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Moral Illiteracy

When the schools stop contributing to the fund of shared moral knowledge, the informal systems are put under enormous strain. And when they start to break down, we begin to get a picture of what a society looks like when each person makes up his own “morality.” By withholding the culture from a whole generation of youth, we are not helping them to “think for themselves,” but only forcing them to patch together crude codes of behavior from the bits and pieces they pick up on television or in the streets.