A snippet from a reflection I wrote for an education grad course.
Moral injury in education is framed as an adult/professional crisis. Is the psychological weight of systemic moral failures carried only by the adults?
Along this entire discussion about moral injury, we haven’t viewed it yet from the perspective of the child. Are the adults the only ones who can be morally injured by being in this system up-close? Surely the children surrounding someone like Ramona, Lisbeth, and Max feel some distress for how their friend gets yelled at for being themselves, and surely they notice things like how “Forrester seemed to experience physical pain when a teacher asked him to be still or quiet” (Stearns). Outside of the disruption that these students may cause in the classroom, are we glossing over the implication that other students might feel bad for these kids too, and that distress may be from their inability to change the circumstances around them to fit their innate view of good or bad, just like adults? What effect would that have on how a developing mind views the validity, care, safety and belonging of the schooling system?
Do students experience moral injury too? Students may witness and fail to interrupt what they perceive as harmful. Some need an option other than the standard “linear progress” path to thrive. This is what Stearns is pointing out. But if those kids complain about school to their parents, they find there is no other option. The parent is locked into the same system as the student, with the powers of the government above them just like we see in Wilderpeople. This may be framed as a “hard truth” by adults, or framed in the sense that the child needs to grow up because they can’t have everything they want, or that they are still learning and developing, but reality seems more nuanced.
To be fair, when we discuss moral injury, we’ve discussed that educators view some aspects of the systems they’re in as harmful. But it seems to me that the students have morals too that get stepped on, just without the knowledge of ‘the system’ as broadly as the adults. The day-to-day events of school can leave students disheartened not only because they see their own peers struggling to fit their square selves into round holes, but because they feel that they can’t fix it either. Adults who know their students, and know that some parts of the system are harming them, have the perspective of which parts are the issue. Students simply witness the harm, perhaps without being able to pinpoint ‘why’ it exists. One friend can’t buy lunch, the other physically struggles to sit still and gets yelled at, another just stops showing up and disappears. Frankly, that seems to be a worse type of distress because it may be more internally un-explainable and entirely unable to be addressed by the student witnessing it.
Stearns, C. (2015). Bad kids and bad feelings: What children’s literature teaches about ADHD, creativity, and openness. Curriculum Inquiry, 45(4), 410-426.
Other relevant literature we read as part of this course:
Campbell, E. (2008). The ethics of teaching as a moral profession. Curriculum Inquiry, 38(4), 357–385.
Fenstermacher, G. D. (1990). Some moral considerations on teaching as a profession. In J. I. Goodlad, R. Soder, & K. A. Sirotnik (Eds.), The moral dimensions of teaching (pp. 130–151). Jossey-Bass.
Levinson, M. (2015). Moral Injury and the Ethics of Educational Justice.” Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 203-228. https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.203
Litz, B. T., Stein, N., Delaney, E., Lebowitz, L., Nash, W. P., Silva, C., & Maguen, S. (2009). Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: A preliminary model and intervention strategy. Clinical Psychology Review, 29, 695–706.
Oberg, G. (2025). Moral injury in teaching: the systemic roots of ethical conflict and emotional burnout in education. Educational Review, 78(3), 346-369. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2025.2504523
Salvio, P. M., & Boldt, G. M. (2009). ‘A democracy tempered by the rate of exchange’: Audit culture and the sell-out of progressive writing curriculum. English in Education, 43(2), 113–128. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-8845.2009.01043.x
Santoro, D. (2018). Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay. Harvard University Press.
Sugrue, E. P. (2020). Moral Injury Among Professionals in K-12 Education. American Educational Research Journal, 57(1), 43-68. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831219848690