School and Morality

In the first half of the nineteen sixties decade, I attended a private school in Detroit, Michigan for elementary education. The former west side Catholic school was only a few miles from the Detroit cultural center on Woodward Avenue, the avenue that divides Detroit between east and west sides, and incidentally where one of the largest and most acclaimed art museums in the nation is located. I happened to be thinking of my old school, which has been defunct for quite some time, now, because of the moral degeneration that is occuring in the country today, with political corruption and madcapper antics in Washington D.C. & the state capitals, violent crime rates that the nation seems to just shrug off as normal, Hollywood and video game producers who will stoop to any degeneration as long as they're not legally liable and it will put dollars into their bank accounts, and on and on.

Really, though, it all goes back to how we were educated as children, and I don't mean just formal school education, but today the schools scoff at moral values education and are more and more only concerned with making sure that kids become cogs and instruments of the great corporate nemesis (e.g., the emphasis on testing over real education, and becoming compliant to the narrow educational demands of CEO's as opposed to a broad-based liberal arts education), the same entity that has put us on the brink of environmental calamity with their nukes and mountaintop mining, to name just a couple, and has thrown people that don't fit into their plans to the curb, so to speak, although in some cases quite literally as the number of people without jobs and homes grows.

Schools are more concerned about placing kids into the greedy hands of the corporations after their graduations, those relative few that can get in, in the present "free trade" era, than teaching civics in which they can learn that government is suppose to serve the greater good (the Republic, "We the People") rather than just a handful at the very top of the economic echelon. Now, colleges are even being dictated to as to what their curriculum should contain by big private funders with a corporate agenda, because too many people in the nation have bought into the lie of "big government," and as a result, many state and public colleges, and other schools indirectly, are not getting the necessary funding that they need. Of course, we need a big government, this is a nation of more than 300 million people, after all. To the nation's detriment, academic freedom in the schools and colleges is waning. It should be noted that the saint whom my old school was named after practiced self-denial and austerity. Values that the colleges which accept corporate funding with strings attached could learn something from, not to mention the nation as a whole, which prides rugged individualism, maybe, a little too much.

So a lot of these decisions being made in government, in the corporate world, and in the Hollywood studios, all goes back to the first grade, in a sense. What were we taught about moral values in the home and in the school, and how does that, in the aggregate, affect how our nation makes the big decisions overall? To me, the first grade cannot be underestimated, and although some people shrink from talking about moral values, because they, themselves, cannot possibly live up to its most idealistic tenets, as if anybody except the most rarest of people could (and I don't include myself in that rare category), I think this issue should be discussed more, and that we should demand that the schools teach basic moral values, not necessarily with a religious content as that would relate to whether the school is public or private.

Finally, I want to pay tribute to Sister Ruth Patrick, my first grade teacher from 1960 - 1961, who drilled me and all her students in reading, writing, arithmetic, and morality with great dedication. My late mother praised her, rightly, as the best teacher that I ever had.

- by Mark Greene

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