37th Edition
December 19, 2023
The Most-Honest-Student Award
The Cato Institute, a leading Washington, D.C. think tank, is sponsoring a webinar to discuss lying. According to the advertisement, a law professor, Jeff Kosseff, will address the pervasiveness of lies, the legal protections they enjoy, the harm they cause, and how to combat them. Moreover, Kosseff will also argue that even though lies can cause huge damage, US law should continue to protect them. My initial reaction was to say, you can’t make this stuff up, but on second thought, I hope to listen in on what could be an important discussion.
In the meantime, there seems to be very little disagreement that lying is in fact pervasive in our country today. It makes me wonder if the Cato Institute plans to sponsor a separate webinar on how we teach people to tell the truth. In the long run isn’t that infinitely more important? If personal integrity doesn’t become a core value when a person is young, it seems logical that over time lying would in fact become pervasive. In other words, dishonesty isn’t a new phenomenon, it has been more of a silent but deadly cancer infiltrating our society for some time. To eradicate it will therefore take time. Perhaps it makes sense to start with today’s youth.
To my knowledge, teaching integrity to youth isn’t a top priority in our society or in our schools. In my view this all-important teaching should begin at home and be reinforced in elementary school. We might want to ask ourselves why this isn’t happening? What undermines this at home? That’s obvious – TV. The smartest thing parents should do when they have young kids to raise is to unplug the TV. Today, kids in elementary school age watch about three hours of TV each day. The vast majority of what they are watching isn’t teaching or reinforcing personal integrity or any other positive character trait.
In schools today, other issues are given higher priority, some of them important in terms of building character and preparing students to be successful in life, but some less so. Would it make sense to refocus away from some of the controversial social issues and concentrate on something as basic as personal integrity? Does it even make sense to teach Chemistry or Calculus, or about Income Inequality, if students haven’t learned to tell the truth?
Sometimes it seems that the most basic and uncontroversial challenges are the ones we ignore. But, overlooked, these problems can fester and infect our relationships, institutions, and our overall way of life. That seems to be an accurate assessment of our country today. How can we come even remotely close to achieving our full potential as a nation if lying remains pervasive?
So, my proposal is to make “Personal Integrity” a subject taught in elementary school starting in second grade. We can give awards for the most honest student every year like we do for the student with the highest GPA or for the best athlete. Elevating integrity, over time, will have a huge impact on, well, just about everything.
In the early 80s, I went to one the country’s leading business schools, now called Ross, at the University of Michigan. One of my professors told me something that confused me then, but I think I understand now. He said, “In business you have to act better than you are, and you seem to be better than you act.” It wasn’t meant as a compliment. Essentially he was explaining that to be successful in business you have to sacrifice personal integrity. That realization is ingrained in our business sector. We admire the most innovative, the most clever, certainly the wealthiest, but the most honest businessperson too often falls through the cracks, or worse is compromised by an individual or organization that is dishonorable.
The absence of trust we have today in business leaders, politicians, and many institutions, is a direct result of not valuing integrity, which we haven’t for perhaps a generation. It’s time we did something about it, don’t you think?
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Michael Kayes
*These views are my personal opinions and are not the viewpoints of any company or organization.