few weeks into my junior year that I began to see the sinister side of the agents of honor at Webb. I was walking — or perhaps skipping, I don’t honestly remember — down the hallway to my economics class, when another student sidled up to me and asked for a moment of my time. “I saw you cheating on that test the other day,” he declared smugly, as I stood there shocked and dumbfounded. How could he have seen me? I had been perfecting my methods of smuggling in the correct answers for the last five years: there was no way this guy had found me out in under a month at Webb!
Well, not exactly. I was indeed stunned, but not at being outed as an academic criminal. Instead, I was astounded at the absolutely certain attitude my accuser confronted me with. Not something along the lines of “…so what was that sheet of paper you were looking at?”, but “I saw you cheating”. Though I soon established that I had been doing nothing more than checking my schedule, the incident provided a vivid illustration of the lengths to which people would go to uphold this code. The system established at Webb seems to encourage to some extent a vigilante mentality regarding the defense of honor at the school; a culture that turns students against students is surely not the best way to preserve the ideals of trust, honor, and openness.
Let me be perfectly clear, I have no objection to honor. I believe that human nature is in at least some small way naturally just and honorable, as there’s clearly something that made Athenian’s hands-off approach to honor work. What I take issue with is the entire Webb community’s tendency to pay lip service to the lofty ideals of honor — through speeches, plaques in classrooms, wallet-size quick reference cards, and so on and so forth — to the point at which the very idea seems trite and meaningless. An honorable community (whatever that means) is a noble thing to strive for, but Webb’s current strategy of bludgeoning students over the head with its Truncheon of Honor seems from my experience to not be the most effective way to create such a community. If Webb would take a step back and challenge its established beliefs about what is necessary to create an honorable community, it could truly be a breath of fresh air for all involved. It seems that the constant talk about honor here actually works to diminish the benefits of being in an honorable school culture: how much can one bear to hear of honor, honor codes, honor offenses, honor committees, honor pledges, traditions of honor, honorable behavior, expectations of honor, displays of honor? Past a certain point, the very concept Webb attempts to glorify becomes as meaningless as the endless speeches that invariably go along with it.