Moral Classes

When I was in the school, we used to have a one hour class every week called “Moral Class”. We used to look forward to that class as that was when no boring subjects were taught. A teacher will come to tell us stories, give us story books from the school library to read in his class or ask us to take turns to tell a story to the class.

The only criteria for all the stories that were told or given to be read was that it should have some moral and instil a sense of morality in the young minds. So that the student grew up with good values imbibed and the country in turn got good citizens who have high moral values. A strong and far sighted view.

Once you have the people with high moral values in the society, it is easy to get honest husbands, wifes, teachers, doctors, engineers, lawyers, accountants and politicians.

When I look back and think about those classes I note that a majority of moral values and good attitude that I have today were shaped by those classes and stories that I heard.

It also makes me think that they were too few to make a strong and sound impact. The fact that the moral classes and inpartation of moral values were inadequate is very evident when you look at the society around you, including yourself. We have too few morally strong people around us. All of us sacrificy morality and honesty at some area or other. If it gives some monetory gain we are prepared to do that.

However, the little amount of moral values inculcated in us do come out time and again as we do not intrinsically like dishonesty. We do not want to be one, but we are pushed to that by the larger society. It is the society that has grown up with lower level of moral orientation that forces one to disregard the moral values. I think that no one, including the politicians whom we think are most corrupt and have no moral values, do not want to be that way.
We all crave for a morally strong socieity and that thought keeps coming out in some form or other. Take for example the many emails that we receive, with some moral story, as forwards from our friends and relatives who in turn received it from their friends and they from their friends and so on.

These emails get forwarded because each one who read that story considered that it is a nice story, it contained a nice message. The person forwarding the message was impressed by the good message in that story and that story made an impact on that person. And he considers it a good thing to share the good message with his friends and relatives so that they are also enriched with that good message or thoughts.

If you think about it deeply, the spreading of these good messages emanate from a desire that we all have. A desire to have a better socieity. A society with stronger moral values. A society with an improved degree of honesty and trust.

If the small amount of moral dose that we got in the school prompts this small activity what impact it would have had if only we had lesser 10 minutes less of Maths, Science, English and History in each school day and added those minutes to moral classes?

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I was inspired to write what you read above on reading the story below that I got on email from a friend.
A blind girl hated herself because she was blind. She hated everyone except her loving boyfriend. He was always there for her.

She told her boyfriend “If only I could see the world, I will marry you”.

One day, someone donated her a pair of eyes to her. When the bandages came off, she could see the world. She could see everything, including her boyfriend.

He asked her, “now that you could see the world, will you marry me?”

The girl looked at her boyfriend. He was blind. The sight of his closed eyelids shocked her. She hadn’t expected that. The thought of living with a blind man for the rest of her life led her to refuse to marry him.

Her boyfriend left her in tears and days later wrote to her a note that said “take good care of your eyes dear. Before they were yours, they were mine”.

This is an example of how human brain works when there is a change in the status. Very few remember what was life before and who was with them during the painful times.