Thomas Mott Osborne: “a few years ago I ran across a study which was done on the Fullerton, California, public schools in 1940. It was kind of…”

“a few years ago I ran across a study which was done on the Fullerton, California, public schools in 1940. It was kind of interesting, the number of the concerns that the teachers in the Fullerton, California, public schools had at that time. Number one was talking in class, number two was chewing gum in class, number three was not putting waste paper in the waste paper basket, and number four was getting out of turn in line when going from one class to another. More recently I saw this study replicated when they went back to the Fullerton, California, public schools and asked the teachers what their main concerns were, and this is what the list read like. The number one concern was drug abuse, weapons in school, gangs, teenage pregnancy, teenage suicide, alcohol abuse, violence and so on. So, in the last 50 to 60 years, we have seen an amazing shift in our culture. I guess over 36 years of coaching, I saw some of the same changes, the same dynamics in some of the young people I was dealing with. So I guess I have asked myself from time to time, what has caused this shift? I think really two basic elements that I can point to. One is family disintegration. Currently one-half of our children grow up without both biological parents, and back in the 1940s and the 1950s, this percentage was probably no more than 5 or 10 percent. We have 18 million fatherless children in our country today.”