Sidebar: DARE Suggests that Right and Wrong Are Subjective 

Massachusetts News 
By Curt Lovelace 

October 1--Massachusetts News discussed the current moral state of American society with William Kilpatrick in his office at Boston College. 

MassNews: Violence is much on the collective mind of the nation these days, in the wake of Columbine High School and the recent violence at a Jewish day care center. Why do you believe the federal government contributes to this? 

Kilpatrick: I just came back from a conference about Columbine at which the general thrust was that court decisions and legislative acts have had the effect of inhibiting both teachers and parents from disciplining the children and also from creating a positive school ethos – a climate of orderliness.  

MassNews: Can you tell us about one of those laws? 

Kilpatrick: One of these legislative acts is the "Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act" which makes schools jump through all sorts of hoops in order to expel or suspend "disabled" students. The problem, of course, is that a lot of kids fall under the category of "disabled," including kids who before might have simply been called difficult or acting-out. 

The net effect of many court decisions has been to paralyze teachers and administrators

MassNews: What are some other examples? 

Kilpatrick: Another decision guarantees students freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Now a lot of teachers and administrators feel obliged to extend respect to various forms of expression. If students wear trench coats in the corridors or baseball caps in the classroom – turned backwards, of course – or if they wear Marilyn Manson T-shirts or studs in their tongues or rings in their noises, shout obscenities or boys grope their girlfriends in the corridors, that’s just their freedom of expression. That kind of climate makes it very difficult for a school to create a sense of common purpose and common behavioral expectations, let alone to create the sort of esprit de corps that some schools once enjoyed. 

MassNews: It sounds like this situation creates problems beyond the "spectacular" violence that we read about. 

Kilpatrick: Exactly, the real problem is not the high-profile violence that you hear about in the news, but rather the low-level violence and crudity that occurs every day in corridors and classrooms and which the schools seem to be unwilling to control. That climate makes some students hate school, hate their classmates and hate their teachers for not doing anything about it. Combine all this with our society’s emphasis on the therapeutic – expressing your feelings, not holding anything back – I think you have a potent formula. There is not an absolute sense of conscience or moral authority to prevent a student from acting on his anger, his rage, and his fantasies of revenge. 

Another thing that a therapeutic society does is to provide us with various psychological excuses for not taking responsibilities for our actions. An article that I read just recently, by James Q. Wilson, sums it up nicely. It’s titled "I’m Sorry I Killed You, But I had A Bad Childhood." 

MassNews: Haven’t recent studies shown a decline in crime rates in America?  

Kilpatrick: People who study these things indicate that the lower statistics on crime may simply be a result of changing demographics. There are fewer people in the age group most prone to violence. It may also be true that metal detectors and security guards may eliminate some problems. 

But even if we eliminate all that high level violence, I think we would still have a problem and the problem has to do with the character of the students and the damage that’s being done to their character and their souls in schools that aren’t able to talk about right and wrong and remain mired in the non-judgmental, therapeutic ethos that can’t provide any sort of vision that might counter the vision they see on MTV and in the movies and on the Internet. All of these visions are quite a bit more vibrant and fascinating than the therapeutic adjustments which the school offers. 

Plato once said that children ought to be brought up in such a way that they’ll fall in love with virtue and hate vice. We fail to capture the moral imagination in the schools. By default, I think the moral imagination of our youngsters is being pretty much formed by the media, pretty much in the direction not of virtue, but of vice. 

MassNews: One study has suggested that crime is actually down in the ‘90s because of the legalization of abortion. Would you care to comment on that?  

Kilpatrick: I saw a column recently describing abortion as "preemptive capital punishment," because that study is really saying that we ought to be imposing capital punishment on certain individuals for crimes that haven’t been committed yet. It’s kind of a strange and bizarre notion, I think. It’s like a desperate attempt to justify the abortion decision. I think it’s important to point out that abortion doesn’t prevent crime – it is a crime. 

If you look at other countries with very high rates of abortion, by the way, you don’t see a drop in crime rates. For example, in England, despite heavy reliance on abortion, and in Russia, despite heavy reliance on abortion in the last couple of decades, you’re seeing a vast increase in crime statistics. So I think we need to look elsewhere for the explanation for our decrease in crime statistics. 

MassNews: It has been written by many that democracy requires a moral foundation. How can one select a moral base without charges of religious bias, etc.? 

Kilpatrick: I don’t think you can. I think it’s possible to reach a point, and we may have reached that with our public schools, where any move to the left or the right will be met with a lawsuit. We have to argue about whether these schools are workable anymore. I’m particularly worried about the fact that the schools have become so thoroughly secularized that they don’t have any transcendent vision; that they can’t offer any good rationale for good behavior. And I think students realize this. 

Today we have the question of where the schools get their authority over children. More and more, I think the idea is that they get their authority from the state. But if there is no reference back to parental authority or natural authority or to divine authority, then this authority comes to be looked upon, accurately, as an arbitrary imposition of will. 

Public schools, I think, work well if there is a general consensus about values and about right and wrong. You have to wonder if that’s any longer true in this country. If it is no longer true then I think it’s time for the public schools to step aside. 

MassNews: If the moral foundation is gone, then is the nation at peril? 

Kilpatrick: As someone once asked, "Is it possible to slip into a dark age without really knowing it?" Well, it certainly is. Another well-know quote is that, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." I think we’ve lost that sense of being vigilant and on our guard. I think we’ve become more like a frog that’s being slowly boiled to death.

MassNews: In Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong, you suggested religious schools and home schooling as alternatives. How do you view those suggestions today, a decade later? 

Kilpatrick: I believe that even more firmly. I believe parents should be the primary educators of children. They shouldn’t leave it up to the public schools to do the job for them. In many instances public schools subvert the values of parents and teach students a very different set of values, thus confusing them quite seriously. I believe that education can’t be separated from spiritual questions and that education is almost by nature a religious endeavor because it does deal with basic questions such as, "What is life all about? Why am I here? What is my purpose?" You cannot really separate education from the provision of some larger vision of what life is all about. Also I refer to what Dostoyevsky has one of his characters say in The Brothers Karamozov: "If there is no God, everything is permissible." If there is no ultimate authority by which acts are to be judged, then why not just go ahead and follow your feeling and impulses? 

MassNews: Should we, as many pro-life and pro-family advocates have suggested, shoot our TVs?  

Kilpatrick: Well, I hate to use such violent language, since we’re trying to dissuade people from violence. But I think that if you don’t have a TV in your home that you’re not doing any damage to your youngsters and you’re probably doing them good, by forcing them to rely on their own resources for entertainment, giving them a chance to develop their imaginations. 

It’s interesting to note that in the family of the Academy Award Winning Director, Steven Spielberg, the TV was hidden under a blanket most of the time. It was not for everyday use. I doubt if Spielberg would have turned out to be quite the creative genius he is if he had been plugged into the TV set every day. 

In our family we use the TV in conjunction with the VCR to watch old movies, and some new ones. There still are a lot of good, classic Hollywood movies that teach solid values and do engage the moral imagination. I think the VCR can be a tool for moral education, if properly and sparingly used. 

MassNews: Has the nation gained any ground in its quest for moral literacy since you wrote, Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong?  

Kilpatrick: It’s hard to say because there have been movements in both directions. There has been a resurgence of interest in character and virtue. This is exemplified, for example in William Bennett’s Book of Virtues and other titles, the fact that our society has been talking more about character, the fact that there are now a number of Character Education curriculums in schools, the fact that there are several Character Education organizations, the fact that the White House for three or four summers in a row held a conference on Character Education. There are many good signs.