Reagan Places the Blame

Once more the banalities of the Great Communicator are heard in the land. Again Ronald Reagan offers his shallow thinking as an excuse for the nation’s ills. After recent months of exposing the American public to a diet of scandal, deceit, subterfuge, ineptness, forced resignations and federal indictments against once trusted aides the President, speaking before the Los Angeles World Council, would have us believe that the lamentable behavior of several U.S. Marine guards at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow is “the fault of our schools.”

Someone should remind the Western world’s leading misanthrope that it is parents who are supposed to pass on to their children a clear code of ethics; that it is the home environment that sets standards of behavior in young people (including U.S. Marines); that leaving it to the church or school to inculcate concepts of right and wrong or blaming the school for not providing what the home neglects is clearly an abdication of parental guidance.

While educators--at any level--surely must encourage the standards of morality and craftsmanship in a student’s life it has always been, it is now, it will always be the responsibility of a parent--a single one if there are not two--who establishes a proper mode of behavior.

Why have we so lowered our expectations of human behavior? Civilization and ethics are not just a veneer as is sometimes assumed. People, most of the time, are reasonable beings and they are, as the English writer Edmund Burke noted, “Qualified for civil liberty and its rules in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.” And if that isn’t taught from the ground up, God help us all. It’s already too late to learn it in any school.

But then blaming the schools for the treasonable acts of a few U.S. Marines is quite in keeping with Ronald Reagan’s way of doing things: “Hey, it’s not my responsibility, let George do it.” Or Sam, or Harry, or Donner and Blitzen. And we have nearly two more years of this?

FREDD WAYNE

Santa Monica