Andrew Fastow, the notorious former Enron chief financial officer and Kellogg School of Management alumnus, might not be the only one who could have benefited from ethics training.
Now it seems that the seniors at Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook Ill., who were responsible for hazing junior girls could benefit as well. Everyone by now is familiar with the story of the teenage girls’ beating the younger students and smearing them with trash, urine, fish guts, feces and pig intestines.
Clearly this behavior is wrong, but it seems some adolescents no longer can recognize the difference between proper and improper conduct.
According to the 2002 Ethics of American Youth survey, three out of four high school students said they had cheated on at least one test in the past year. Thirty-eight percent admitted stealing from a store, and 37 percent said that they would lie to get a good job.
In a society where morals are relative and values are subjective, can we expect children and adolescents to be able to tell the difference between right and wrong?
Not if our corporate executives can’t.
To prevent corporate fraud from being committed by more of its alumns, Kellogg professors have created a 10-day conference for next year’s incoming students to provide training in ethics, leadership and teamwork. Ethics will be integrated into all of the school’s courses next year.
Similar problems have also rocked the journalism world. Jayson Blair, a reporter for The New York Times, now faces charges of plagiarism and fabrication.
The Medill School of Journalism strives to teach its students the importance of journalistic integrity by requiring at all journalism majors to take law and ethics of journalism before they graduate.
We cannot afford to wait until a Fastow commits fraud, or a Blair is discovered fabricating hundreds of news stories and interviews. All children need to develop a sophisticated sense of right and wrong while they are young. And if families are no longer capable of providing this moral training, then we should institute it some place else.
In Germany parents whose children attend public schools are allowed to select an ethics class for their children to attend. The classes are based on Protestant or Catholic teachings, if the family subscribes to either of those beliefs, or based on secular philosophers like Aristotle or Plato.
“I think some level of ethics would be a good thing to teach in classrooms,” said Elisa Bock, Medill ’02, who attended middle school in Germany. “Even just teaching ethics in terms of history could be beneficial in high school. I think most of the ethics in America is taught on the field in terms of sports. … I think a good solution would be to require teachers to take an ethics training class and lead by example.”
Because here in the United States we are suspicious of interactions between the church and state, the German model might not be the best one to follow, especially because of the number of diverse religions practiced in the United States.
Some parents also might be uncomfortable with a public school teaching values to their children, but there must be some universal values everyone can agree on to be taught to future generations.
Stealing is wrong. Killing is wrong. Lying is wrong. Rubbing feces on another living being is wrong.
Even Enron execs know that.
