Good citizenship and character development programs have become prevalent in our public schools. Their prevalence is due to an undeniable need for a return to morality. So, well-meaning administrators implement programs, programs fraught with impotent and sterile buzzwords and clichés. Teachers try to impart an understanding of the need for morality to confused students, whose understandable responses go something like: "Didn't you just teach us survival of the fittest? Didn't you just teach us that the founders of our society who believed in strong morality were backward and close-minded? Didn't you just teach us that evolution dictates that I exalt myself over others, and that I reproduce as often as possible with as many partners as possible?"
We have ceded any semblance of the moral standing that it takes to teach character. The credibility simply isn't there. They don't need another teacher who watches and listens to the filth that they immerse themselves in. They don't need another adolescent adult who would rather foster self-esteem than to save their lives and give them something real to esteem. We have exiled the Father from the home, congratulated ourselves on our enlightenment, worked hard to scrub His influence away, and then wonder why the children don't know how to behave. Why do we think that they will learn morality any other way than the way that we learned it?
So we ask the Almighty God: "How can a young man cleanse his way?" Our answer has always been and always will be: "By taking heed according to Your word" (Psalm 119:9). His Word is good "to receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, judgment, and equity; to give prudence to the simple, to the young man knowledge and discretion" (Proverbs 1:3-4). Man sets out to make a god of himself and to establish his own righteousness, but he willingly forgets that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction" (Proverbs 1:7).