The fur ore over the mms scandal is reminiscent of USA awakening to the dangers of terrorism after the nine eleven attack. It is time to assess the reasons for the decay in the upbringing of our children.

Parents, no doubt, have to bear responsibility. In the present days, with both parents working, this becomes difficult. This does not mean that the remedy lies in asking women to refrain from taking jobs, because that would take the society backwards in the matter of gender -relations. There is however great need to think deeply on this issue.

Present day parents were reared in the seventies and can provide parenting to the extent of the education they received. By the time they went to school some disconcerting developments had taken place. The old hierarchical structure of the family had considerably loosened. Ethics teaching through moral science classes or teachings based on stories from the scriptures by seniors in the family, had more or less been discontinued by that time. Parents of today were the part of the beat generation, with it’s anti-establishmentarian under tone, and they developed a less forbidding attitude towards sex and drugs. While the many things this generation rebelled against, has sensitized the society, but negativism involved in such a ‘beat’ attitude did not help in equipping them with the right attributes needed for successful parenting. This generation of parents has little in their armory to help them provide effective guardianship to their children.

In addition to the loss parents suffer in their own education, many important institutions have also stopped working now, making the task of present day parents more difficult. In the old days, grand parents either guided the children directly or advised parents on the steps they should take to rear their children. The neighbourhood consisted of homogenous caste or cultural groups, which encouraged neighbours to guide or report on children: the children felt the moral pressure of the locality. The benign presence of grand parents has more or less vanished for most children, as families become nuclear. The neighbourhood does not count any more, as families in an area remain strangers to one another. The church, or similar institution for other religions, no longer plays an important role. Who will then lend support to parents in such a situation?

Families and the civil society are forced to meet this challenge of a degraded value system. Technology seems to hasten the process of erosion rather than build the character of minor boys and girls. The value of faithfulness, steady relationship, celibacy in tender ages seems to have been drowned under the rage for gizmos and the competition for excellence in the titillation of the senses. Cleverness in use of gadgets and boldness in sex relations is becoming the mark of the successful youngster.

The first thought that comes to the mind is that perhaps the society has thrown the baby along with the bath water. Teachings of moral precepts extracted from Holy Scriptures of all religions, or from psychological studies, or based on medical research needs to be re-instituted in the study curriculum of all schools, at least up to the Class IX level. NCERT, which has been instrumental in producing excellent textbooks, clearly need to address them to this critical need of the society and produce appropriate courses aimed at building the moral fibre of our school children.

Society looks up to the schoolteacher to play the role of a moral science teacher, a role for which they hardly prepared. This is an unfair expectation from teachers. They are loaded with academic work and have not received any specialized training for this purpose. The class size is always very big, distancing individual child in the class from the teacher. Clearly we need a new brand of professionals who can serve as good substitutes for the padre or the pundit of the by gone days.

The society will have to act through the government and the institution of schools. Government must include in the academic curricula, courses on personality/character building. Schools must employ efficient group of counsellors in their roll, who keep watch on the attitudes, academic performance and other activities of children and guide them and also advice their parents. The counsellors can then be trusted not just to supervise proper moral teaching but they should be made to win confidence of the students so that the lack of communication between the child and the parents can be bridged by the counsellor. What we need today is the secular equivalent of the religious teacher and the conscience keeper of impressionable boys and girls in schools. To begin with, there is an urgent need for a public debate on this issue.

Related Links:
DPS for in-camera hearing in MMS scandal case
Column: No sex please, we are INDIANS
US 'very closely' following DPS MMS scandal case
Minor boy in court for a sexually explicit MMS


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