Simcoe County District School Board celebrates character education. Our “Commit to Character” program is an important aspect of our schools.

Schools are more than centres for academic instruction; they are places of community, teaching citizenship. As a board, we resolve to commit to character, to challenge our conduct and equip the moral imagination of our students.

Character matters. Helping pupils to realise a caring worldview inspires students to serve society, actively empathising with those in need. Schools, as centres of the community, need to foster community values: fairness, respect, peace, tolerance and justice.

It is important that the values instilled in students be reflected by the school board’s actions: this means environmentally friendly schools – a provincial initiative our board is at the forefront in implementing.

Similarly, it is time for the board to examine its purchasing practices in an effort to align them more closely with the character attributes promoted in our schools. I, along with the Student Senate, hope the board will take steps to prevent the purchasing of clothing from sweatshops.

We need to ensure our schools maintain a caring conscience. Custodians, team players and club members should not wear their school logo if the fabric was made by kids in the Third World in sweatshops. Our clothing should not be made by kids our own age, who rather than receiving the same privileged education and start to life, work in near slavery conditions and are robbed of a proper childhood.

Economically, perhaps we cannot realistically end child labour, but we can at least ensure fair labour conditions, safety and schooling for young workers supporting their families.

The board taking an effort to ensure fair labour practices is a way to tie student success into the real world; the issues learned in a world issues class are put into practice and the player on the football field can have a clear conscience joining the social-justice club because he knows his jersey was ethically made.

This issue is also about responsibility. We cannot abandon our brothers and sisters in the Third World, children who rather than going to school like us, go to sweatshops.

At this year’s Public Education Symposium in Toronto, Canadian humanitarian Stephen Lewis spoke about how African children – children whose lives have been ravaged by war, AIDS, poverty and hunger – desperately want to go to school. We need to help them.

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Anan said, “Education is peace building by another name”. The school board can make a difference in the lives of young children by implementing a policy to ensure they are treated fairly.

By standing up against consumer gluttony and the ease of cheap commerce, we send a signal to corporations that molest the dignity of the poor and abuse the sad situations of the Third World for profit.

And, if the board’s actions are emulated by other purchasers, we can work to start a culture, demanding fairness for Third World workers. We have a responsibility to do what we can for those who have so little; at the very least, we cannot blindly contribute to their mistreatment.

There is an importance to educating citizens, including through practical applications, teaching students good values and then having them commit to character in their daily decisions. Students in Simcoe County can learn what we are doing to live out good global citizenship; perhaps we can even open the eyes to future humanitarians who may one day heal the fissures of a complicated world.

Education, true education, is about more than learning: it is also about doing.

• Jonathan Scott is a student trustee with the Simcoe County District School Board. E-mail jscott@scdsb.on.ca.