"The Buck Stops Here": Teaching Personal Responsibility in Middle School

     This essay will be published by June 2, 2022.

     In an era desperately in need of rebound after decades of cultural decline, there are few life lessons as important as learning how to accept personal responsibility for one's mistakes. If students have not already learned to accept this personal responsibility in elementary school, then it should be imperative that they learn the lesson in middle school, when they begin to embark on their journey through adolescence, at which point personal misdeeds start to carry real consequences. Of course, we all know (of) at least one individual who never learned the lesson. And a sense of discomfort or even disgust comes to us when we think of such people, and their endless attempts to prevaricate, minimize culpability, and shift the blame.

     Before I go further I should go ahead and aver, following Romans 3:23, that "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God" (KJV). And I would never try to exempt myself from this rule. I am fortunate, in many respects, that those closest me don't allow me to forget my mistakes; and so they help to keep me humble. I try to maintain an empathetic perspective, and hurt for students who come from backgrounds where the perceived necessity of accepting personal responsibility has been missing for generations. God only knows the pain they carry around on a daily basis. What I want to see is their making the conscious decision to mature beyond their background and break that aforementioned cycle by learning to accept personal responsibility, which is the key to freedom. But these days it's not always absolutely clear how to conceptualize individual responsibility; life's situations are often messy.

Historical Background

Harry S. Truman served as the 33rd president of the United States, 1945-1953.

     It has been a lifetime since the days of President Harry S. Truman and his sign that read, "The buck stops here." When I teach this principle to my students, I also teach what it means to "pass the buck," e.g. to shift the blame toward someone else. Since the early 1950s, our country's discourse on personal responsibility has been marked by, and has contributed to, growing political polarization. Conservatives have long explained individual success or failure in terms of individual behavior and personal decisions, as many have believed in "pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps."  Liberals and radicals, by contrast, tend to emphasize social structures when they explain why individuals (who are then categorized into groups) succeed or fail. And so those left of center, however far to the left they happen to fall, have often been more inclined to find the solution to social problems in our providing greater funding to the institutions they believe will break through those perceived structural limitations.

     Practically everyone sees issues relating to personal responsibility through the lens of his or her upbringing and/or education, however self-directed his/her own path toward education. When things go wrong, we often look for explanations for why they have gone wrong and who is at fault. In that respect, we bring our way of looking at responsibility to the table. That being the case, we have to be able to argue our perspective and also be open to others arguing theirs. That may sound fair. But sometimes this idea of open exchange of positions works better in theory than in practice, especially given that few of us are adequately self-aware as to check our egos when examining a situation where something has gone wrong. Yet true leadership demands the ability to check one's ego in order to attain a bird's eye point of view of difficult situations. 

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