At Bosque School, we have three core values--scholarship, community, and integrity--and we view all three as equally important. We stress these values again and again, and we post the words around campus. We ground our conversations with students in these concepts, and we show them the relevance of these values in all areas of their lives. Candidly, I wonder sometimes if they have a full understanding of the three concepts.
Students might have an easier time understanding scholarship and community than integrity. They might define scholarship as doing well in their academic classes and being engaged in their learning. While this is a part of the concept of scholarship, we not only want them to get good grades, but also to be curious and excited about ideas. When we talk about community, we hope they know it means caring for each other in our school and also being involved in the larger communities of Albuquerque and New Mexico. Interestingly, when students see something wrong at school, as teens are apt to do, they often explain that the wrong they have witnessed has violated Bosque’s devotion to community. At times likes these, I am as proud of our students as I could ever be.
Beyond the obvious notions of being honest and forthcoming, to have students explain integrity might challenge them. After a particularly difficult school issue recently, I spoke with our students at morning meeting about integrity. I told our students that they are good people who typically do the right thing, and it’s because of this that we care for them so deeply and we trust them. The vast majority of times they act with integrity, and we become accustomed to their behaving in this way. I quoted one of our teachers who often says, “Integrity is not about what we do when people are watching, but it’s what we do when no one is watching.”
An online google search of the word integrity produces these definitions of integrity: 1) the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness, and 2) the state of being whole and undivided.” Although these are two separate definitions, one could argue that they are actually the same. More often than not, our students want to do what is good, right, and moral. This is their instinct and their default mode. In their heart of hearts, this is who they are, and I believe that for the most part, this is their natural inclination.
When students act with integrity, their cognitive intentions and their emotional impulses are one and the same. At these times, they are whole and the different elements of their personalities are in alignment with one another. This is partially why adolescents, who are constantly trying to figure things out, are happier when parameters for things are clearly delineated because their lives may then lack the anxiety that accompanies inner turmoil.
On the other hand, when students act without integrity, this can cause conflict with others and with themselves. Their beings are bifurcated, and their reactions and their conscience are at odds. In these moments, they may say, “I don’t know why I did what I did,” and much of the recent research on the adolescent brain may support their statements. Consequently, it is up to the adults in their lives to guide them and help them get back to a place of wholeness.
Maybe one of the best pieces of advice on living a good life our children could heed comes from the physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson as he memorialized the scientist Carl Sagan: “Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others? That’s who we are! We’re not who we say we are, we’re not who we want to be — we are the sum of the influence and impact that we have, in our lives, on others.” Perhaps integrity is ultimately defined by the good or ill we cause other people. For students to be “whole and undivided” on the inside, they need to act on their “strong moral principles” on the outside and be the positive influence on others that they wish to be.
