Contentious quiz aside, good to challenge students’ thinking

Just how mature are high-school students, and how much do we want their public-school education to challenge them?

Most communities have no consensus on those questions, and that leads to controversies like the one that blew up recently at Hilliard Bradley High School, where a teacher resigned after a parent and administrators blasted her for giving an envelopepushing “quiz” to her students.

School districts have a tough job navigating such situations; they want to respect community standards and avoid angering parents and voters, but they also should be striving to engage students in thinking and talking about important issues.

A knee-jerk reaction runs the risk of stifling interesting teaching and driving away good teachers.

At issue in Hilliard was a survey-type quiz given to 10th-grade language arts students. It was drawn from a website that offers a variety of free “personality tests,” many of them purportedly based on peerreviewed research by top universities. It presented students with scenarios and directed them to rate them on a sliding scale from “OK” to “not OK.” The results were supposed to predict the student’s political orientation.

It included bizarre and disturbing scenarios, such as “a brother and sister decide they want to sleep together — just once, to see what it would be like, but use a condom and the pill” and ones in which someone kills a baby rabbit with a knife on live TV and someone else kills unwanted puppies “with a stone to the head.”

When a parent complained about the test on Facebook, triggering a community outcry, the school district imposed a paid suspension on teacher Sarah Gillam on Sept. 6. On Monday, the Board of Education accepted her resignation.

It isn’t surprising that some parents considered the quiz out of line, but it’s fair to question whether this outcome is for the best.

Gillam’s personnel file includes a stellar evaluation and no indication of previous problems in 11 years with the district. She is credited with creating “opportunities for students to make connections with their own lives to make the content more meaningful” and displaying “the highest example of professionalism with students, parents and fellow staff.”

It’s fair to wonder how many similar episodes have ended the careers of bright, talented teachers who were helping develop young minds to think and probe.

The quiz Gillam gave her students crossed a line from thought-provoking into needlessly lurid. But should one misstep be unforgivable?

Some discussion of ethics and morality is as important for teenagers today as it ever has been. Today’s young people are bombarded continually by media of all sorts — unfiltered messages and images aimed at selling them products and ideas.

Try as they might, short of a complete media blackout or constant supervision, parents can’t shield kids from all of the challenging or disturbing ideas in the world. Sexuality and violence permeate popular culture; the world is complex, and the most moral or ethical choice isn’t always obvious. Open and honest discussion about puzzling questions can better prepare kids to navigate them.

Parents are right to expect public schools to avoid presenting any particular moral code as superior. But talking about concepts of right and wrong — and the fact that not everyone sees them the same way — is a valuable exercise for young minds discovering the world.