Setting an example ...

A long piece at Yowling from the Fencepost with an important point:

...

Of my more difficult students, I find that their capacity to appreciate the importance of their means justifying their ends is minimal at best. In ways similar to our political representatives, it isn't how we achieve a goal that is important, it is simply that we achieve it and pay little mind to the cost to others around us. If they are challenged on their grounds that their methods to achieving a goal were -- putting it generously in some cases -- unethical, they either ignore the charge and state that they at least got 'r done or argue that their means was not unjustifiable.

Look at the model that they have to follow: The president can make a dodgy case for war, conduct it, claim success when success has been far from assured, and argue that he at least got it done when people challenge him on how he went about making that case as details of his dodge come out. Is it any wonder that more and more students are not bothered so much these days with cheating on tests via text messages and unaware of or unconcerned about their plagiarizing of material from the internet for papers or projects? We have a president who is allowed to say whatever he wants and have it rubber-stamped or rationalized by his poodles in Congress and allies in the right-wing media.

...

The attitude (begun during the 'Greed Orgy' of the Reagan years) has permeated every part of our society. There is no accountability and everyboody goes around as if it's their world and everybody else is a nuisance. You see it on the roads, in the stores, and eveywhere else. The 'Me Generation' is alive and well.

... Until people can see the value of working to build a strong society and world that offers the prospects of a decent, if not better, future for all our children, we will struggle under the oppressive millstone of such things as war, impoverishment, and ignorance, where only the few in power -- political and financial -- have any say in our future.

In other words, there are too many self-centered pricks making decisions.