Ethics, morals and value bases

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Where is a student supposed to acquire his or her ethic, morals and values from? Traditionally it is assumed that a child from a good family will have these traits drummed into them in various ways by the parents and relatives. The sad fact today is that there is an expectation that teachers at school and colleges must do this.

I think this expectation is wrong. But if you see the young people who go to higher education you get the feeling that there may be a problem that needs to be addressed. In the modern world we are seeing more and more of families where both husband and wife are working. In this situation there is every chance that a young mind may not pick up on the right system of values. Does that make it the job of the educator? I don’t think so. If this is a real issue each school and college may have to conduct classes on ethics, morals, values, behaviour in public and much much more. This may not be possible in the modern day education system and its unlikely to be effective. Short of the guru-sishya parampara where these things were built in I cant think of any existing method to do this.

There may have to be a whole new approach to conditioning the young mind to be a “model citizen”. In the fiction book ‘Clock work Orange’ by Anthony Burgess there is an experimental behaviour modification technique called the Ludovico Technique. The technique is a form of aversion therapy in which the subject is injected with a drug that makes the subject feel sick while being forced to watch graphically violent films, eventually conditioning the subject to suffer crippling bouts of nausea at the mere thought of violence. I fervently hope society will not adopt such methods but realise that relatives and friends must work together to eschew the right values, ethics and morals for a youngster to become a functional and useful member of society.