Commentary : . . . And Make Sure They Learn Early About Values : Society: Forget the quick fix. Give kids a head start to learn right from wrong.

Some politicians, not all, are scurrying about with much zest and anticipation. It’s time, their polls inform them, to find the quick fix for what they have determined is a society plagued by the irregular heartbeat of deficient values.

But there are contradictions that intrude on this denunciatory atmosphere. If there are moral omissions in the society, they cannot be caulked by instant, slenderly premised attacks on entertainment. The plain fact is we are rearranging our priorities in the wrong way.

The statistics tell us that crime is steadily decreasing in America. The cities are safer. The schoolyard, according to the Centers for Disease Control, is the safest place for children. Serious crime by teenagers has been dropping since 1994. Only .41%--that’s point-four-one percent--of the 70 million teenagers in the U.S. have been arrested (not necessarily convicted) for serious crime. Which means that 99.59% of all teenagers are not involved in serious crime.

Nonetheless, if most Americans believe otherwise, there is a place to begin whatever repair is needed to make sure our values in the next generation are braced and knit. That place is in the very early years of the child’s education, beginning in preschool, continuing through kindergarten and grades one through five. Most child behavioral experts will assert it is in those early years that the child’s moral shield is shaped and made impenetrable to the later years’ blandishments of peers and the enticements of the surly streets.

We are today misplacing our energies and our funding by directing all sorts of incentives to high schools and colleges. Too late. The moral scaffolding has been built by then, for better or worse. How then to begin this revision of life conduct? We must introduce in preschool, and keep alive through grade five, a new school course.

The course could be titled, “What is right, and what is plainly wrong.” For 30 minutes each day, the teacher would illuminate for these very young children what William Faulkner labeled “the old verities,” the words that construct and implement the daily moral grind in which every durable society must engage if it is to be judged a “just” society.

These are words like duty, honor, service, integrity, pity, pride, compassion and sacrifice, plus the clear admonition that violence is wrong. To the teaching of the meaning of those words must be added the cleansing precept of treating other people as you would want them to treat you. And most of all to make sure that these kids understand with growing clarity that home, school and church are the sanctuaries for their later life. There is a grand simplicity to this kind of school course. It enters a child’s mind early, burrowing deep into those recesses of the human brain that even today advanced medical science has not been able to penetrate.

If you ask enough people, you will find that most of us remember our first- or second-grade teacher. I remember Miss Corbett and Miss Walker, who read to us before we really understood, but the words had weight and allure. We listened and, without really knowing it, we learned and saved what we learned. Perhaps it was because what we heard in those early school years was the first entry into our learning vessel.

Moreover, the words that furnish us with a moral armor plate are the same, more or less, in all cultures and religions. Therefore, without breaching the walls of church and state, the child masters and retains the majesty of old homilies and maxims that form the platform from which vaults the great religions that guide most of the known world today.

Absent this kind of early instruction, absent the building of this moral shield, no congressional law, no presidential executive order, no fiery rhetoric will salvage a child’s conduct nor locate a missing moral core.