For some years, teachers have been despairing about the falling moral standards in society. Youngsters were growing up on a daily diet of scandals, suicides, rapes and murders. More recently, we have begun to worry that schoolchildren were becoming quite blasé about cheating, lying, plagiarizing and breaking rules. The disconcerting aspect of this phenomenon is that they do not consider these acts wrong, since ‘everyone does it’. It is small comfort that since ancient times every successive generation has complained bitterly about the deteriorating conduct of the next — simply because today we are complaining about our own generation as well. Last year, the list of scams in India was the longest since Independence. A telling cartoon in one of the dailies depicts a ministerial hopeful asking a veteran cabinet minister for advice. The minister’s reply is, “Don’t get caught.” There is no denying that in present times, dishonesty has become a way of life.

Even if we disregard for the moment our daily ration of scams and scandals, we cannot ignore the kind of unethical conduct that we ourselves accept and demonstrate on a regular basis. We violate traffic signals when we realize that there are no policemen around, readily make illegal payments to skirt the law, report ‘sick’ when we want a day off and get false medical certificates from accommodating doctors. We permit our underage children to drive, watch A-rated films, register at adult social networking sites and frequent pubs. Recently, a guest lecturer at a prestigious law school learned that students did not think that paying ‘unofficially’ to speed up a legal process was unethical. As one student pointed out, “Isn’t one’s duty to the client important?” A popular contest in school fests involves making ‘creative’ excuses to get out of a sticky situation. In spite of the light-hearted spirit in which this event may be taken, such activities are likely to reinforce dishonest practices. Many more examples of a casual attitude towards ethics among schoolchildren can be given. All this makes it most urgent for schools to get their students to distinguish between right and wrong.

This, however, has always been a daunting task. I remember an unsettling experience when a small child asked me quite guilelessly whether god made everything. Without thinking, I said, “Yes.” The child then proceeded to question me as to why she was punished for things which god had made her do. I didn’t think of it then, but I wish I had told her that god had made me punish her. In a serious vein, it is becoming increasingly difficult to address value-related issues. I remember agreeing with a character in a P.D. James murder mystery who observed that we haven’t found an effective substitute for belief. Now we construct our own morality — “What I want is right and I’m entitled to have it.” The old sense of guilt is practically gone. So the question arises, “Can values be restored?”

It can be safely said that schools have always been expected to attend to the development of character along with the imparting of knowledge and teaching of skills. This has been dealt with in a variety of ways — a system of reward and punishment, a prefectorial supervision of discipline, the presentation of historical and fictional characters as role models, moral science or value education classes and inspirational talks and sermons by reputed communicators and spiritual leaders. Also, it has been traditionally expected that schoolteachers would be role models themselves. Many adults maintain that their character had actually been shaped in school; curiously, as many believe that their value system had nothing to do with the moral science classes they attended in school. Still others hold that moral education should be left to the different religions. But then, it is generally accepted that morality and religion are independent of each other and it is possible for an atheist to be moral while an overtly religious person can be outrageously immoral. In fact, the current Dalai Lama believes that the time has come “to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether”.

Anyway, I think we are all agreed that values are learned and not biologically inherited, and we may even agree on a set of values that all children should possess. The next step is to ask ourselves the thorny question of how to ensure that these values are assimilated by our students. The difficulty is that if you subscribe to the aphorism “values must be caught and not taught”, then there can be no syllabus or teaching programme for value education. We have to leave it to our students to develop values from their own experience. This is in keeping with the central principles of the professor of “Hole in the Wall” fame, Sugata Mitra, of “self-directed learning” and “self-organizing learning environments”. Mitra has recently won the TED prize of a million dollars to promote his mantra of “non-formal, minimally invasive education”. Much as we teachers would not like to be made redundant, we have known for years that with regard to developing individual value systems, a formal, didactic approach is futile. But even if students were to learn values by observing the behaviour of ethical people around them, the question that is likely to be asked in these cynical times is, “Where will we find these ethical people?”

Instead of going round in circles trying to find the elusive answer, my colleagues and I decided to get our students to revisit their school motto for a start. We had already chosen the World Heritage Day 2013 theme “Heritage of Education” for our new school year and we felt that a re-examination of age-old values fitted in nicely with our scheme. The three elements comprising our school motto, Satyam Shivam Sundaram or Truth, Beauty and Goodness (or Kindness), are considered to be the ‘defining virtues of civilization’. From our ancient texts to Plato and Aristotle and from Tagore to Einstein — all have referred to these ideals. While preparing to get our students to engage with their school motto, I came across Howard Gardner’s book, Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed — Educating for the Virtues in the Twenty First Century. The book brought home to me the complexities involved in what seemed at first a simple project. Was there only one absolute truth? Wasn’t ‘beauty’ subjective and hasn’t the very concept of beauty been challenged? Bertrand Russell, for example, found truth and beauty in mathematics. With regard to ‘goodness’, John Holt explains the problem clearly in his seminal book, How Children Fail. “Teachers and schools,” he writes, “tend to mistake good behaviour for good character. What they prize is docility, suggestibility, the child who will do what he is told; or even better, the child who will do what is wanted without even having to be told. Small wonder that their effort to build character is such a failure; they don’t know it when they see it.”

In the midst of all these dampening thoughts, I reminded myself that there were many educational centres in our own country which claim that they successfully impart value-based education. I also discovered that in the United States of America, they even have a director of character education. Steve Johnson holds this post at Santa Clara University and his work is to implement ways which will help young people to grow up to have ‘good habits’ or virtues. A unique aspect of Johnson’s strategy is that he uses the English language programme to teach character education. He finds that the ‘strong narratives’ in the syllabus (for example, To Kill a Mockingbird) allow him to address the core values of respect and responsibility, while ‘integrity’ implied developing all aspects of the self. In our own setting, however, I have tended to favour a time-slot set aside for teachers and students to express themselves freely on various issues of their choice. This way we have been able to understand one another better and have been able to appreciate that one person’s ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ did not necessarily match another’s. Therefore, we had to be careful about not imposing our own set of beliefs on our students. In these General Awareness and Value Education classes we covered topics ranging from prejudice to peer pressure and from media influence to multiple intelligences. In one such class, when we were discussing needs, wants and motives, a student declared that her strongest drive was to be famous some day. This generated a flurry of reactions from the other students. One of them commented that she found it odd that a person would want to be “just famous” without knowing what she wanted to be famous for. This in turn led to a discussion of the absurd lengths people could go to in order to gain entry into the Guinness Book of Records — such as swallowing live reptiles or holding a particular posture for hours on end. At another such class, I was asked by a student why I had asked the lone Muslim girl in the class ‘awkward’ questions such as whether she had ever been made to feel uncomfortable in her class. Wasn’t I making them conscious of communal differences? The others spoke up without waiting for my answer. One said that it was important that I should find out whether the school environment was healthy. Another stated that nobody should feel awkward about belonging to a different culture or religion. Needless to say, I was pleased with their responses. On the whole, I believe that this kind of discussion and resultant reflection influence young minds in a positive manner.

Possibly, we will never know the outcome of our efforts. We can only hope that our students will be prompted to choose the harder right over the easier wrong whenever the time to choose arrives and that they will opt to do so knowing that they may have to pay a price.