Ethics Crisis in Nation's Youth

Reaping the fruits of mocking virtue:

The Josephson Institute, a Los Angeles-based ethics institute, surveyed 29,760 students at 100 randomly selected high schools nationwide, both public and private. All students in the selected schools were given the survey in class; their anonymity was assured.

Michael Josephson, the institute's founder and president, said he was most dismayed by the findings about theft. The survey found that 35 percent of boys and 26 percent of girls -- 30 percent overall -- acknowledged stealing from a store within the past year. One-fifth said they stole something from a friend; 23 percent said they stole something from a parent or other relative.

"What is the social cost of that -- not to mention the implication for the next generation of mortgage brokers?" Josephson remarked in an interview. "In a society drenched with cynicism, young people can look at it and say, 'Why shouldn't we? Everyone else does it.' "

That's bad enough. I think this paragraph is sickeningly worse:

Despite such responses, 93 percent of the students said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character, and 77 percent affirmed that "when it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know."

In A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, Eugene Peterson writes that our culture has imbibed the harmful "assumption that anything worthwhile can be acquired at once. We assume that if something can be done at all, it can be done quickly and efficiently. Our attention spans have been conditioned by thirty-second commercials.
[...]
There is a great market for religious experience.... there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness."

We are more interested in what Peterson calls apocryphal religious stories, feel good, chicken soup for the soul essays, shallow, insipid, and most of all, instant.

And so it is easy for us to welter in what Charlotte Mason called odious self-complacency, and certainly more pleasant, than to do the hard, sweaty, marathon work of patiently acquiring virtue. We are nice people, we think to ourselves, not as bad as those other people- and this passes with us for actual virtue.