Article September 14, 1998 Issue

Facing the challenge of raising a moral child

Self-government is the goal.

By Jan Kassahn Keeler

I have a young friend who is in the first grade. Recently, she was playing with classmates on the school playground. They were playing a game called "Truth or Dare" when a fellow first-grader dared her to go home and have sex with him. Fortunately my young friend's parents had given her enough information to help her give an appropriate response.

As a parent of a young child myself, I was deeply disturbed by this story, and with what it said about how surprisingly early our children can be subjected to immorality and violence. Such events are a wake-up call for us to increase our efforts to educate children morally and to save them from damaging influences and mistakes.

Many experts have examined the role morality plays in business and politics, and what, if anything, should be taught about it in schools. Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers, a professor, author, and the W. H. Brady Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., writes: "Like most professors, I am acutely aware of the 'hole in the moral ozone.' ... today's young people live in a moral haze. Ask one of them if there are such things as 'right' and 'wrong' and suddenly you are confronted with a confused, tongue-tied, nervous, and insecure individual. ... We are living through a great experiment in 'moral deregulation,' an experiment whose first principle seems to be: 'Conventional morality is oppressive.' ... What we know is that we cannot, in good conscience, allow our children to remain morally illiterate."

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