It’s National Character Counts! Week, and the Josephson Institute, a public-benefit, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, released the preliminary results Monday of its “2000 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth.”
This is not a report card you want to show off proudly. This report card should greatly concern parents, educators and politicians. Take a listen to what the Josephson Institute found in its nationwide study of 8,600 high school students:
* 71 percent of high school students cheated on an exam in the past year and 45 percent said they cheated two or more times.
* 92 percent lied to their parents in the past year and 79 percent said they did so two or more times.
* 78 percent lied to a teacher and 27 percent said they would lie to get a job.
What’s up, y’all? Dirty, lying cheaters. I know I’m a Gen X-er and my childhood started in a kinder, gentler era of American life, but is our culture so corrupt and perverse as to have raised teens this poorly? No wonder President Clinton lied about his sexual endeavors. All the kids are doing it.
But wait, there’s more:
* 16 percent said they have been drunk in school in the past year.
* 40 percent of males and 30 percent of females say they stole something from a store in the past year.
So now they’re stealing, lying, dirty, cheating drunks. Great. Whose fault is this? Are their parents so greedy and debased that they have demonstrated nothing in the way of personal ethics? Do they care so little about the quality of their souls that they’ll sacrifice personal dignity for a false and superficial sense of success? Where have we gone wrong?
If you call now, you can get violence absolutely free:
* 68 percent of students say they hit someone because they were angry in the past year and 46 percent did so at least twice.
* 47 percent (and 60 percent of males) said they could get a gun if they wanted.
These statistics are pathetic and grotesque. Whose fault is it? Who cares. When I spoke to my parents about this study, they told me that lots of kids did the same stuff when they were in high school. Yeah, and then those teens grew up and became parents, and look where that got us. Apparently today’s teens have been taught that material success is important enough to live in a world where no one respects themselves, each other or anything beyond physical gratification. That’s not success. Success is living well, with an inner sense of character, so that we don’t all have to walk around the world thinking everyone else is a stealing, lying, cheating drunk. No matter how many toys we have, an ethics-free world isn’t successful.
But this vision of success is everywhere. While some people want to post the Ten Commandments in schools, it isn’t enough to say “be good.” The adult world — media, business, social groups, peer groups, teachers, everyone — needs to be teaching by example. Teens don’t care what their parents say when they see them doing whatever it takes to get ahead, have a better career and buy that second SUV. Apparently, not enough people in America care, because it isn’t getting through to our kids.
So maybe I should just stop sounding like Bible Jim and join the party. Get myself a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and head off to class with a baseball bat and a term paper I stole off the Internet. After all, the one thing I know is that 99 percent of all those kids surveyed will end up being successful in life. Wait, that’s a lie. But I guess I don’t care.