Garth George: Teach our children virtues, and all the rest will follow

COMMENT

Once again education is in the news as thousands of parents in both Australia and New Zealand desert the public school system and try to get their children into private schools, either state-supported or not.

In the Weekend Herald Greg Ansley's piece on the situation in Australia was headed "Lines drawn for class warfare" which, of course, is ridiculous. It reeks of an antediluvian mindset which equates a top-class comprehensive education with a long-gone (in the Antipodes at least) class structure based on birth.

The only class structure we have today is based on money and we can be sure that the last thing on the minds of middle-income parents concerned at the falling standards of state education is stepping up in society.

What they do have in their minds is that the state's politically correct, morals and ethics-neutral education, with its one-size-fits-all, no-winners-no-losers philosophy, has reached such a stage of disarray that it is likely to do their children as much harm as good.

Far from trying to foot it with the wealthy, many parents are prepared to make serious financial sacrifices, and do without themselves, to give their children the best education they can.

None of which is to say that there aren't some fine state schools which are run by men and women who really know where it's at. Trouble is, there aren't nearly enough of them.

And to make it worse, parents have to live in their zones for their kids to go to those schools and too often the property values in the zones alone put them way out of reach of the average family.

From articles and correspondence in this newspaper it is obvious, too, that a prime concern of parents who eschew the state system is that they want their children to have a fully rounded education and particularly that they be taught morals and ethics and that vague and indefinable concept called "values".

They are sick at the realisation that, among other things, what used to be called discipline is now called unhealthy repression; what used to be called moral irresponsibility is today called being freed up; what used to be called chastity is now neurotic inhibition; what used to be called self-indulgence is now self-fulfilment; what used to be called living in sin is now called a meaningful relationship; what used to be called perversion is now called an alternative lifestyle; and what was once called depravity is now called creative self-expression, and so on.

In Australia the Education Department defined the "values" all schools should be pursuing in a study released last August.

Says the study: "Values are often highly contested and hence any set of values ... must be the subject of substantial discussion and debate in their school communities ... The application of those values to real school circumstances inevitably requires they be appropriately contextualised to the school community concerned ... "

Which means the whole exercise is futile since it seems that every school can decide its own definition of "values" which might, or might not, have some relevance to society at large. Few seem to realise that values that are negotiable are valueless.

Values are simply the outworking of something else and in trying to instil values we are simply doing what society has become highly adept at - treating symptoms (in this case of social and community disintegration) and ignoring the cause.

So what we need is a set of behavioural standards that are not open to question or interpretation, timeless and unchanging. They exist. We've had them available to us since time immemorial, but as society has become more secular and pluralistic they have been largely forgotten.

They are known as virtues. It is not surprising that for most people they have been pushed into the background for they stand firmly in the way of the "me first, anything goes" world we have created for ourselves.

And it is their loss more than anything that has brought society to its present pass - so much so that many parents are desperately looking for a way to undo the damage and have put their faith in educational institutions which are still based on virtues because the owners and staff still subscribe to them.

There are only nine. They are simple to understand yet, it has to be admitted, difficult to practise. They are patience, kindness, generosity, humility, courtesy, unselfishness, good temper, guilelessness and sincerity.

The interesting thing about these qualities is that they all have common names, they are things that we see every day, they can be practised by every man, woman and child in all departments of living and when we see them in people we come across we admire them.

They are, in fact, the mortar which holds society together and if they were to disappear completely, society would fly apart in ways we can't even imagine.

And the incredible thing about them is that if we teach these nine simple fundamentals of life to our children, there will be no need to teach morals or ethics or values because in the practice of virtue all those things come naturally.

Simple, isn't it?

* Email Garth George