The Honor Code
Our student Honor Code is a newer and important aspect of what our culture at Oakdale Academy is - and the high ideals we wish to grow and that we come to expect of our students.
During the first week students returned from Christmas, I shared these thoughts with our Rhetoric School (grades 9-12) during what we call J-Term (for January).
Student Honor Code
Out of the desire to honor God, my family, my teachers, and Oakdale Academy, I endeavor to be honorable in character, honest in word and deed, and respectful of others. In humility and with integrity, I commit to walk in a manner worthy of God’s calling in my life.
I commit to diligent study, patient reflection, and respect to the teachers placed over me. Together with fellow students, I am a steward of Oakdale Academy and commit myself in the pursuit of Truth, the love of the Good, and the cultivation of Beauty as I embrace the high calling of a liberal arts education.
What is the Honor Code and why is it important?
I want to start this morning by asking two important questions:
What is the Honor Code and why is it important?
Now, where those may seem like such easy questions and almost silly in their simplicity, they are rather complex and affect so many more things than perhaps they seem that they do at first glance.
Honor is such a wonderful word because it is one of those words that means so much in just those two syllables.
To have honor, to be honorable likely creates in each of us some picture of a great man or woman, a famous person, someone who has accomplished a great thing or performed some series of admirable deeds for which they are remembered.
Perhaps we think of great stories that evoke in us someone or some group that deserves to be honored.
Maybe we think of King Leonidas and his three hundred at Thermopylae or the Marines at Iwo Jima storming the beaches and raising our flag atop Mt. Suribachi.
Or maybe we think of mighty Odysseus fighting the suitors to win back his honor and his Penelope or of the Roman dictator Cincinnatus who freely gave up ultimate power to return to his farm, echoed later by our own George Washington.
We would likewise think of the less well-known and even those from the stories we know and love to read.
Harriet Beacher Stowe’s determination to influence how Americans viewed slavery when she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
It is the honor shown in true friendship such as existed between Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee.
From the great Roman statesman, solider, and philosopher Cicero, we know that dignity and integrity – two ideals to which the honorable man aims – we find true excellence in a human.
In Cicero’s On Obligations, he says that there are many moral qualities for people, but the essence of them all is honor, for an honorable man never neglects his duties or fails in his obligations, as he specifically says,
“for there is no aspect of life public or private, civic or domestic, which can be without its obligation, whether in our individual concerns or in relations with neighbors.”
Paul, in the letter to the Romans also notes this concept when he encourages Christians to live for a law of God and nature, exhorting us that this law is “written in their hearts while their conscience also bears witness.”
Let us continue with a wonderful quote from C.S. Lewis’ book The Abolition of Man where he says,
Our Honor Code is a commitment we ask you to make as not simply passive bystanders of Oakdale Academy, but as active participants in this thing called a classical liberal arts education.
We have had a list of rules before, of course, but they were typically a list of “thou shall not” items and their associated penalties.
Now, we do have some things you can’t do and, as we have a group of students, we do need to continue to have rules and consequences, but I want you to see that the Honor Code goes beyond that simplicity and servile way of looking at things.
Instead, this is a compilation of the principles we stand for here at Oakdale.
We are inviting you to some important things in the Honor Code.
Firstly, when you adhere to it, you are endeavoring – working hard – to be honorable in character.
What does that mean?
It means you are always seeking to follow the way that will help your character grow in accordance with the virtues we instill here.
It implies you are seeking to do the right thing at all times and in all situations.
It means, though, that you are endeavoring to that end – you will not always get it right.
There are times you make mistakes in judgement and there are times you make the wrong choice – and for those, you need to be renewed with a dedication to endeavor back towards honor.
In the Honor Code, you likewise endeavor to be honest in word and deed and to be respectful of each other.
For this, you should be just what it says – honest in what you say, write, speak, and in how you act – both with yourself and with your peers.
How does one do that consistently?
Our next line answers that –
In humility and with integrity, I commit to walk in a manner worthy of God’s calling in my life.
In so many ways, the goal of the first paragraph of the Honor Code is the relationship between you as students and the school.
You see, here at Oakdale, we want you to know, in particular as you move from Logic School to Rhetoric School and throughout your time in this final stage of K-12 education, that we are training you for the ability to govern yourself as you move toward a life of service.
If we as a school wanted you to comply and obey blindly, we would not be involved in a classical education where we desire for you to not only understand why order is needed as a better alternative to chaos, but that living a life marked by virtue is better for your soul, your witness for your faith, and for serving our loving God.
A great deal of what you do here is to focus on God’s calling in your life.
What is that calling?
That is not something we as teachers or a school can answer for you completely.
What we can – and will – do for you is to assist you in understanding what it can be but, more importantly, how you should move toward it while walking worthy of the calling the Lord gives to each of you.
To walk worthy means simply that you are working out your salvation with fear and trembling – you are taking the daily lessons and admonitions of your parents, your teachers, your church, and your peers and are raising yourself to the level of life where you know you will not be perfect, of course, but you are focused on doing what you can with the gifts God gives you to live worthy of His calling in life.
The second paragraph of our Honor Code deals much more with what we call transcendental things.
It starts with a reminder of your relationship with us and the things that not only we should expect of you, but that you should expect of each other and of yourselves.
Your study should be one that is diligent and your best. In many ways, I often echo the concept that we expect your best always.
That does not mean always and everywhere you get an “A”, but that you do your utmost.
The concept of patient reflection is something that is specific to how we do things here.
We want you to think great thoughts.
We want you to wrestle with those who have thought great thoughts before you.
We want you to wrestle with the big questions of life.
Of course, we want you to do that with respect for your teachers and for all of us that are placed in authority over you.
That means, as an important aside, that you do not always have to agree with us.
Actually, and truly, that is not what we are looking for – robotic automatons who blindly obey us.
No. We want you to respect that your parents have decided you are attending school here and that it is good for you to sit under our teaching.
Each of us has lived our lives to this point and has answered a call to teach and work here at Oakdale.
There is something unique and special about what we do as teachers. There is a unique relationship between teachers and class and individual students.
We know and fully accept the influence we have over your thoughts and your development.
It is one of the things that brings us joy – we are involved with your families and the Church in raising a generation that will hopefully not ignore the things that are of lasting and eternal impact.
What about when you don’t agree with us?
Well, simply put, we may very well listen to you – and there may be times where we won’t.
When we make decisions, we do so, though, for what we think at that decision point, is what is in the best interest of the school and students – from a large picture vantage point.
That may or may not be pleasing to you, but it needs to be acceptable.
In other words, you may not get your way and you have to be alright with that and still accept our correction and consequences. It’s part of the deal.
This Honor Code is, again, about your relationship with us and our relationship with you.
We want you to see beyond the immediacy of your young lives to the lasting legacy living through this Honor Code will bring not only for you, but for those who will walk these halls long after you.
When you pledge to be a steward of Oakdale Academy, I want you to understand what that means.
As a steward, you are a caretaker for a certain amount of time only.
This is your school – it always will be – but your time here is limited in its duration and, though it may not feel it most days, it is fleeting and short.
In that role, you are to come alongside all of us who seek to study the great things we get to study, to learn from the past, and to take part in shaping the future for the Lord.
When you commit yourself to the pursuit of Truth, the love of the Good, and the cultivation of Beauty, you are focused on these things that are called transcendental.
What does that mean?
It means that the great thinkers, philosophers, theologians, and even the skeptics saw these three things as those that are common to all beings and to all things that exist.
Plato, Augustine, and Aristotle championed this through reason to understand that the Good are the morals, actions, and first principles of life.
The True is that through thought and logic we understand not only our knowledge of God, Who is Truth, but that there are things in which we can empirically see Truth – math and science for example.
Beauty, then, is aesthetic and artistic and exists in our tastes and experience of the natural world.
Your role in this Honor Code is to pursue Truth, to love the Good, and to cultivate your understanding and appreciation of Beauty.
Why would you do that?
Because you pledge to embrace the high calling of a liberal arts education.
This is something we’ve talked about often here at Oakdale.
A liberal arts education is one that leads to freedom and something that is suitable for a free man to pursue.
Through the seven liberal arts – grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy – as well as the other arts we discover with you here, our desire is to help make you fully human so you may ponder, study, and experience those things that are good, true, and beautiful.
Disascalicon of Hugh Saint Victor said in the 12th Century that “these seven [the ancients] considered so to excel all the rest in usefulness that anyone who had been thoroughly schooled in them might afterward come to a knowledge of the others by his own inquiry and effort rather than by listening to a teacher.”
What this implies is that a truly liberal education frees one to continue to study and learn, continually shaping the body, mind, and soul throughout one’s life.
When you recite the Honor Code, you are making a promise – one that should be one you wish to keep and that we wish for you all to keep together.
Reciting it by yourself or reading it silently may encourage you, but I submit to you that reciting it together has more of a chance to make it impressionable and important in your life.
In the Honor Code, you have the ownership. Oakdale Academy is not supposed to simply be a place you “go to”, but a place you become a part of and that you help shape it as much as it shapes you.
Let us finish with Cicero from Book 3 of The Republic, where we are reminded that honor is a motivator for the man and woman who seeks to live virtuously,
Virtue clearly does want honor, nor is there any other reward for virtue. Yet it accepts that reward graciously, rather than making a strenuous demand for it. What riches, what commands, what kingdoms would you offer such a man? To him, all such things are merely human, while his own goods are divine. But if virtue is deprived of its rewards by the ingratitude of all, or by the enmity of many, or by the power of enemies, still, I tell you, it has many consolations to satisfy it; above all, it sustains itself with its own distinction. (3.40)