PERHAPS ONE reason why the government's second "Values and Attitudes" campaign seems to be having no more success than the first is that citizens do not discern their political leaders to be practising the virtues they preach. The programme, therefore, is seen to be mere sloganism and a change of name may be appropriate. The real ethical mandate has to do with conduct, its goodness or badness, its rightness or wrongness. Morality can't be glossed over with nice words to make it more palatable.
We need to avoid the impression that values and attitudes are only a sub-set of an obligation to obey the laws of the land. Many laws are in fact unjust and in Jamaica the inequalities of the legal system, its delays and partialities, have brought it into disrepute. In fact civil laws get their legitimacy and authority only if they are in conformity with moral laws. Nor is ethical conduct coterminous with the preachings of religion which depend on denominational interpretations of divine revelation. We fool ourselves if we think that ethical values can be imparted merely by preaching, whether by church or state.
The nuclear family should be the environment in which an infection of good behaviour is spread to children by the example of parents. Morals are caught, not taught. But the nuclear family in Jamaica has long since broken down and many children learn conduct from the example of adults who tell lies and cheat, who settle disputes by violence rather than conciliation, who destroy trust by flagrant infidelity, who blame all misfortunes on others, who lack any sense of justice even in dealing with their own offspring.
In the absence of a nuclear family structure, perhaps the best hope for imbuing children with moral values is in the classroom, starting with early childhood education, where the school itself becomes a role model of an ethical community, where a child learns respect because it is respected, where a child learns love because it is loved, where a child learns to be just because it is treated justly, where a child learns to tell the truth because nobody in authority lies to it.
Our modern history and conditioning have stressed rights at the expense of duty, freedom at the expense of self-control, consciousness at the expense of conscience. The values and attitudes programme needs to be embedded formally across the board in the education system if it is to make a difference.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
