In the last week I’ve had several conversations regarding the intangible elements of education. I’m talking about the “soft skills,” the unquantifiable attributes that standardized tests don’t measure. I’ve always believed that these are as important, if not more so, than content knowledge. Whether it’s perseverance, social-emotional intelligence, metacognition, or executive functioning, as an educator I believe these abilities measure potential and success more than innate intelligence. For those familiar with the Carol Dweck research on “mindset,” this is what I’m talking about.

A former teacher from a fledgling curriculum start-up contacted me recently after hearing my podcast interview on “Educators Lead.” He was interested in putting together what he called “lightweight” lessons on some of these topics. At the same time, we’re examining our school’s standards in the areas of Personal Social Service, Careers, and Technology, many of which fall into these same categories. All of this demonstrates a way of identifying the kind of people we want our students to be when they leave us. We want them to have a well-rounded academic experience, but we also want them to be thoughtful, decent, inquisitive people. The word “dignity” has been hovering in thoughts. I think we want our students to be dignified and to value dignity in others.

How do you teach “dignity?” How do you teach students to recognize and appreciate the dignity of others? It’s more than social-emotional awareness. It’s different from empathy. It pertains to respect, pride, perhaps even honor, and like those other immeasurable qualities, it’s as important as knowledge. The most straightforward way to teach it is to model it. As educators it is incumbent upon us to model all of the qualities we prize in our students: life-long learning, empathy, curiosity, etc. Certainly, dignity is no different. But how do we do it?

1. Model. Model. Model. If dignity is a product of respect and honor, then we model respect and we act honorably in all things. Students will not respect a teacher who does not respect them.

2. We never take a student’s dignity from him. Kids, particularly young adolescents, can be frustrating to the point of hair loss. There’s no point in denying it. However, when we lose it, when we show that frustration, it often manifests itself in taking a student’s dignity from him, either by calling out his behavior or worse, publicly humiliating him. Discipline and correction ought to happen privately.

3. Highlight examples outside of the classroom. As I wrote last week, talking to students about the political climate can be treacherous, but there are examples in the public sphere. Whatever one may think of the President’s politics, empirically, he has been a dignified leader and has rarely, if ever, overtly undermined the dignity of others.

We don’t talk about dignity very often, in or out of school. I think we ought to. We need to re-emphasize its importance in our society. We’ve lost a lot of our dignity as a people recently and we need to re-gain it.

Meteorological Observation: I think it’s snowed more in March than in November through February. Three years ago there was record snow up here. This year there’s record lack of snow. But the jury is still out on climate change, right???

“An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” — Thomas Jefferson

I don’t believe it’s an exaggeration to say that our job as educators is more important than ever. We live in an era where facts are denigrated, the intelligent and educated are distrusted, and denial of truth is a badge of honor for some. Pundits and layman across the country and around the world have been trying to pinpoint the various causes of the meteoric rise of the leading Republican candidate for President (whose name I choose to avoid even typing). I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that one of the reasons is a failure in the education system.

Now that kids have 24/7 access to information, I would argue that once they’ve been taught to read, we have to work harder at teaching them to think critically. They need to be taught to be thoughtful and critical consumers of information. There’s a glut of it at their fingertips and so much of it is hyperbole and rhetoric masquerading as fact. As teachers, we’re still required to walk the ethical line, particularly when it comes to politics, since our positions give us influence over young minds, but that should not preclude us from guiding students in pursuit of truth.

How do we accomplish this without revealing our personal beliefs (and even biases)? How do we help them call “BS” without calling it for them? We need to spend time on delineating fact from fiction and truth from belief. It is a fact that unemployment is at its’ lowest point since April, 2008. It is opinion that the country is “headed in the wrong direction.” It is a fact that there are over 2.5 million veterans of the Irag and Afghanistan wars. It is opinion that these are/were unjust, immoral wars. We can and should have these conversations with our students. At what age it would be appropriate to begin these conversations is debatable. My opinion is that middle school age students are ready for this conversation. Tread lightly, but tread we must.

Finally, the current Presidential campaign has also revealed a deploring lack of decency and civility in our society. Social-emotional learning has become a critical component in public education across the country, and the current political climate has revealed a desperate need for it, from the infantile behavior of candidates to the volatile behavior of campaign supporters. These last several months have been a shocking revelation of the worst of us. We need to show and teach our children to do and be better.

Cultural Observation: The largest state in the Union is one gigantic small town. The population of Alaska is just over 700,000. That’s about equivalent to Wrigleyville. Beyond that hyperbolic statistic, though, there is a small-town friendliness and pride in the state. Trajan Langdon, a former Duke and NBA player was the first Alaskan to play in the NBA. He was recently named an NBA executive and he was celebrated like a conquering hero. The daily sports section of Alaska’s biggest newspaper regularly highlights the accomplishments of the four current Alaskans in the NHL and NBA. I don’t mean to sound condescending, but it’s cute.