I wanted to make a few comments about the students I met at Eckerd when I gave a recent talk about protecting one's reputation.
The Career Services center at Eckerd College got in touch, asking me to give a talk to their students, both traditional and nontraditional. The talk in October was for the former; a future one will focus on students in the PEL program, students who usually are older and working. The contacts at the center were particularly keen on my concern with honor--my talk dealt with protecting and building reputation so as to protect and build one's career in the 21st century. I found that the students were entirely aware of the issues. My job--or any teacher's or employer's--really comes down to reminding or refocusing young adults on these issues.
I constantly hit one note: human nature has not shifted significantly in thousands of years. So we should expect that human motivation and action remains pretty much unchanged, including how teenagers and young adults are constituted. Nonetheless, something really has shifted: for the first time since humans lived only in tiny settlements for their entire lives, they must tend their reputations from a relatively young age. Pre-internet, one could mess up in high school, then start over in college. Or do the same in college, and enroll in another one. Or leave for a job and start over. Or move across the country. Now, however, our reputations, whether accurate or not, accumulate from the first words, images, and sounds that we post, or have posted about us, on the Web.
So-called "character education" would seem much more pressing, especially to its recipients, if we made this new world concrete to children from an early age. Otherwise, I fear that we will have failed them.
