Children grow up in a family.  Adults grow up at work.

Children are taught rules of behavior that help them find their place within the family.  The most important thing in a family is values.  Rules point to the family’s values:

Tell the truth because …

Pay attention in school because …

Be kind to your friends because …

A child is prepared to make their way in the larger world through the values they’ve learned growing up as a member of a family.  In a perfect world, this is the ideal.  The child goes out into the world as an adult knowing how to live with honor and integrity.

The adult enters the world of work.  There they are given new rules.  The rules are likely to have little in common with family values.  The rules of work elevate one value above all others, profit.

Too many of the attributes that help the child to bond with family and friends are irrelevant to the world of work.  The adult learns to lie, manipulate, coerce, and cajole for the purpose of increasing profits.  The appearance of integrity becomes more important than the reality.  Fiction becomes fact, the false is portrayed as truth, and people become a resource to be used.

The child becomes an adult and willingly gives up their freedom in return for a position of employment.  This is possible only because the child has family values.  They want to belong to something larger than themselves.  They want to contribute, to participate, and they understand that sometimes they must set aside personal concerns for the greater good.

The children of today are protected and valued, society assures us of this.  The children of yesterday are the overworked and underpaid adults of today.  But where is the fault?

The teacher of the child is the henchman of profiteer.  We are not subject to the world.  We are the creators of it.  The light and the dark, the good and the bad, lives within each of us.  Circumstance decides the mask we wear.  We learn as we go.  We grow or we wither, nourished by our values or decimated by our acts.

Choice, an interesting word that speaks of possibilities.  What is possible?  Who decides?