“Truth is the only safe ground to stand on.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton – Honesty

Transcript

Steve Fouts: 0:02 

Hello, everybody. Steve and Dan Fouts here teaching different with 19th century civil rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with a quote about honesty. It’s short and to the point.  Here’s the quote, “Truth is the only safe ground to stand on.” 

Honesty is something students can relate to. They have adults who are telling them, for the most part, to be honest. But, most importantly, they have personal experiences of when they were honest and when they were dishonest. They’re going to have an opinion about whether telling the truth all the time is something that is the right thing to do, or if being dishonest allowed them to get away with something.  They’re going to have personal experiences to draw from, and that’s why I like this quote. 

Dan Fouts: 1:03 

Honesty, both as something that they experience personally, whether they tell the truth or lie, but also being lied to.  Everyone has been a victim of a falsehood of some sort. 

Steve Fouts: 1:19 

There are going to be strong opinions about this quote during the conversation.  Let’s go back to the quote and figure out what claim Stanton is making. Here’s  the quote again, “truth is the only safe ground to stand on.” What claim do you think she’s making? 

Dan Fouts: 1:38 – Claim

I think she’s saying that truth is security, a ground to stand on, a firm foundation. When you tell the truth, when you’re honest, you’re safe and secure. For this conversation, I would ask students to talk about a time when they told the truth, and it made them feel safe.  Maybe have them write that down on a piece of paper.  Younger kids might say, when I told the truth to my mom, or my teacher, it made me feel safe, because they trusted me. 

Steve Fouts: 2:20 

To add to that, ask them to look at the internal feeling they had when they told the truth. How did you feel when you told the truth? Did you feel more confident? Did you feel more relaxed?  We’ve all been caught in lies where there is a little bit of turmoil, when we have to tell someone something we know is not true. We might reflect on it later and regret it or feel guilt. 

Dan Fouts: 2:52 

Guilt is unstable. It’s an unstable feeling. 

Steve Fouts: 2:56 – Counterclaim

Let’s get to a counterclaim to this truth. All right, we’re going to give some pushback to this idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand on. The first thing that  comes to mind for me is this idea that lying in certain situations can keep us safe and out of trouble. I would even argue that it can provide a benefit for others  that we can’t provide if we were completely honest.  I’ll give a simple example of a child who doesn’t want to take their medicine. What should the parent do? They could hide the medicine in a brownie, then ask the child to eat the brownie. There was some deception there. The child didn’t know the truth that the medicine was in the brownie, and the parent had the child’s best interest in mind. 

Dan Fouts: 3:52 

I was thinking of the consequences that come from the deception as more  important than the deception itself.

Steve Fouts: 4:00 

Students are going to have experiences to share.  They will argue that the half truth they told was something that was better for that moment, and they in no way regret it. They might even do it again. You’re going to have students argue that you can’t tell the truth all the time.

Dan Fouts: 4:30 

Another simple example of this, that I’m sure would come out in the conversation, is cheating. When a student cheats, gets caught by the teacher, is confronted, and decides to lie, they are acting in a way that keeps them out of  trouble. If it works, then it keeps them safe and secure. Now, they may have guilt, but they’re not going to get into trouble.  They’ll get a good score on the test, and their parents won’t know about it. It could be argued that lying kept them more secure and safe. 

Steve Fouts: 5:19 

That might begin another interesting conversation about what happens when you do get away with lying. After you lie, do you keep doing it because you think you can get away with it, or are there cases where you came so close to getting in trouble that you actually learned your lesson? Although you lied to stay out of trouble, you decided that you didn’t want to feel that way again. There are a lot of different ways to approach this counterclaim. 

Dan Fouts: 6:00 

What you’re getting at is how it ended up. That’s why these stories will be really interesting in class, because you can ask them how it ended up. Did you have regrets when you lied? Did it work out? Why? What’s so cool about this conversation is that as you’re having it you’re actually working on one of those key SEL themes of building a sense of ethical responsibility for your actions. By talking about this stuff, you are helping them reflect on their own decision making, and building their character through this conversation. 

Steve Fouts: 6:40 – Essential Question

Right. Here’s an essential question you can use to close up the conversation and  start to think of connections to your curriculum. Should we always tell the truth? 

Dan Fouts: 6:56 

For a curriculum connection, I immediately thought of a teacher who just  completed our online course, “Teach Different with Essential Questions.” This  teacher had a conversation about honesty with a different quote, but the same theme. He decided to have this conversation just before introducing political advertising, and the importance of telling the truth in political advertising. What kids will hopefully understand is that when you lie in political advertising, it can end up hurting your chances of getting elected. I thought that was a creative way to use this theme of honesty in a middle school government class. 

Steve Fouts: 7:50 

For the elementary crowd, there are all kinds of books that talk about the value of honesty. Having a conversation to get the students’ opinions about honesty and to have them share some of their experiences first would be a really good setup for a lesson like that. They can see someone else’s journey and what they learned about the importance of honesty. 

Thank you for joining us this week to talk about Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s quote with the theme of honesty. Visit our Conversation Library to find more conversations and resources to inspire you to have conversations like this in your classroom. Take care everybody.

Dan Fouts: 8:38 Alright, bye.