When things of value or worth come into our possession they tend to make us happy. When we are respected (esteemed of worth or value), we respect (value) ourselves. We also esteem ourselves of value when we do that which is of value. Yet, if our measuring stick or rule for that which is of value is based upon money (goods of second intent) then our worth can also be measured in monetary terms. This being the case, is it any wonder people ask themselves, "Is this all there is?"

Moroni wrote, "A man being evil cannot do that which is good; neither will he give a good gift." (Moroni 7:l0) Jesus saw, "rich men casting their gifts into the treasury. And he saw also a certain poor widow casting in thither two mites. And he said, "Of a truth I say unto you, this poor widow hath cast in more than they all". (Luke 2l:l-3) If we look at this only in terms of money we cannot see the worth or value of the gift that was given, for it was a gift of the widow herself. Regardless of this widow's humility or self-effacing nature, her worth, her value, her self-respect, and thus true happiness was greater than that of those rich men. Nephi, when asked the meaning of the tree in his father's vision, said it was "the love of God ...the greatest of all the gifts of God." (I Nephi ll:22 and l5:36) Yet all the gifts of God are gifts of love for they are freely given. When in my mid-twenties, I was asked what could be wrong with having sexual intercourse with someone to show your love for her. I thought about it and concluded that I couldn't plant a seed and walk away never knowing whether that seed had taken root and grown or not. I determined that I would want to be there to help support the child and care for it. Then I determined that if I really loved the girl I would want to be there to support and care for her. All this led me to determine that though sexual intercourse might be an expression of one's love, so is laboring to put food on the table, and to provide shelter. Love is expressed right down to changing the dirty diapers. Love is only expressed in the giving of one's self; it is here that one knows that one is of worth or value (self-respect) and is thus innately happy with himself, which is of far greater value than being happy with what one has.

A gift is given or bestowed without compensation. Back to the evil man not giving a good gift; he actually gives no gift because he's always looking at what he will get back. As we labor for money, it is a dead situation. As God gives freely to us, so also is our love shed abroad to our fellowmen in giving freely to them of our labor, our substance, of ourselves; and our worth is increased l0, 30 and l00 fold i.e. l,000%, 3,000% and l0,000%, and our happiness is boundless as it extends beyond ourselves, but is increased in the lives of others that we touch.

To conclude, true success is not expressed in one's freedom to sleep around, make money, or according to social status. It is ex-pressed in being a whole (holy) person. In realizing that we are part of a greater whole, and that our happiness depends wholly and com-pletely upon the wasting and wearing out of our lives in the service

of God, i.e. our fellowman; to consecrating all of our time, our talents, everything we have or ever shall have, all that we are or ever will be to the building up of God's kingdom.

It is only as we live God's laws and give them life that we truly live; this is that which is of value, which gives each of us the ability to respect ourselves, and it is in this that happiness innately comes.

"Happiness is the object and design of our existence; and will be the end thereof, if we pursue the path that leads to it;" (TPJS page 255)

A SPEECH BY JOHN GATTO UPON BEING NAMED

NEW YORK CITY TEACHER OF THE YEAR

"... We live in a time of great social crisis. Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing, and arithmetic.

"Our teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world and suicidal kids are rich kids for the most part, not the poor. In Manhattan seventy percent of all new marriages last less than five years.

"Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world without precedent; nobody talks to them anymore. Without children and old people mixing in daily life, a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name "community" hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that...

"Using school as a sorting mechanism, we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleeping on the streets.

"... The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administration, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic; it has no con-science. It rings a bell, and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell, where he learns that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

"Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around l850. It was resisted - sometimes with guns - by an estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the l880s when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.

"Now here is a curious idea to ponder. Senator Ted Kennedy's office released a paper not too long ago claiming that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was ninety-eight percent, and after it the figure never again reached above ninety-one percent, where it stands in l990. I hope that interests you.

"Here is another curiosity to think about. The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and a half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents. Last month the education press reported the amazing news that children

schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think. ...

"We need to realize that the school institution "schools" very well, but it does not "educate" - that's inherent in the design of

the thing. . It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It's just impossible for education and schooling ever to be

the same thing.

"Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnas Sears and W. R. Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and others to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behaviour can be predicted and controlled.

"To a very great extent schools succeed in doing this.

"...It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety. It cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does.

"It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.

Think of the things that are killing us as a nation: drugs, brain-less competition, recreational sex, the pornography of violence, gamb-ling, alcohol, and the worst pornography of all - lives devoted to buying things, accumulation as a philosophy. All are addictions of dependent personalities, and that is what our brand of schooling must inevitably produce.

I want to tell you what the effect is on children of taking all their time - time they need to grow up - and forcing them to spend it on abstractions...

l. The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants to grow up these days, and who can blame them. 2. The children I teach have almost no curiosity; they cannot concentrate for very long, even on things they choose to do. Can you see a connection between the bells ringing again and again to change classes and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?

3. The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. They live in a continuous present; the exact moment they are in is the boundary of their consciousness.

4. The children I teach are ahistorical; they have no sense of how the past has predestined their won present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives.

5. The children I teach are cruel to each other: they lack compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness, they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.

6. The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. They cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of pre-serving a secret self inside an outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behavior borrowed from television, or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent them-selves to be, the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy, so intimate relationships have to be avoided.

7. The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically "grade" everything - and television mentors who offer everything in the world for sale.

8. The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This timidity is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness, but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.

Between schooling and television, all the time children have is eaten up. That's what has destroyed the American family; it no longer is a factor in the education of its own children.

The success of home schooling shows a different road that has great promise. Pouring the money back into family education might kill two birds with one stone, repairing families as it repairs children.

This nation has tried to impose objectives from a lofty command center made up of "experts," a central elite of social engineers. It hasn't worked. It won't work. It doesn't work because its fundamental premises are mechanical, anti-human, and hostile to family life. Lives can be controlled by machine education, but they will always fight back with weapons of social pathology - drugs, violence, self-destruction, indifference, and the symptoms I see in the children I teach.

It's high time we looked backward to regain an educational philosophy that works. One I like particularly well has been a favorite of the ruling classes of Europe for thousands of years. I think it works just as well for poor children as for rich ones. I use as much of it as I can manage in my own teaching; as much, that is, as I can get away with, given the present institution of compulsory schooling.

At the core of this elite system of education is the belief that self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge. Everywhere in this system, at every age, you will find arrangements that place the child alone in an unguided setting with a problem to solve. Sometimes the problem is fraught with great risks, such as the problem of galloping a horse or making it jump, but that, of course, is a problem successfully solved by thousands of elite children before the age of ten. Can you imagine anyone who had mastered such a challenge ever lacking confidence in his ability to do anything?

One of my former students, Roland Legiardi-Laura, though both his parents were dead and he had no inheritance, took a bicycle across the United States alone when he was hardly out of boyhood. Is it any wonder that in manhood he made a film about Nicaragua, although he had no money and no prior experience with film-making, and that it was an international award-winner - even though his regular work was as a carpenter?

Right now we are taking from our children the time they need to develop self-knowledge.

A short time ago, I took seventy dollars and sent a twelve-year old girl with her non-English speaking mother on a bus down the New Jersey coast. I had arranged for the girl to have a one-day apprenticeship in small-town police procedures. A few days later, two more of my twelve year-old kids traveled alone from Harlem to West 31st Street, where they began an apprenticeship with a newspaper editor. Next week, three of my kids will find them-selves in the middle of the Jersey swamps at 6 in the morning studying the mind of a truck-ing company president as he dispatches eighteen-wheelers to Dallas, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Are these "special" children in a "special" program? They're just nice kids from Central Harlem, bright and alert, but so badly schooled when they came to me that most

of them couldn't add or subtract with any fluency.

Does that worry me? Of course. But I am confident that as they gain self-knowledge they'll also become self-teachers - and only self-teaching has any lasting value.

We've got to give kids independent time right away because that is the key to self-knowledge, and we must reinvolve them with the real world as fast as possible so that the independent time can be spent on something other than more abstractions.

I think we need to make community service a required part of schooling. It is the quickest way to give young children real responsibility.

For five years I ran a guerrilla school program where I had every kid, rich and poor, smart and dipsy, give three hundred twenty hours a year of hard community service. Dozens of those kids came back to me years later, and told me that this one experience changed their lives, taught them to see in new ways, to rethink goals and values. It happened when they were thirteen in my Lab School program - only made possible because my rich school district was in chaos. When "stability" returned, the Lab closed. It was too successful, at too small a cost, to be allowed to continue. We made the expensive, elite programs look bad.

There is no shortage of real problems in this city. Kids can be asked to help solve them in exchange for the respect and attention of the adult world. Good for kids, good for the rest of us.

Independent study, community service, adventures in experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships - these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force the idea of "school": open - to include family as the main engine of education.

Family is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents - and make no mistake that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in l650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in l850 - we're going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.

The curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life. We've gotten away from that curriculum - it's time to return to it.

Our greatest problem is that we have large, vested interests profiting from schooling just exactly as it is, despite rhetoric to the contrary.

Experts in education have never been right; their "solutions" are expensive, self-serving, and always involve further centralization. Enough.

Time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family.

"I've said my piece. Thank you.

TRUE SUCCESS

"A Milwaukee attorney made her contribution to last week's "Take Our Daughters to Work Day", orchestrated by the Ms. Foundation by telling thirty six twelve and thirteen-year old seventh-graders that they should not bother to get married, because marriage can interfere with their careers (and marriages, she said, usually end anyway). The girls would be better off, she suggested, to remain single and "sleep around all you want" The attorney, Debra Koenig, later offered a luke-warm apology: "About that sleeping around thing, you girls are only about twelve. Well, that's still very young." Sure, wait till you're fourteen, maybe? ... Columnist Anna Quindlen of the New York Times, who wrote that "one of the greatest challenges I face as a mother is bringing up feminist sons," thinks the Ms. Foundation had a good idea because taking daughters to the work place helps raise their self-esteem. (An example of success spelled money).

The idea that self-esteem is, or ought to be, derived solely from work place achievement may be what is responsible for so many dysfunctional children in our society. It is what led psychologist David Elkind to write his book "The Hurried Child". Mr. Elkind writes of an experience he had, when requested to visit his middle son's nursery school to observe a problem child. The first child said, "My daddy is a doctor and he makes a lot of money and we have a swimming pool." Child No. 2 said, "My daddy is a lawyer and he flies to Washington and talks to the president." The third child said, "My daddy owns a company and we have our own airplane." Mr. Elkind writes that his son said, "My daddy is here!" and cast a proud look in his direction. ...Self-esteem comes when parents tell their children by word and deed that, "I care ..." Your importance has nothing to do with what I do for a living or what you decide to do for a living." (Arizona Republic, May 9, l993 by Cal Thomas)

From: God's Lost Children

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, a child in America will drop out of school. In the time it takes you to finish this sentence, another child in this country will run away from home. Our country is now gripped by an epidemic of kids who are right "out there" on America's streets. Lost and alone. Completely on their own. Hungry. Sick, Scared. ... All too often these kids are homeless because they've literally been thrown out of their houses by parents or stepparents who don't want them or don't care about them. Many others have fled to the street because they were abused at home ... physically, emotionally, continually. For these kids, life at home was so dangerous, they couldn't live there another day. They are truly victims . . . living and breathing symbols of the single greatest tragedy in America this past generation - the complete and tragic breakdown of the American family.

HABITS FOR A VIRTUOUS LIFE

The scriptural injunction to "train up a child in the way he should go [so that] when he is old, he will not depart from it" (Proverbs 22:6) identifies the parental responsibility to teach our children the importance of living a virtuous life. We can help our youth establish the habits recommended by President Ezra Taft Benson:

"(l) Avoid late hours and weariness. The Lord said retire to your bed early (D & C 88:l24), and there are good reasons for that. Some of the worst sins are committed after midnight by tired heads. . . .

"(2) Keep your dress modest. Short skirts are not pleasing to the Lord, but modesty is. Girls, do not be an enticement for your downfall because of your immodest and tight-fitting clothes.

"(3) Have good associates or don't associate at all. Be careful in the selection of your friends. If, in the presence of certain persons you are lifted to nobler heights, you are in good company. But, if your friends or associates encourage base thought, then you had best leave them.

"(4) Avoid necking and petting like a plague, for necking and petting is the concession which precedes the complete loss of virtue.

"(5) Have a good physical outlet of some sport or exercise. Overcome evil with good. You can overcome many evil inclinations through good physical exertion and healthful activities.

"(6) Think clean thoughts. Those who think clean thoughts do not do dirty deeds. You are not only responsible before God for your acts but also for controlling your thoughts. So live that you would not blush with shame if your thoughts and acts could be flashed on a screen in your church. . . .

"(7) Pray. There is no temptation placed before you which you cannot shun. Do not allow yourself to get in positions where it is easy to fall. Listen to the promptings of the Spirit." (Conference Report, Oct. l964, pp 59-60; or Improvement Era, Dec. l964, p. l069.)

WHY SEX ED IS FAILING OUR KIDS

From "Christianity Today"

By Sharon Sheehan

It was my first job in my career track. My task was to "do something" about the county's high rate of teenage pregnancy. I was happy to attend a training seminar in San Francisco conducted by acknowledged experts in the field.

Our discussions quickly centered on how to convince teenagers to use birth control. This group of experts was baffled. In the minds of teenagers, the decision to be sexually active was an embarrassment.

Our Planned Parenthood leader neatly summed up our mission: Eradicate the sense of shame associated with pre-marital sexual activity.

Eradicate shame? I was stunned. This was not simply fixing a public-health problem. This was wholesale restructuring of the human personality.

Not one murmur of dissent was voiced. Maybe we were too ashamed to speak up.

But taking a young person's sense of modesty and giving her a pill or him a 25-cent condom didn't seem like a fair trade.

Nonetheless, I had succumbed to the obligatory gag rule: Don't say anything that could arouse a sense of shame. Everything that I had learned from my parents' marriage and from my own marriage was off-limits. Everything I believed about how people form meaning-ful and lasting relationships was now irrelevant and counterproductive.

The new sexual ideology protects teenagers from shame by saying, "If you feel like you are ready, then it's OK." Ready for what? Ready to build a life together? Ready for con-quest? Ready to feel like a slut? Ready to bring new life into the world? The media bar-rage on safe sex makes it simple: being "ready" means having a condom.

Shame is a powerful word that explodes off in many directions. Shame can be cruel and destructive--controlling people by shaming them into silence or self-loathing or compliance, for example. But shame also prevents us from treating others in a despicable fashion. And it protects us.

In his book, "The Meaning of Persons", Swiss counselor Paul Tournier reflects on a young person's innate sense of modesty: "The appearance of this sense of shame is, in fact, the sign of the birth of a person. And later the supreme affirmation of the person, the great engagement of life, will be marked by the handing over of the secret, the gift of the self, the disappearance of shame."

Teens feel that they are left to learn it all on their own. They care about questions like: "What should I look for in a guy?" "How do I know if it's morally right?" "How will I feel afterward?"

When asked surface questions, they give the "correct" value-free answers. But behind the facade lurks a deep sense of loss. They lament the lack of guidelines and moral structure. "It used to be that kids wouldn't want to disappoint themselves or each other", a boy remarked.

It is as if the gap between sex and marriage has opened up in them a huge, empty hole in which there is "no real sure thing."

One girl described it this way: "It used to be that people got married and then they

had sex. Then when the baby came there was a place all prepared for it. Now technology has taken away the worry of having children. That leaves sex to float around in everyone's life when there's no guy who's going to stick around."

"I think it's really lonely," said one boy. "It's sad."

A loving, secure, and nurturing relationship that lasts: Hasn't that always been the goal and bottom line? Isn't the real C-word for sex education commitment, not condoms?

Public-health and family-planning experts have managed to dictate the terms of sex education and reduce them to a narrow line of thinking that is impersonal, dishonest, and defeatist. Young people are suffocating under this brand of realism, and they want some-thing higher.

We have a great resource in thousands of couples who have been happily married for 20 to 50 years. One boy told me, "I'd like to hear more stories: how they met, how they kept the love alive...." Information alone cannot give young people hope or meaning, but living examples can.

In coming face to face with another human being, how much do we value the self that we glimpse through their eyes, that flutters past in a gesture or a smile? Sex education is about nothing less than how and when we hand over this astonishing gift of the self.

Question: Is dating, as we know it, righteous, or what can we find in scripture and/or reason that establishes a proper or righteous courtship?

Dating, as we know it, has gone far wrong. Cultural traditions in earlier days were established to ensure (in most cases) that courtship was kept on a high moral level. The

idea was for a couple to get to know each other's character, values, beliefs and feelings before considering marriage - which was the goal intended. But somehow society views dating as a sexual roulette game these days.

Traditions I saw as having value were: introduction, so one has an idea who they are meeting by reference of a friend or family member; chaperon - at events especially with the young who fight such a desire-versus-chastity battle; dances, dinners, social gatherings - with families and others (as well as unmarried people) to encourage introduction and a bright, neutral atmosphere for courtship; family involvement - to have the person courting involved in some family activities, dinners, etc. ... it builds familiarity and encourages an "above-board" relationship.

In the end, the most telling factor of whether a courtship will remain righteous is by the virtue and ethics of the couple involved. Perhaps the best thing to do is try and emphasize the sanctity and most precious worth of our bodies and the deep meaning of sex

as it was intended between a man and a woman joined by God in marriage. S.B.

In nature, courting is a natural act and typically leads to mating. If daughter and son are taught the truth about nature, the body, the urges, and also taught self-esteem, how to think (common sense), responsibilities associated with mating and honesty-of-self, then one's daughter's or son's courtship will be a righteous one. S.Y.

Genesis 24 deals with Abraham sending his servant to get a wife for Isaac. I would like to point out that: l) Abraham took the responsibility in helping his son get a good wife; 2) prayer was involved, invoking the guidance and help of our Heavenly Father; 3) Rebecca's father was involved as per giving his consent; and 4) Rebecca was consulted and gave her consent. In Genesis 29 Jacob takes Leah and Rachel, both given to him by their father. Judges l4:l-5 tells of Samson's getting a wife ... by going to his parents and telling them who he wanted and asking them to get her for him. Ruth, chapters 3 and 4 gives the account of Ruth and Boaz. Here, Ruth, a widow, taking advice from her mother-in-law makes the offer of marriage to Boaz. Boaz then takes it to the elders of the city.

In Exodus 22:l6 the law Moses gave was "if a man entice a maid ... he shall surely endow her to be his wife ... [unless] her father utterly refuse to give her unto him".

My conclusions are that parents ought to be very much involved in helping their children choose good mates, though the children must make their choice for themselves. Young men and women are so vulnerable, not only in their urges, but also in their feelings and person when rejected. If parents could initiate the first step and secure the fact that there was a mutual interest, it could save the child from possible pain and embarrassment, and for one's daughters it also becomes a barrier to unwholesome and unwelcome men.

From B.A.

I feel so torn between being a good Mom (staying home where I belong) and get-ting more involved to help our country regain some ground on the freedoms we have already lost. The ironic thing is, they know that most people are so busy keeping their heads above water financially and trying not to lose what little mind they have left that they won't have much energy left to fight. That's the way I feel, worn out already and the battle has only just begun. So things like the Forum help us all to encourage each other and not give up the fight. Knowledge and being informed is giving us some power over our enemies as well as prayer and faith. Although the desire to even have that is slowly losing ground with me. That's why it is so important to have and keep, if possible, a two-parent household. This is where they are gaining a lot of ground is through the breaking up of and weakening of families and they do this through brainwashing and re-programming, as we all know. ... The children are so mixed up. My daughter knows what I stand for and her father is the total opposite. She is going through a terrible time right now. She doesn't want to be in school and has nausea and headaches in the morning and won't go to school. She says she wants to do home school again, but is afraid her Dad will hate her. ... It is hard being a parent in today's world.

I STILL SEE DANIEL

From Readers Digest March l99l

"...my husband and I had arrived in China to teach English ... I had looked forward to my role as the new American teacher. ...As the days passed, my zeal for teaching began to wane. Students slouched in their chairs, gazed out the window and punctuated my lectures with loud, juicy spitting. They rarely did homework, and during tests they opened their books and brazenly asked questions back and forth. ... If you are a college student, no matter how little you apply yourself, you will always receive a passing grade: 60. Everyone gets a degree after four years. ... One student, however, stood out. ... He was the only one ... who asked questions. ... He was also the only one who wanted to be there. All the others had been assigned to the class. ... He understood my frustration with the apathy of his classmates but explained that most students in China no longer see education as a way to advancement. The only way a student gets ahead, he told me, is by cultivating guanxi ... 'connections' ... In time, the small apartment my husband and I were staying in became a place for students to hang

out, drink soda and chat. Students who seemed barely alive during class burst with enthusiasm over a simple card game; clearly their apathy wasn't inborn ... Daniel was one of the few who entertained hope for the future. The morning of April l6, l989, signaled the beginning of a transformation. ... Instead of slumping at their desks, students were talking, standing, gesticulating wildly. ... I knew what had aroused them ... the death, ... of Hu Yaobang, a beloved political leader, one of the few who wasn't corrupt. ... At last, I thought, a subject they are interested in. I threw out my lesson plan and devoted the class to a discussion of Hu Yaobang. ... That afternoon, three party members were at my apartment door. ... two English teachers and the leader of the Foreign Language Department ... "You have been given books" one of the teachers told me. "It is your duty to teach from them." ... I often think of our last night in China, I sat up late watching television, which showed face after face - bright, alert faces just like Daniel's - all "hooligans" wanted by the Peoples Army. These were not the faces of criminals. They were China's best and brightest, her only hope. If found, would they, too, be killed? I feared for them that night.