The ethics of teaching: students as means to an end

At Jack and Jill Politics, which offers a "black bourgeois perspective on U.S. politics," Jill recounts an incident dating to her time as a student at Sidwell Friends, the elite private school in which the Obama's daughters have been enrolled. Jill says the story offers insight into what it was like to be black at Sidwell in the 1980s, but it really ends up being the story of a teacher who uses his influence over an 13-year-old girl, one of his students, as a means of confronting the girl's father over the Reagan administration's policy toward South Africa.

Jill -- née Cheryl Contee -- calls the teacher's plan "brilliant." Hilzoy is kind of appalled, which was my reaction, too.

Hilzoy speaks from experience. Her father, she explains, "was well known in the town [she] grew up in," holding an influential post at the local university. She writes: "Being thirteen is tough enough in its own right; it doesn't help when people assume that you're just an extension of your parents, and that you can be used to get to them, or to score political points." One of the two boys who asked her out in high school did so, she thinks, to increase his odds of being accepted at the university where her dad worked. The Sidwell teacher's actions similarly treated the 13-year-old girl as a means to an end (creating a conflict between daughter and father as part of an effort to change the father's activities, shaming the girl before her peers in the process). That he was a teacher, not an unctuous teenager -- as with Hilzoy's jerk -- makes it all the more unethical.