“When you have the chance to do what is right, try to do it.” We listened to late-night radio back in the 70s and 80s and this was the sign-off statement of one of the after-hours talk shows. We all hear innocuous phrases that float on the airwaves but this one stuck with me. It stuck because the number of life occurrences when events present choices of expediency, self-interest, conformity, and ethics never ends. In those moments, the congruence of choice, what is right, and the action to do it belong to everyone, and the choice made matters more than we know.
What do we know about right?
When I was growing up in the 1950s Disney presented a TV series on the American folk hero Davy Crockett. I can still hear Fess Parker, as Crockett, give his personal advice – “Be sure you are right, then go ahead.” For a long time, Crockett’s words told me to pause in front of every decision to take a breath and consider the rightness of my options. It may have been easier in the last century; things may have been less fuzzy. Why are principle-based decisions so hard to make today?
When I was a child everyone I knew went to a church on Sunday. Kids went to Sunday School and then sat with their parents for a church service. I cannot say that everyone knew their Bible. Most churches, mine included, made two obligatory recitations of Old and New Testament verses as part of the weekly service but gave no interpretation or application. Sunday School followed our denomination’s published curriculum that included child-adapted Bible stories, but nothing about Bible-based living. The 23rd Psalm, Lord’s Prayer, the story of the Good Samaritan, and Sermon on the Mount were the heart of our religious education. I was raised in a Christian household with little knowledge of what it meant to lead a Christian life.
The Golden Rule from the Sermon on the Mount was as close to Crockett as I got.
Folklore provided children with stories of people doing the right thing. We heard Parson Weems’ fabricated story of George Washington chopping down one of his father’s cherry trees. When challenged, young George said, “Father I cannot tell a lie. I did it.” The lesson of not to lie was a lie in the telling.
Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac served as guidelines for how children should behave. “Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.” “Don’t throw stones at your neighbors, if your own windows are glass.” “Diligence is the mother of good luck.” Most Franklin verses were easier to quote than to practice.
The concept of true direction was not easy to discern. Early in our history, the North Star became a symbol for directing people. Frederick Douglas published an abolitionist newspaper in 1847 under the banner, North Star. Douglas used Polaris, the celestial marker of north on a compass, as a directional target for enslaved people on the Underground Railroad. To follow the North Star became synonymous with moving from slavery to freedom. Harriet Tubman was our hero leading runaways to freedom using the Big Dipper and North Star.
The North Star returned to our vernacular in this century. In 2007 Bill George, a former CEO, wrote True North. He argued that every individual and organization needs an internal moral compass based on a set of core values, ethics, and purpose. Without a moral compass, leaders and people in general are swayed by short-term pressures, greed, and self-interest. George gave us the reference point for figuring out Crockett’s “Be sure you are right” – follow the ethics of your true north.
But principled decision making still eludes us.
Being right and being transactional.
Being right today has become a matter of transactions. When faced with a question of a right or wrong thing to do, a person reduces the decision of what is universally right to a decision of what is self-benefiting. The transaction is – “If I do this, what do I get in exchange? And the more I get in exchange, the better the decision.” Transacting deals make a successful outcome the justification of a self-proclaimed right decision. For the transactional person, justification for a decision is idiosyncratic not principle based. This person uses the royal “we” as in “we won” or “we gained” to generalize and popularize the personal benefit that their decision brought them, but that is only a matter ego bloat. “Me” is the most important person in transactionalism.
How is this different from ethical decision making? An ethical framework treats people as an end in themselves with every person having inherent value. The first lines of our Declaration of Independence are based on such ethics. An ethical person aligns daily decisions with their values, the promises they have made, and to act without deception. An ethical person respects the rights of others and treats them fairly and honorably. And an ethical person accepts responsibility for mistakes and honestly tries to correct their errors.
Transactionalism reduces every person to the means of an end. People only have value if they can be used for useful leverage to achieve a personal goal or profit. Friends, colleagues, and others are only tokens to be used, they are not valued. Moral duties become conditional – keeping a promise is only worth doing if the return on investing in the promise is personally beneficial. If not personally beneficial, transactionals break promises with impunity. They treat their good deeds as bank accounts in which one good deed can be paid against a bad deed. Social trust is a quid pro quo proposition.
What to do.
We do not teach children what to think, we teach them how to think.
The first part of the above sentence is politically contentious. Today, more than ever before, every topic can be approached from multiple perspectives, especially political perspectives. Also, now more than times past, free-thinking people must honor different perspectives. This honor is in our national DNA. We defend every person’s right to speak, write, join with others, and publicize their ideas. In public education, we honor these by teaching about topics and their perspectives not teaching to inculcate a particular perspective on any topic.
To teach about a topic is to teach how to think about it. Children in school learn to think as historians and to understand human stories that tell us how perspectives about a topic developed. Children learn to think mathematically and to consider a topic quantitatively, statistically, and proportionately. They learn to think scientifically and to analyze the classifications and properties of things and how they work in a natural world. And children learn to think literally and figuratively. They learn to consider an idea for what it really is and means as well as how the idea can be interpreted and applied in different contexts.
Public education is not parochial. We do not teach a limited or dogmatic point of view. Public education also is not partisan, at least it is not supposed to be. Totalitarian states dictate what their people think, control what they write, and restrict their public meetings. Public education opposes mandated thinking, that is why those who mandate oppose public education.
With the caveats of our Constitutional rights and public education policies, we can teach about ethical and transactional thinking. Through literature and history, we can use human stories to illuminate examples of each. And we can extend their thinking with problem-based scenarios. The more they think about thinking, the better they will understand their thinking.
We can teach children the value of developing personal value systems within the mores of our society and with their informed perspectives how to evaluate life decisions.
The Big Duh!
Not to be too simplistic, we can teach children to be Crockett-like in considering the implications of and responsibilities for the decisions they make. This curriculum will not display on their transcript but will be noted in the proverbial book of life. We can teach them that a “True North” is either an ethical process for decision making or it is the endgame goal to be achieved regardless of process. It is their decision to make.
In 2026 educating about ethical and transactional decision making extends not only to children but also to the crafters of artificial intelligence. AI makes decisions that impact humans and our children will be the next crafters of AI.