What adults do with, for, and to children determines what the future will be like for any cluster of people, whether it’s a family, a school, a community, or a nation. When a nation’s institutions that are supposed to nurture and protect children begin to fail, civilization there deteriorates.

This week we were shocked by disclosure of grievous wrong-doing by one adult who sexually abused children and wrong-doing by other adults who were complicit by keeping silent and allowing the abuse to continue. There were at least two things wrong with collective responses to the story as it was reported in various national media. First, the “blame” seemed to fall on Penn State where the specific abuse happened; and second, “what-to-do” about the situation focused on which and to what extent people should be punished. A third thing wrong with early reports was that for the first couple of days of media frenzy, the individuals who had been abused were seldom mentioned. The Penn State community, current students and faculty and alumni all over the world, plunged into sadness and regret that the incidents happened at “their university” as if it were their problem and their sadness alone. In fact, all of us are complicit who have developed or allowed to develop a culture in which children are sexually abused in plain sight of some adults with other adults’ knowing that it has happened and is continuing to happen.

It’s a cop-out to blame the Internet, instant reporting on television and radio, and mass media in general by saying it’s just that we know immediately now when a mother somewhere murders her child or a child disappears on the way to or from school or some other awful abuse of a child occurs at the hands of an adult. I’m not buying the excuse. Whatever it is that we are becoming as a civilization is the result of how we care for children... not just the children in our own families but all children.

Because of deplorable living conditions of many of the poorest of America’s children, I am personally chagrined and distressed by the general “state of the American union.” A nation is a deteriorating civilization when its politicians and the people who elect them tolerate letting children go hungry and homeless and lacking needed medical care. A presidential candidate in a speech earlier this week actually said, “Our nation needs to stop doing for people what they can and should do for themselves. Self reliance means, if anybody will not work, neither should he eat.” What is she willing to let happen to children who live in homes where parents aren’t working?

Sometime after World War II America entered a period of enlightenment and subsequent renaissance in its development and management of educational programs. The high school in a California Central Valley farming community where I was a beginning teacher in 1957 was doing then what only expensive private schools are doing today. By the mid-sixties, besides compulsory English classes, students at Yuba City High School could study German, French, Spanish, or Latin... or more than one of them. They could play in an orchestra or a marching band, sing in one of four or five special choirs, choose from several special art programs, participate in a variety of acting programs, and a whole cluster of sports and vocational programs... along with a first-rate academic program. I live now in a large California city that is facing bankruptcy and take-over by the state. In more affluent regions of the city, special programs in public schools are paid for by foundations set up by parents. Art and music teachers, sometimes librarians, and often nurses have been dismissed from the schools in the poorest parts of the city. In the sixties I thought the day would come when no American child would be left behind in hunger, sickness, homeless,and inadequate schools. In those days of civil rights activism I actually believed American public schools would all one day be places where all children would have equal educational opportunities. Like Charles Shultz’s Lucy, who was told by Charlie Brown that she should expect ups and downs because that’s the way life is, said, “But I don’t want ups and downs. I want ups and ups and ups.” But, alas, the up movement turned down in the eighties when the political climate changed. We got a national infusion of myopia by electing senators and representative in Washington and in statehouses who believed that if people at the top of the economic and social order were left unhampered by regulations, a trickle-down effect would bring prosperity to anybody who wanted to be prosperous. They believed what another presidential hopeful said recently, “Anybody who wants to be a millionaire in America and isn’t has only himself to blame.” Another presidential hopeful’s solution to America’s economic woes is to eliminate the Department of Education.

So... Penn State’s woes belong to all of us. The blame for what’s happening to our civilization must be owned by all of us. Finding solutions that will put us back on track is the responsibility of all of us.