(6/2003) - The ethics class at Webb is currently watching the documentary film “Hoop Dreams.” The students are mostly from Middle Tennessee and all are in school in Bell Buckle, a rural town so small that the nearly 300 students comprise about half the population.

Webb is a private school, so even though 40% of the student body is on partial scholarship, there is little real experience of anything less that what might fairly be called privilege. The film is about two inner city Chicago students who, because of their basketball skills, will attend St. Joseph’s, a well-known local preparatory school, and be given an opportunity that has the potential to bring both young men out of the ghetto.

As the kids at Webb watch the kids at St. Joseph’s face the inherent challenges in such a situation, the opportunity for the discussion of ethics is close to infinite. They watch the movie in segments, pausing for discussion of questions asked by their teacher, Ron Smith—questions such as: “What makes one person push himself and the other not?”

Smith continues, “Ethics is not only about how you treat others, it’s about how you treat yourself. Why do we treat ourselves the way we do?”

The class is also asked to look at how the characters deal with adversity, where moral responsibility lies in culture, in schools, in leadership, in individuals. They examine the consequences of decisions. It’s a sentence Mr. Smith is famous for on campus, “Choices have consequences, so make wise choices.”

Most of the students on the receiving end of these questions are in 10th grade. That means they were probably born around 1987. The ethical morass that their families and teachers have tried to help them through is enough to confound great minds with vast experience. The challenge that Webb has taken on, and that Mr. Smith in particular faces daily in his ethics class, is how to instill values with such strength that an individual can look head on at the really hard questions and be trusted to come up with answers that are moral and true and responsible.

Webb recommends that students take the course in 10th grade, because according to Smith, “The development between 10th grade and 12th is significant. This course provides a good opportunity for the students to learn to think independently and to learn about who they are and what they believe. They can take it anytime from 10th grade on, but we think it’s beneficial for them to take it early on.”

Mr. Smith admits that his greatest temptation is to “fill the empty vessel,” to give the “right” answer. In order to be true to his own sense of ethics, however, he must exercise self-discipline and teach his students to discern answers rather than receive answers. People who are taught to simply accept the answers of others rather than to tease apart tough situations and make their own decisions from a strong moral core are in danger of being seduced by ease, by selfishness, by peer pressure, and by any number of other evils.

The textbook for the course is a college freshman text, The Moral of the Story. Smith also makes use of novels, plays and films to put difficult questions into some kind of context for the students. Smith says “When there’s a story, there’s an opportunity to stop and ask questions about decisions and consequences.” In addition to the issues raised by the story, the discussions provide inspiration for confronting current topics such as 9/11, Enron, WorldCom, Columbine, and the moral obligations of our leaders.

When Sawney Webb founded the school in 1870, he established the motto: Do nothing on the sly. The code is preserved today. In 1997, the Webb School Board of Trustees resolved that every student must take a class in ethics in order to graduate. Smith says the tenets of the honor code are the foundation for his students’ exploration of ethics. “Start with the Webb credo,” he says, “If there’s a constant that goes through our discussions, it’s that. Don’t lie. Don’t cheat. Don’t steal. If you had a universal embrace of those ideas, we wouldn’t be talking about Enron.”