Rights vs Responsibilities

Garth Thompson, principle at the Eden School in South Africa, made a comment on my last blog post, Victim Mentality, which really resonated with me. Garth said, "The problem is that people are more focused on their rights than they are on their responsibilities".

That comment reminded me of a magazine I read called The Week. Each issue has a section called "Only in America" which reports on individuals who have brought lawsuits for one reason or another. Here are some examples from the last few issues:

• A model who is suing a radio show host for $500,000 for bruising her bottom after she agreed to allow him to hit a golf ball of of her rear end at a Playboy Mansion publicity stunt.
• A Florida teen cost her father the $80,000 he won in an age-discrimination lawsuit but gloating about it on Facebook, thus violating the confidentiality clause. She posted that the former employer was "officially paying for my vacation in Europe - SUCK IT".
• A Colorado man, who flipped his car while driving on flooded roads, is suing the First Responders who saved his life for $500,000 because they should have gotten there sooner. The man said, "I'm glad to be alive but I'm looking for some help in paying my bills".

We hear things like this more and more these days and it concerns me that the kind of individualism that made America great is slowly being replaced by a more narcissistic notion of individual rights. Parents often foster this idea by being overly attentive and involved in their children's lives at school.

As educators, I believe we have a duty to continuously encourage personal responsibility and resiliency in our daily interactions with the young people in our care. We can do this in a number of simple ways:

• Take time to talk with your class about what responsibility is to you and what it looks like in your classroom.
• Take responsibility for all your decisions in class and admit when you make a mistake.
• Use "responsible" language when talking to students like "I like the way you took care of your responsibility by doing your work."
• When students are rewarded, attribute it to them being responsible and doing what you asked them to do.

It's the little things we do everyday that make the biggest difference in our student's lives. The more we focus on and reward responsible behavior in our classroom, the more we can help them understand that "life, liberty and the pursue of happiness" comes, not at the expense of others, but with great personal responsibility.