On Responsibility, Pt. 1

Responsibility is a pernicious discourse. It is a name used in vain. As a thing, responsibility can only be taken, but when we talk we are always giving it away. No wonder it becomes such a worthless currency to those we pawn it off on.


We pawn it off on our students, telling them what they are responsibily for. Maybe we should blame Oliver Wendell Holmes, sitting on the Supreme Court, working out precisely who will pay the consequences for everything in the universe. Maybe that is when we began to confuse responsibility with liability.


The ideas are similar enough that we have allowed ourselves to confuse them. Liability refers to consequences and assigns who will pay for them. Listen to yourself the next time you say "responsibility." Couldn't you have more precisely said "liability"?


"You are liable for getting your work in on time."


"You are liable for your behavior."



Don't teachers tell students this all of the time? And don't we mean that they will have to pay the consequences for how they work and how they act?



But we are not lying to them when we say these things. Worse, we are misleading them. It is true that students are liable for many things, but we don't say "liability," we say "responsibility." Who can blame students for coming to shun responsibility, having learned of it through this sad, defeated discourse?



Responsibility can only be taken. It must be accepted and embraced. Only then does it become empowering. How do we find ourselves so bamboozled as to debase this noble notion and foist it upon our students as a liability?