The Army officers' code of ethics is very simple: "An officer does not lie, cheat or steal and does not tolerate those who do." Originally the ethical code for the US Military Academy ("cadet" instead of "officer"), the Academy's grads brought the standard with them into active service and so a long time ago it suffused to become the code for the entire officer corps, no matter how commissioned. In fact, it's really the ehtical code of the entire Army.
Once sentence long, the code has survived several attempts over the years to expand it, modify it, be more specific and less general. None have succeeded, as well they should not have.
Machiavelli wrote that a nation's armed forces were often the strongest keeper of the nation's core virtues. Because an army's officers, even in the United States, tend be both insular and insulated from the rest of society, the moral corruptions that inevitably creep into civil life do not reach so easily or so soon into the military.
When, or if, they do, we're sunk. And this is how far the civilian standards have plunged: "American teens lie, steal, cheat at 'alarming' rates: study."
American teenagers lie, steal and cheat more at "alarming rates," a study of nearly 30,000 high school students concluded Monday.The study went on to say that despite these abject moral failures, the kids had a pretty "high self-image when it comes to ethics." No doubt, since we've been telling children for more than 20 years that they are wonderful no matter what they do, their self esteem being more important than their character.
The attitudes and conduct of some 29,760 high school students across the United States "doesn't bode well for the future when these youngsters become the next generation's politicians and parents, cops and corporate executives, and journalists and generals," the non-profit Josephson Institute said.
In its 2008 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth, the Los Angeles-based organization said the teenagers' responses to questions about lying, stealing and cheating "reveals entrenched habits of dishonesty for the workforce of the future."
Boys were found to lie and steal more than girls.
Overall, 30 percent of students admitted to stealing from a store within the past year, a two percent rise from 2006. More than one third of boys (35 percent) said they had stolen goods, compared to 26 percent of girls.
An overwhelming majority, 83 percent, of public school and private religious school students admitted to lying to their parents about something significant, compared to 78 percent for those attending independent non-religious schools.
"Cheating in school continues to be rampant and it's getting worse," the study found. Amongst those surveyed, 64 percent said they had cheated on a test, compared to 60 percent in 2006. And 38 percent said they had done so two or more times.
However, just as Napoleon observed that there are no bad brigades, just bad brigadiers, there are no bad children, just badly-raised ones. With rare exceptions, children grow up no better or worse than their parents teach them. The moral formation of the next generation is the most important task for the present one, and it is upon parents' shoulders and none other that this task rests.
Yet too many children, even at young ages, are left to fend for themselves for meals, for entertainment, for friendships, for reinforcement and approval, for all the things that form a young adult's morality. And even for parents who are very involved in shaping their children's moral character, there are many obstacles, chief of which is the general loss in society of respectability for religious instuction and an increasing world view that embraces moral relativism.
Thomas Sowell observed,
Our education system, our media, and our intelligentsia have all been unrelentingly undermining the values, the traditions, and the unity of this country for generations and, at the same time, portraying as “understandable” all kinds of deviance, from prostitution to drugs to riots.Well, the chickens, as Rev. Wright might say, are coming home to roost.
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1 comment:
You say in your post that kids are being left to fend for themselves.
I'm single with no kids. But It's been my observation that with today's kids it's actually the opposite. When I was growing up in the 1960's, I and my friends played in the neighborhood unsupervised.
That is not the case with my niece and nephew and their playmates. Their play is very organized, whether it's the swim team, or tennis. And if their parents were to let them loose in the neighborhood the way my parents did my brother and I, they'd have no one to play with.
Of course they're not teens yet, so maybe it will be different then.
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