OPINION

DANA D. KELLEY: Virtue in education

Last week, a video of a random arrest in Houston went viral. In that video, a police officer is shown struggling on the ground to subdue a 17-year-old suspect, who had fled after being pulled over in a car associated with an armed-robbery report.

The singularity of the video is not the actual arrest itself, but the behavior of both the teen suspect and the small spate of bystanders.

Specifically, their collective refusal to respond to the officer's request for assistance.

A security guard arrives at the scene, but instead of aiding the officer, pulls out a cell phone and walks around while filming the incident, presumably to capture it from every angle.

The crime-related implications of the video and the "gun grab" attempt by the suspect--5 percent of police deaths come at the hands of criminals who manage to gain control of officers' weapons--are obvious.

But there's a more subtle, fundamental dynamic on demonstration in the shaky cell-phone footage, which ties back to the most basic purpose and function of public education and the fruits it should deliver as a result of the enormous expenditures we fund as taxpayers.

The state of Texas has invested to date roughly $100,000 in the 17-year-old suspect's public education. But watching just 60 seconds of his behavior raises a pressing question: What has it taught him?

A hundred grand is quite a sum to spend only to see fear, stupidity and insolence on display.

It's a small fortune wasted entirely when the subject has failed to grasp the concepts of right and wrong. Indeed, there are far cheaper ways to produce a lawless underclass.

Modern cynics and social apologists may cry foul, arguing that parents are mostly to blame for ill-behaved children.

That's a half-truth cop-out. Irresponsible parents are irrelevant to the purpose and accountability of public education. On the contrary, for children who get no moral instruction at home (or worse, horribly immoral or criminal examples), their only hope may be to get it at school.

As with other "modern" mindsets, we've lost touch with our nation's founding principles pertaining to public schools.

Noah Webster spoke in eloquent summary for the collective wisdom on the subject in a 1788 essay when he wrote, "The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities."

During the formative years of our republic, it was universally understood that virtue was necessary for liberty, and the idea of tax-supported education was to produce a virtuous citizenry capable of perpetuating self-government.

The 17-year-old Texan would have taken a battery of standardized academic tests as part of his public schooling to gauge his mastery of math and science.

It's unlikely he ever took a school test designed to measure his proficiency at being good or acting respectfully in preparation for situations such as getting pulled over.

A hundred years after Webster, English essayist and critic John Ruskin turned his prolific pen to the topic of teaching, with some keen insights worth repeating.

"Educate, or govern, they are one and the same word," he wrote. "Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave."

He saw no use at all in teaching students letters and numbers, only to "then leav[e] them to turn their arithmetic to roguery, and their literature to lust."

Sterile information without moral direction, in other words, defeats the true object of education, which he described as "to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things."

Teaching the value of virtue was acknowledged to be paramount by the same great minds that conceived our nation and built its foundations.

Value-neutral instruction is a contemporary myth that corrodes and corrupts the moral compass of students.

For example, writing in The Atlantic, a high school teacher in Kentucky described posing an ethical quandary to his junior English class: "Your boyfriend or girlfriend has committed a felony, during which other people were badly harmed. Should you or should you not turn him or her [in to] the police?"

Exhibiting what the teacher termed a troubling "unequivocal unconcern" for the people harmed in the hypothetical scenario, not one student said they would do the right thing and report the crime.

Instead, they all proclaimed fidelity to a misconceived notion of the virtue "loyalty," apparently comfortable with becoming accessories to a violent crime themselves in the doing.

Character education has given way to a sole focus on academic standards in public schools over the last 40 years or so, and in that same time span the incarceration rate has increased 500 percent. Corollary spikes in parolees and persons on probation have occurred as well.

The degree of coincidence is debatable.

What seems clear, however, is that the trend will not be reversed--or restored to pre-1980 levels that had been stable for decades--without society doing a better job of teaching young people how to behave morally, ethically and legally.

That once was the hallmark of good public education and, for what we're paying, should be again.

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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.

Editorial on 08/31/2018

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