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Damaging Outcomes of
Erasing the Lines Between Right and Wrong
As
the schools embraced the new philosophy towards moral judgment in the
sixties and seventies, several techniques were developed to avoid teaching
anything that would indicate that there is a right way and wrong way to
behave:
- The use of open-ended stories — stories that present a moral dilemma to
students, but do not have an ending or closure that would establish the
correct or right way to deal with the dilemma. The phraseology that
teachers were instructed to use was "there is no right or wrong, but it
is how you think about it that counts; it is your own opinion that is
important and anyone's opinion is as important as anyone else's." The
teacher was not to impose upon the students how she felt the dilemma
should be solved.
- The placing of all decisions on the same level. In
a typical values-clarification discussion, a student's decision to have
an abortion is treated just like a student's decision to spend the
summer with one parent instead of the other. Selecting a sexual
orientation is treated in the same manner as selecting a flavor of ice
cream.
- Values are not taught but are discussed, or, more
accurately, argued heatedly. Those who can holler the loudest, argue the
cleverest wins. You can tell when this is happening by the raucous noise
emanating from a classroom, especially at the high school and college
levels. Persons participating may feel stimulated and have been given a
vent for intensive emotions, but very rarely is there any credible
learning taking place, certainly no delineation of the rightness or
wrongness of an issue.
Some
of the results of the "valuing process" (from Values Clarification)
replacing the teaching of traditional values can be seen:
- In
the attitude of disrespect many young people have towards their elders,
especially observable in the schools and community.
- When people think freedom is doing what you want
when you want.
- In
T-shirts boasting "If You Like It -— Do It."
- In
the rise of the "new morality" that gives promiscuity and licentiousness
respectability and acceptability, providing a hotbed for STD's (sexually
transmitted diseases), AIDS being the most notable, to flourish in
epidemic proportions.
- In
TV shows and videos portraying Mom and Dad as blithering, idiotic
chumps.
- In
TV shows, movies, and videos where sex is portrayed as easy and sleazy,
carries no responsibility, and is a humorous activity to be shared by
all.
- In
a general attitude of "I want it and I want it now!"
- In
the attitude that if someone challenges what you are doing, it is okay
to beat them up or shoot them.
Youth
Violence
The following current statistics (2002) are from
safeyouth.org, sponsored by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) and its federal partners—the Departments of Agriculture, Education,
Housing and Urban Development, Justice, Labor, and Health and Human
Services (HHS). In addition to CDC, other participating HHS partners
include the National Institutes of Health and the Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration.
How common is youth
violence? In 1998, homicide was the second-leading cause of death in
the United States for persons between the ages of ten and twenty-four
years, with 5,796 deaths. Suicide was the third-leading cause of death in
this age group, with 4,452 deaths. Thus, 10,248 persons between the ages
of ten and twenty-four died from violent behavior in 1998.
In 1999, high school students were asked about their
experience and behavior in the preceding twelve months:
- Slightly over 14 percent of students
reported having been in a physical fight on school property at least
once
- Almost 8 percent of students had been
threatened or injured with a weapon at least once on school
property
- Four percent reported being treated by a
doctor or a nurse for injuries sustained in a physical fight.
In the preceding thirty days:
- Slightly over 17 percent of students
reported carrying a weapon
- Almost 7 percent carried a weapon on school
property
- Slightly over 5 percent missed at least one
day of school because they felt unsafe at school or unsafe traveling to
and from school.
While overt violence is one of the "noisy"
indicators, making the decision to cheat on tests, use drugs, or be
promiscuous, sometimes causes even greater moral decay and harm (covert
violence) to the individual and others. The latter are systemic indicators
of the need for strong character education, in the home and in the
schools.
Here's a Cartoon
That Says it All
An award-winning cartoon about two lines was aired on
an educational channel several years ago that illustrates concisely the
principles working in the rise and fall of the Values Clarification
philosophy.
The cartoon is about two lines. One is a very
straight line and the other a scribbly sort of line. The straight line is
organized, confident, directed by noble intentions, knows where he wants
to go and is interested in getting from here to there without wasting
energy on useless by-paths.
A pretty girl line, whom he wants for his girlfriend,
finds him quite structured and uninteresting. Soon the scribbly line comes
on the scene. He is not constrained to follow any direct paths but pursues
any whim that strikes his fancy. He is carefree and looking for fun. The
pretty girl line finds his manner to be flamboyant, exciting and
attractive. She leaves the company of the straight line to keep company
with the scribbly line. They dance and romp over the countryside with
sheer abandon. In their frolic they poke fun at the dull, ordered life of
the straight line.
The straight line is saddened by losing the pretty
girl line and being made fun of. He withdraws to the sidelines. However,
he does not change to become like the scribbly line since he believes in
himself and what he stands for.
Time passes and all the while the scribbly line and
the pretty girl line do as they wished. It isn't very long before the
pretty girl line becomes weary of the scribbly line's ways. What she once
thought was flamboyant and fun about the scribbly line now seems careless,
disorganized, and irresponsible. She speaks to the scribbly line about it
and pleads for him to settle down and do something worthwhile, like
straightening out his line a bit. He scoffs at her seriousness and invites
her to go frolic with him some more. She finds that thought rather
distasteful and wonders why she found him so attractive to begin with.
About that time, the straight line comes by on his
way from here to there in accomplishing a goal. The pretty girl line finds
his well-groomed straightness handsome, the meaningfulness of his directed
ways very appealing. He knows what he wants and how to accomplish it. The
straight line is shy about looking at the pretty girl line because he
feels she doesn't like him, but he wishes she did.
The pretty girl line makes a decision. She wants to
become like the straight line and hopes he will forget her past
foolishness and help her to be a straight line because that is the best
way to be after all.
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Note: In a Values sense, the difference between
straight and scribbly lines, between being on one side of the line
and the other, is the difference between right and wrong, between
good and evil, between harmful and beneficial, between success and
failure, between happiness and
misery. |
The Face of the Child Entering the Classroom Has
Changed
Educators whose careers have spanned fifteen or more
years will agree quickly that the face of the child entering their
classrooms has changed over the years since their career of teaching
began. Schools have been traditionally instituted as places to learn. It
has been assumed that parents will bring to the schools children who are
cared for, well-adjusted, and ready to learn with a support system at home
that will assist them with the expectations of the educational effort.
Fewer and fewer children are arriving at school with these qualities.
Teachers are teaching less and managing more.
Disruptive behavior is more intense, more common. Schools are being
expected to feed the nation's children breakfast, even preschoolers, keep
children who are sick because neither parent will come get them, tend
children out of control, tolerate vile disrespect, provide counseling for
children experiencing emotional distress often due to sexual, physical, or
mental abuse at home, provide condoms, run maternity and daycare units,
frisk for weapons, man the hallways, lunchrooms, and campuses with
security personnel, all while keeping SAT scores off the
charts.
When compared to students fifteen or more years ago,
many of today's children:
- Spend too much time watching TV, videos,
playing computer games, listening to music tapes and CDs — making media
the number-one teacher of too many children.
- Demand to be entertained rather than taught;
are less proactive, more reactive.
- Are more distracted, taut,
over-reactive.
- Have a greater incidence of
emotional/psychological maladies that must be remedied before they can
learn.
- Are seriously more disrespectful of
authority.
- Are more vile and profane in their
speech.
- Have difficulty getting their minds and
mouths above their genitals.
- Experience a warped censorship — one that
has been used to silence the good while giving mediocrity and lewdness
the stage; a child may ask a teacher for a condom, but cannot pray. They
can read Catcher in the Rye, but not The Bible, The Koran, or other
religious tomes.
- Have unsupervised/unfiltered access to the
Internet, where unscrupulous pushers of the obscene and the unsavory lie
in wait, disguised as agents of useful, credible, or entertaining
information and content.
- Have a de-sensitized disposition towards
gore and violence. Juvenile courts report that more children at younger
ages are committing more serious crimes than even a few years
ago.
- Are indifferent and less sensitive to the
feelings of others; some without natural affection.
Most Children Now Cheer Death Where Once They
Cried
A seemingly simple incident is a sobering example of
how young people in general have become desensitized to the consideration
of others; of their feelings, even of life. There is an excellent
educational guidance film called "Big Henry and The Polka Dot Kid"
sponsored by the National Education Association. It first came out in the
late 70s or early 80s.
It is a story about a young boy named Luke. His
parents have been killed in a car wreck and he is on a train going to live
with his uncle, Big Henry, who is a logger in Canada. Big Henry is a
gruff, practical man and not very easy to live with. On the way to the
depot to pick up Luke, his foreman brings Big Henry his big dog, Old Dan,
who is old and blind and has tangled with a raccoon. Big Henry makes the
decision to have the dog put away and has the foreman put him in the cab
of the pickup intending to drop him off at the vet after picking up
Luke.
Big Henry picks up Luke and loads him into the
pickup. As he sits by him, Luke notices the big old dog and that he is
bleeding. Big Henry explains that he is old and blind and has tangled with
a raccoon. He drops Luke and the dog off at the vet instructing Luke to
take him to the vet, he'll know what to do with him, and then to head on
home ... just take the road north out of town; he'll find it for
sure.
Luke takes Old Dan into the vet, meeting the old
gentleman for the first time. The vet lays Old Dan on the examining table
and takes a large hypodermic needle, filling it with a solution. In the
course of the conversation between Luke and the vet, it dawns on Luke that
the shot is to put the dog to sleep rather than to make him well. Luke
steps between the vet and the dog, hugging the old dog on the table and
begging the doctor to not give him the shot.
Luke pulls a $5.00 bill out of his pocket, which is
all the money he has in the world, and offers it to the vet to not kill
the dog. The vet is touched by Luke's willingness to give all he has to
preserve the old dog's life. He doesn't give the dog the shot, doesn't
take the money, but gives him a medicine to put on the dog's wounds to
heal them up, then sends the dog and Luke walking home.
Big Henry is angry that Luke did not obey him in
leaving the dog with the vet but lets the dog remain. One day Big Henry is
giving Luke a lesson in sawing down a 100-foot tall pine with a
cross-blade saw. As the huge tree cracks and begins to plummet to the
earth, Luke sees Old Dan lying in the grass in the path of the falling
pine, oblivious to the tree falling because of his blindness. Luke yells
at the dog and runs to get him out of the way.
Big Henry runs after the boy trying to get to him
before the tree crushes him and barely manages to grab him and roll them
both out of the path of the tree as it crashes to the ground in a
deafening roar of crackling limbs and thudding trunk. The dog has run out
of its way because of the sound of the excited voices. Big Henry is very
agitated and says that that's that and the old dog will be put away. He
then tells Luke to ride his bike home.
As Luke is riding home he passes a pond in the forest
where he sees the foreman put Old Dan in a rowboat then row to the middle
of the pond. The dog has a rope around his neck with a heavy rock tied to
the other end. As a horrified Luke watches, the foreman throws the dog and
rock overboard. Underwater photography shows the dog being jerked and
dragged to the depths of the pond by the heavy rock tied to the rope
around its neck.
The trauma of the event is dramatic and full of
awfulness. Luke runs for all he is worth and dives into the pond, taking
out his pocketknife from his pocket in the pursuit. After having to
surface for air a time or two while trying to locate the dog, he is
finally successful in cutting the rope and dragging the lifeless, limp old
dog out of the water. Exhausted, Luke lies by the dog, crying, patting him
and begging him not to die. His parents have already died and the dog is
his best and only friend. After what seems like forever, the dog opens one
eye and his tail twitches a bit. Eventually, he recovers. Luke and Big
Henry work some things out and all ends well.
When the film was shown to students in the late 70s
and most of the 80s, girls wailed and cried as Old Dan was jerked to the
bottom of the pond, knowing his death was imminent. A few boys cried, all
gasped, were quiet, and noticeably glad when Old Dan made it out alive.
Now, when it is shown, students make jeering remarks throughout the film,
cheering and laughing when the old dog sinks to the bottom of the pond
rejoicing in his violent destruction and imminent death. Many boo their
disappointment when the old dog is saved.
Graphic and Violent Media Have Done Their Work
Well
Kids search out and destroy a good part of their
leisure time, seeking for more clandestine ways to achieve the
annihilation of anyone or anything in their paths. Gangs or roving packs
of kids causing death and destruction are acting out that which they watch
and listen to daily. Their actions are a natural outcome of all the things
that many youngsters are missing in their lives that build strong values
structures, such as a stable home life that teaches them principles of
good behavior on a daily basis, having a strong work ethic, having a close
contact with nature and its life cycles, feeling a responsibility towards
others and society.
Too many have lives filled with things of little or
no substance and are exposed to a constant diet of contorted media with no
one caring enough or knowledgeable enough to protect them from it
all.
That Illustrates the Problem. What IS the
Solution?
It is time for parents to
retake the helm of being the predominant teacher of their children in the
values area and clearly draw the lines between right and wrong behavior.
It is time for teachers to have a time made available within the
curricular framework to identify and teach the same values which reinforce
and extend those taught in the home using a methodology that has closure
and establishes that which is right and wrong, good and bad
confidently. If you're ready to answer this
call to action, click here to
order.
In his discourses On Walden
Pond, Thoreau said,
"For every thousand hacking away at the leaves of evil, there is only one
striking at the roots." No where is this axiom more observable than in the
area of values. There are innumerable agencies that have been instituted,
at an enormous cost to the taxpayers, to repair the damage of
irresponsible decision-making based upon weak or nonexistent values
structures.
Very little is being done at the preventive level or
the root level. Perhaps not many know how. Perhaps not many know that
that's where the work must be done if the next generation is going to make
better decisions than the present one. How do we go about redrawing the
lines? We must begin at the root or preventive level.
It is consistently amazing to ponder the discovery
that the greatest happenings are controlled at the micro level. The
turning of the universe is governed at the atomic and molecular level. The
same is true with disease, heredity, and all functions of living
organisms. They are governed at the molecular and cellular
level.
Logical reasoning tells us that the principles
governing human behavior will follow similar patterns; that successful
human behavior does not just happen randomly, but is an outcome of
practicing the principles governing successful human behavior. If those
principles are not practiced, the outcome is behavior that is not
successful.
Teaching children in such a manner that they grow up
to be healthy, happy, knowledgeable, productive, contributing adults with
strong character and capable of providing for themselves and those
dependent upon them is governed by certain fundamental principles or
values, which terms are synonymous.
There can be much confusion as to which or whose
values ought to be taught and this conundrum can become the topic of
heated debate, but need not be. While there may seem to be a great number
of values, actually there are only five root, core, universal, or
fundamental values, and all other values and/or principles are subsets of
one of these core values. These five, cross-cultural, core values
encompass all values, form a hierarchy, and are related progressively to
one another.
There are FIVE Core Values, Universal
and Cross-cultural, to which
All Other Values Belong. The Good News is —
They can be Taught!
If we are going to teach core values to the young,
what should be our goal? We want such teaching to be strong enough to hold
up over time and under duress and be age-appropriate.
As a mother of six children, eleven grandchildren,
and a public school teacher for 25 years, I felt that teaching children
strong values structures, as a parent or as a teacher, was important
enough to pursue a doctorate that would equip me with the skills necessary
to develop the learning materials needed for such a task.
If you are not ready to get real in the battle to
teach children strong values, then any do-gooder fluff will do. If you
want to do it and do it right, then you will do it with this goal in mind:
To teach
learners analytical thinking skills and behavior skills so that they build
frameworks of thinking patterns and behavior patterns upon which to base
appropriate decisions; and that these frameworks become strong enough to
enable them to make responsible decisions even when the umbilical cord of
influence between them and their parents, teachers or leaders is
severed.
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Note:
Learners come in all ages. Learners in the
early years (3-7) learn differently from learners in the mid-years
(8-12), who learn differently from teens (13-18), who think they
know it all, but are actually eager to learn about values if it is
relevant to their age group. |
Often there is confusion about things that can be
taught and those that can't. For example, many people feel self-esteem is
important and want to teach their children self-esteem. They might even
attend a conference claiming to teach self-esteem.
In
reality, self-esteem is an outcome and cannot
be taught. It is an outcome of responsible behavior. If you teach the
principles of responsible behavior and they are practiced, then
self-esteem of the highest caliber, self-esteem that will hold up in the
most depressing of circumstances, happens as an outcome. Freedom,
integrity, happiness are other desirable traits that are outcomes rather
than principles to be taught.
The Character is Higher Than Intellect Curricula
Includes: |
) when they become highly-functioning
adults ... then read on ...