Q: We could enroll our older daughter in a school for gifted children or in a very good school for children who are bright but not gifted.
The attraction of the latter is that it has a strong sibling admissions policy, all but ensuring her younger sister’s acceptance. Should we consider our younger child’s interests in deciding where to send her sister?
– David Quinto, Los Angeles
A: Your older daughter earned a place in the gifted school on her merits. You should not deprive her of that in the hope of giving her sister a leg up.
I may seem to be asserting that you must treat each child strictly as an individual, selecting the best school for the older and ignoring the effects of that decision on the younger. But parental duties extend to both children and require a more nuanced calculus.
In some cases, parents must make a greatest-good decision. That might mean sending one child to a less-expensive college rather than to her first choice, in order to make some of the family’s resources available to her siblings. In such a case, you would rightly weigh the quality of the schools. If choosing the more expensive meant paying full freight at Swarthmore and the less expensive were McGill, you might reasonably ask your daughter to bundle up and head north, confident that she could receive a fine education. If the alternatives were Princeton or cosmetology school, you would make a different choice.
But your actual decision here does not involve the equitable distribution of family resources. Rather, you contemplate sending your older child to a slightly worse school to game the system on behalf of her sister. This is too discouraging a lesson about merit, about fairness, to teach either child.
UPDATE: Deciding that “each boat floats on its own bottom,” the Quintos enrolled their child in the gifted school.
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Q: I teach ethics to 17- to 19-year-olds in Bavaria. By law, Muslim students attend ethics lessons instead of Christian studies. My class also includes Protestants and Catholics and some nonreligious students, an interesting mix. Some Muslims, often very religious, ask if I am religious. Shall I tell the truth (I’m not religious, but accept any nonfundamentalist religious belief), or avoid answering so as not to confuse them or cause conflict in their families?
– Peter Kopf, Altdorf,
Germany
A: Tell them – but wait until the end of the term, so that until then they can consider ethical ideas on their merits, unaffected by their teacher’s convictions.
This is less a matter of ethics – you have no obligation to reveal your beliefs to your students – than pedagogy. By disclosing your personal feelings late in the term, you avoid unduly influencing your students during their lessons, while demonstrating that such things can be explored openly and without rancor.
Send questions and comments for Randy Cohen to Universal Press Syndicate, 4520 Main St., Kansas City, MO 64111, or ethicist@nytimes.com.
