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I want to offer a few brief observations on an aspect of our program that is not listed on your child’s daily schedule: moral education. Promoting moral development is at the core of our mission, and middle school is the time when students begin to decide who they are and what they believe. Although a great deal of our attention may be focused on maintaining a strong academic program, we must be sure not to allow the quest for academic excellence to overshadow the quest for moral excellence.

I’m reminded of a statement made by John Phillips, who founded Phillips Exeter Academy in 1781: “Goodness without knowledge is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous . . . both united form the noblest character and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind.”

A strong commitment to promoting ethical conduct is certainly not new to our middle school. A Middle School Honor Code that provides a formal standard of truthful, honest conduct is new this fall. Under this new standard, every Middle School student is expected to tell the truth in all situations, present his or her own original work, and obtain permission before possessing another’s property.

Some may wonder whether it is too demanding to expect middle schoolers to be honest in all matters. The culture outside school seems to believe that this expectation is unrealistic even for much older students. Unfortunately, an unintended consequence of the Internet and other technological developments is that they have made it easier to be dishonest. A few days ago I read a story in the New York Times about the growth of web sites (with names like Cheater.com and Cheathouse.com) that provide essays, book reports, term papers, and even doctoral dissertations for easy downloading. One of these sites posts over 5,000 pieces of homework available for free. In a recent survey conducted by the Center for Academic Integrity, nearly half of high school students admitted to having plagiarized from an online source.

I’m sure you have also heard about the allegations of widespread plagiarism last spring at the University of Virginia, which has a rigorous, well-established Honor Code. When a physics professor suspected that students had been recycling term papers written by other students in previous semesters, he devised a computer program to detect six-word phrases that were duplicated in five semesters’ worth of papers. He discovered 122 cases of cheating, including students who had graduated more than a year earlier, and some who had just received their diplomas in May. The professor referred the cases to the University’s student-run Honor Committee, which is currently in the process of investigating each one individually. Virginia’s honor code has only one sanction – dismissal – for students guilty of honor offenses, so diplomas may be revoked and current students may be expelled.

In light of this disheartening information, I suppose we could respond as some did, by saying that honor codes are outdated, impractical, and idealistic, and we should do away with them altogether. I choose to believe just the opposite – incidents like these are the very reason we need to be even more clear with young people about our expectation of honesty, especially when they are forming a sense of conscience in their early adolescent years.

At assembly on the first day of school, I told our students that the honor code is not being implemented in response to an outbreak of lying, cheating, or stealing in the Middle School. In fact, I believe we have had relatively few dishonest acts during the two years I’ve been here. Instead, our purpose in establishing the honor code is to build an even stronger community of trust among students, faculty, and staff.

Temptations to be dishonest will not go away. It has often been said that character is what you do when no one is watching. I told our students that I hope our expectation of honesty will eventually become theirs, both for themselves and for each other. It may be that in the beginning many students will follow the honor code only because there will be consequences if they don’t. But we hope that over time they will begin to do what is right simply because it is right.

Middle School kids will make mistakes, even when it comes to something as important as honesty. For moral development to happen, they need to understand clearly where their error in judgment occurred, and to commit themselves to not making the same mistake again. We will take an educational approach to addressing violations of the honor code, and consequences will take into account the developmental issues of children this age. But every violation will be addressed, so that students may learn now, before the stakes become too high, that dishonesty is unacceptable. If we are sincere in our commitment to helping our children develop integrity, we owe them nothing less.