In this third column on my school’s theme of Live Simply, Laugh Often, Love Much and Count Your Blessings, I’d like to talk about the underlying principles of Loving Much that I hope to emphasize to students.

I can hear the snickering now: “Do we really want to tell teens to love much?”

Frankly, I think that’s a problem we often have to deal with when it comes to young people.

Exposed to explicit sexuality at a very early age in so many forms of the media, many young people today cannot separate the issues of love and sex. After all, there is a lot more focus on the importance of sex than there is on the meaning of love and many young people believe they have to be sexually active to be able to receive or give love.

Love is something you must do.

Personally, I’m going to leave that discussion to some health lessons and emphasize in my daily interactions with students this year a more basic and less sexual interpretation of love. I’m going to approach love from the perspective of Primum non nocere – First, do no harm. I realize this may sound like a negative interpretation, but having taught the concept of respect (the foundation of love, in my opinion) in many ways over the years, I’m going to try a different approach this year. A new angle may appeal to students in a different way that will remind them of their obligations sometime well into the future. As for the Latin, well it just offers a little classic good taste to stimulate thought.

So what does ‘do no harm’ have to do with love? Everything. Imagine a world where everyone operated under the notion of doing no harm. There would be no crime, no abusive or bullying relationships, no war, no poverty, no pollution and no one would benefit from the losses of others. People would help each other, be kind to strangers, loving to children and tolerant and accepting of all cultures. We would all spend our days working in such a way that we would do not harm to the environment or to each other.

Utopian dreaming? Sure, but what’s education about if not reaching for higher standards to promote the greater good? If we can teach young people to ask the question, “will this do harm to anyone or anything?”, before taking action, will we reduce the negative social interactions, politics and business practices that give us all so much grief and stress in our adult lives? One would certainly hope so.

When I was a youngster, and a parental slap up the side of the head was not a criminal offense, I remember a couple of them accompanied with the phrase, “if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Although I don’t know the Latin base of a slap up the side of the head, I do believe that this phrase summed up the ‘do no harm’ ethos, at least when it came to interpersonal relations.

There are a lot of social networkers, bloggers and Twitterers who have not learned that lesson. The callous and hurtful remarks that travel incessantly in cyberspace are examples of how far many young people have strayed from the concept of ‘do no harm.’

I had a very interesting discussion with a young man while sitting around a campfire on a school canoe trip recently. He spoke painfully about how he’d been bullied in his last school through computer and cell phone messages. “There are people who won’t like you, I know,” he said, “but I don’t get why they can’t just leave you alone.”

Sometimes, loving much is defined as much by the actions we don’t take and the harm we don’t do as it is by the feelings we show to those we overtly care for.

Graham Hookey is an educator and writer (ghookey@yahoo.com).