I am worried about my home country, the UK. Whenever I read a news story from there, it reads as if Great Britain should be renamed Malignant Britain. The news is dominated with horror stories from a Clockwork Orange-like world [note 1], where society has gone wild with disorder caused by knife-wielding gangs of school children in hooded tops terrorizing the nation making "happy slap" [note 2] videos and drinking alcopops [note 3].

Our British "red-top" (The Sun, The Star, The Mirror) tabloid newspapers cannot be to blame for creating such mass-hysteria, for surely they are the moral vanguard of our culture. (This last statement is rich with what we like to call "British sarcasm." Of course, the tabloid newspapers of Britain sell vast amounts of paper with small words printed largely in scandalous non-detail. Most of the story is left to the imagination of readers, who are reading those "dumbed-down" papers purely because they have no imagination.)

In Korea, where I spent a year living and teaching, the philosophy of the Chinese scholar Confucius (551-479 B.C.) is deeply implanted into the culture, perhaps more so than in China itself. His teachings are manifest as a system of how to live and are taught in schools as proverbs from an early age. Many of these ancient principles are still adhered to in today's modern society, and are fairly universal concepts. Among them are harmonious notions: politeness, kindness, helpfulness, respect for elders and care for nature-intrinsic and embracing concepts that cannot easily be disregarded. I read that another Chinese philosopher and disciple of Confucius, Mencius, advocated superiors in authority taking advice from inferiors to sustain good governance. Is it possible to equally transplant the teaching of good manners of school children to adults?

In the West, we have no widespread equivalent system á la Confucianism that we conform to. It's disappointing to me that in my country there is no such founding moral code to guide people with simple rights and wrongs. Some of the teachings of Confucius echo the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus, from the New Testament, and indeed religion can provide a similar moral structure to life, but it is often sneered at or rebelled against since it requires subscription to the belief systems of the religions.

Certainly in Malignant Britain, where people commonly dump household waste (fridges, mattresses, etc) out of cars into tranquil forests, burgle the homes of the elderly, give birth in order to receive welfare handouts and free apartments, and then embarrassingly charge our own youth with all of society's failings, we need to examine ourselves. The respect and discipline of Korean school children when I taught there never failed to amaze me, or cause me to consider that we adults have forgotten something: The respect children give to adults is not always returned!

Britain's unruly children are served with "ASBO's" (or "anti-social behavior orders"), a way of humiliating our children, restraining their movements, and marking them publicly as troublemakers. It's like the modern version of creating a social outcast by pelting him with rocks to herd him out of the village. The idea is to protect society from anti-social behavior. Sadly, some children now regard the ASBO as a badge of honor for their crimes or behavior. When ASBO's are dished out like candy, kids might naturally look at it as something to be proud of. When I was younger, if most of your mates had something, you often also wanted one. Whether it's a pair of trainers or a government sanctioned stigmata, the same possibly now applies.