During the ’40s, when I attended primary and secondary school, one didn’t hear of school shootings. Why? Did we have better laws banning guns in and around schools? Or hadn’t guns been invented?
Many of today’s youngsters begin the school day passing through metal detectors. Guards patrol hallways, and police cars patrol outside. Despite these measures, assaults, knifings and shootings occur. According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ 1996-97 report, there were nearly 4,000 incidents of in-school rape and sexual battery, 11,000 incidents of physical attacks or fights in which weapons were used, and 7,000 robberies in schools.
About 190,000 fights or physical attacks not involving weapons also occurred at schools, plus there were 115,000 thefts and 98,000 incidents of vandalism. These statistics understate the true magnitude of the problem because not all school violence is reported.
Along with school violence, many youngsters today exhibit little reservation in using foul language — not only to their peers, but in the presence of and to teachers.
Most Americans living today have little or no knowledge of yesteryear’s school environment. As such, they just might think what goes on in schools has always been. But those of my age know that schools, even in poor neighborhoods, in earlier periods were generally civilized. Yes, teachers had complaints about students back then, but they’re trivial compared to today’s. Back then, behavioral problems were: students passing notes, chewing gum in class, running in the hallways, jumping in or out of line, and smoking in the bathrooms or fire escapes. That’s a far cry from today’s problems of school rapes, murder, theft, and assaults and threats to both students and teachers.
We just might ask what could explain the differences in student behavior today and yesteryear. A probable answer is seen if we recognize that society’s first line of defense is morality — the morality of those thou-shalt-nots: shalt not kill, shalt not steal, shalt not lie, cheat, etc. The importance of morality is that people behave themselves even if nobody’s watching. There are not enough cops and laws to replace personal morality as a means to produce a civilized society. Indeed, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Unfortunately, too many of us see police, laws and the criminal justice system as society’s first line of defense.
For nearly half a century, the nation’s liberals have waged war on values, customs, and morality. Our youth have been counseled that there are no moral absolutes. Instead, what’s moral or immoral is a matter of personal opinion. During the ’60s, the education establishment challenged and undermined lessons children learned from their parents and Sunday school with fads like “values clarification.”
So-called sex education classes are simply indoctrination that undermines family/church strictures against pre-marital sex. Lessons of abstinence were considered passe and replaced with lessons about condoms, birth-control pills and abortions. Further undermining of parental authority came with legal and extra-legal measures to assist teen-age abortions with neither parental knowledge nor consent.
Customs, traditions, mores and rules of etiquette, not laws and government regulations, are what makes for a civilized society. These behavioral norms, mostly transmitted by example, word-of-mouth and religious teachings, represent a body of wisdom distilled through ages of experience, trial and error.
Starting in the ’60s, traditional behavioral norms became seen as inconvenient, fun-robbing, or inconsistent with one social agenda or another. Traditional values were discarded without an appreciation for the role they played in creating a civilized society, and now we’re paying the price.
What’s worse is that few of us make the connection, and insist on more laws in the wake of school shootings.
The views expressed within represent those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Capitalism Magazine’s publishers.
Editor’s Note: We agree that a grave problem today is that morality is treated as being a matter of subjective whim. Unfortunately the solution is not a list of dogmatic commandments derived by mystic insight. Morality to be of any value to man’s life must be objective. An objective morality is based on a set of facts that must be discovered by man’s reason, so that he may act on those facts in order to live. “Traditional values” should only be followed to the extent that they can be objectively proven as a rational value to man’s life.–MDC
