Editorial: Is ethics a dying value?

Tuesday, July 18, 2006 | 7:30 a.m.

The past few years have witnessed a rash of scandals and alleged improprieties among public officials in Southern Nevada.

At the same time a diminishing appreciation of ethics has taken place in the business and corporate worlds. It's happening, too, in athletics, the medical and drug fields, in publishing - is there a field immune from this trend?

It would be easy to say that scandals come and go and there will be many more ahead - such is life. It's a little more difficult, but correct in our view, to contemplate our fast-paced lives and wonder if ethics is being crowded out as a core value.

As always when examining a creeping cultural flaw or insidious societal trend, a first thought is to ponder our educational system. There was a time when civics, or citizenship, was taught right along with the three Rs. Teachers then had the time to lay the foundation for instilling ethics in their students. They corrected students who crowded in line, who bullied, who talked back, who were always tardy, who littered and so forth.

Is there time anymore for that, with classes so crowded and with time to prepare students for standardized tests at such a premium? There should be, as a sense of ethics evolves from a sense of consideration for others.

Many children receive moral guidance from their parents, but then again many do not. So there should be time in school, during the course of every subject, where students could be reminded about personal integrity and challenged to think about the decision they would make or course of action they would take in various circumstances.

In a Las Vegas Sun story on Sunday by higher-education reporter Christina Littlefield, new UNLV President David Ashley was quoted as saying he believes every university student would benefit from an ethics course. He was joined by several university deans in expressing that sentiment, which we were glad to hear.

Communities filled with people whose grounding in ethics came early would reap huge rewards. They'd have everything from cleaner sidewalks to cleaner politics.