Who has a keener sense of injustice than the high school
student? School teachers know that at this critical time of emotional and
intellectual growth, students are often ready to ‘dig in’ to dauntingly complex
ethical topics, including those surrounding medicine and health care.
This past year, Aliza Bloostein and Michelle Ryder, two
seniors from The Rivers School, a small co-ed independent day school in the
Boston suburb of Weston, participated in a pilot ‘Bioethics Club’ program. The students met weekly with me (a Rivers teacher
and Community Ethics Committee member) to discuss ethical
questions arising from such topics as transplantation, vaccination, and medical
experimentation. Both busy high school students, neither Aliza nor Michelle was
able to fit another course into their packed school schedules, but a weekly club,
with a stimulating dose of preparatory reading each week, helped them explore
in depth some of the social and moral questions arising from science courses
and their science internship experiences.
With the help of Community Ethics Committee mentors Carol Powers and Paul McLean, Aliza narrowed her research focus to a
particular area of personal interest, physicians’ duties to non-compliant
patients, while Michelle dived into the wave of current literature on CRISPR
gene editing technology. At the end of their year in ‘Bioethics Club’, the
students proudly presented their work at the April meeting of the CEC,
receiving warm applause and detailed feedback. Aliza’s and Michelle’s research
papers can be found here:
In a separate interdisciplinary course on ethics, other Rivers
School students have produced projects designed to engage the wider community
in ethical reflection about issues in health care such as concussions,
transplantation, opiates, and care for the dying. Some of these student
projects can be found here:
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