Notes on School-Based Crime Fighting: International Lessons in Moral Education

Few communities are immune to organized crime and corruption. What has not been fully explored is how education in lawfulness can be introduced into the curriculum of primary and secondary schools to confront the influences of criminal life styles that continue to be romanticized by factions within a community. This paper reports on such efforts in Sicily, Hong Kong, Russia, and Mexico. Each community is vigorously seeking to repel negative influences from traditional strongholds of organized crime, which continue to exert powerful and pernicious effects on those societies.Challenging organized crime requires more than governmental regulatory responses. Civic, business, labor, religious, social, and educational organizations all have a role in mitigating the scourge of lawlessness. A central question is to consider the ways in which a civil society can foster a culture of lawfulness. Promoting a set of beliefs and mobilizing the legal norms and institutions for changing, administering, and enforcing laws will enhance and protect quality of life is a task that some primary and secondary schools have begun to explore. One approach involves moral education, explicitly and directly teaching children and young people about the rewards and obligations in making moral and ethical decisions. This paper examines this effort in four, distinct cultural settings.