6.2 "Wrong Answer": Civil Disobedience?

Question

Shyamal Bikash Chakma · Accepted Answer

Response for "Wrong Answer": Civil Disobedience

Civil disobedience is not a repudiation of the legal system as a whole, but instead a symbolic or ceremonial breach of the law. When legitimate channels for change are closed or non-existent, the civil disobedient feels compelled to breach a particular law by a higher, extra-legal principle. The civil disobedient seeks to create a moral precedent by accepting punishment in the hopes that this would compel the populace or the government to implement significant political, economic, or social change. Advocates of civil disobedience stress that illegal activities be peaceful in order to establish a good moral example. Therefore, civil disobedience may go against the establishment but it can’t be said it is morally inappropriate because the government may be led by an unscrupulous person, which was reflected in the essay of Henry David Thoreau of 1949 (Thoreau and Civil Disobedience, 2017).

However, despite Civil Disobedience may not be categorized as morally incorrect, the actions may be termed immoral. As in the case of the Cheating Scam of Georgia described in the essay of Rachel Aviv published in The New Yorker. Aviv recounts the tale of a middle school math educator dubbed Damany Lewis who decided to cheat to improve his students' performance on a state exam. Lewis's desire to see the school advance and his kids grow was his priority, but his choice didn't turn out well. He was ultimately found out and sacked along with the other educators. The event led to the school being closed. If we closely analyze his action of Lewis, he was not intended to cheat or do any unscrupulous activity, but his actions were to surpass the tough need of Annual Yearly Progress, required by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to continue the functioning of School or prevent from closing by Federal Government Actions. The intentions of Lewis are reflected in his wordings, “I’m not going to let the state slap them in the face and say they’re failures” (Aviv, 2014).  So, we can say Lewis’s action was a type of Civil Disobedience, however not morally indispensable.

There was a need to resist the law as the stringency put many black students of impoverished backgrounds into trouble, but the way Lewis applied was not impacting directly the Government to contemplate over laws. So, I don’t consider his action as Civil Disobedient, but instead morally incorrect despite not being a bad intention of the doer. This represents the moral myopia (Moral Myopia | Ethics Defined, 2018) of Lewis and other teachers who were involved in facilitating cheating and this is evident from a line of the essay, “Waller concluded that the school couldn’t meet its targets that year. More than half of the students were performing below grade level” (Aviv, 2014). They could have applied passive resistance which has directly impacted the system like withdrawing from teaching, refusing to take salaries, taking legal actions, raising voices through media, or appealing to students and teachers for mass boycotts of the exams, etc. The teachers should maintain a reasonable thin margin between ethical action and the unethical way they have applied to resist the standardized test.

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References

Aviv, R. (2014, July 13). Wrong Answer. New Yorker (New York, N.Y.: 1925). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/21/wrong-answer

Moral Myopia | Ethics Defined. (2018, December 18).

Thoreau and Civil Disobedience. (2017, January 27).

6.2 "Wrong Answer": Civil Disobedience?

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