Well, I'd love to say it ain't so but as a person who has served on the adult advisory councils of both a young men's and a young women's organization, I can tell you that I've known about this for years.
According to the hotlinked article, which reports the findings of the "2008 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth":
- 83 percent of all youth in public and private religious schools had lied to their parents about "something important", compared to 78 percent of those students in independent schools.
- 30 percent students admitted to stealing from a store in the last year.
- When asked if they had cheated on an exam, 64% of public schools students, 63% of religious school students and 47% of independent school students responded "yes".
And yet we continue to support the NEA? What's worse, is that even in religious schools, cheating is up! Where are they learning this? Could it be that our culture's instant gratification and "gotta have it at any cost" mentality means that our children are putting material gain in front of any kind of firmly grounded principles. What has happened to the civic education of our children? I'll tell you. In my opinion, it is "moral relativism" that comes from not grounding what we teach our children in sound foundations of moral and ethical behavior. That means standards.
Our culture is spiraling out of control fast. I'd recommend any parent that is not actively involved with their children, or more importantly, they and their children are not actively involved in some kind of youth organization (may I recommend either www.demolay.org or www.iojd.org as suggestions?) that they are only contributing to the ever increasing slide of our culture into moral decay.
2 comments:
Amen - I wonder if the problem is because our children are learning from their parents who have no idea or the meaning of deferred gratification. Bankruptcy, excessive spending, no discipline to save a few bucks for the future. .. Parents themselves are teaching that I must have it now and consequences don't matter (even government teaches theft). At what point is bankruptcy stealing from the rest of us? Seems the children are simply learning exactly what the parents are teaching them.
Brendon,
Well said. Our children our simply a shadowy reflection of ourselves, our institutions and our culture.
So the question is, what do we do to reverse the course we are on? The answer is: Get involved! Get your kids involved in activities or organizations that teach exceptionalism, good morals and ethics. More importantly, we as parents also need to get more involved in those same organizations as well as directly involved with our kids lives. Too many of our children are growing up with no father, or only 1 parent, or worse yet, no parents at all; only moving from foster parent to foster parent. Our "tribal" wisdom is not being passed on to our progeny.
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