With Italy in the news, thanks to the Winter Olympic Games, I was thinking about the possibility of character lessons we can glean from Italy. I don’t mean lessons from the athletes themselves, since I already wrote about that. I mean lessons from the Italy of days gone by – the Italy that boasted the mighty Republic of Ancient Rome.
What valuable character education lesson, based on Rome, can we teach our children at home, and our students in schools?
Character education from Italy would begin, I think, by teaching briefly that Ancient Rome was a republic. You could explain it to young ones as a country where the ruler is the law instead of a king or queen. The people vote for men and women who gather in one place and make laws for the country. Then people obey the laws instead of obeying a monarch. The U.S.A. is an example of a republic – and Ancient Rome was a republic.
There are many parallels between Ancient Rome and the U.SA. Both started out as republics. Both began with written constitutions, which clearly limited government powers. The constitutions allowed citizens to participate by voting. In both countries, there was nearly continuous military success at first. Both had great growth in business, buying and selling freely. Both began to expand their business to overseas ports. Both sent their military abroad – and both became great powers of their respective times.
A sadder parallel between Ancient Rome and the U.S.A., however, is that both saw a gradual wearing away of morality among their political leaders and their people.
Ancient Rome spiraled downward from moral excellence to moral depravity, and with that moral decline came the fall of Rome. The Roman people went from freedom to slavery. Cicero, Juvenal, Suetonius, and Tacitus are among many Roman history writers who believed the fall of Rome and the bondage of the Roman empire were caused by the loss of character among the people. Tacitus wrote of that oppressive empire’s early years, “The state had been revolutionized, and there was not a vestige left of the old sound morality.”
Character education needs to teach our young people this fact. Using the total immersion principle presented in Character Education 101, a free e-Course for teachers, we need to carry our teaching of morality into history, and show young people the dangers of rejecting moral excellence. We need to teach them the dangers of adopting a “take-it-or-leave-it” attitude toward character. We must show through our own lives and through our teaching that character is vital to individuals, and vital to nations – all nations.
People, in any era, that shed moral excellence are doomed to follow the Ancient Romans into slavery. Freedom and moral depravity are enemies, and cannot tolerate one another.
People of character have freedom under good law. The law protects their freedom. Sadly, the opposite is also true. People who do not build character, who teach young people to sort out their own values, have no freedom under good law. They hate law. They want no form of restraint. They want freedom to do what they wish – when they wish – where they wish – to whom they wish – how they wish.
Some of you may be like those citizens of Ancient Rome – and like them, you are in danger of finding that freedom from moral restraint leads to absolute slavery.
That’s the view from my chair. What’s your view?