A new teacher asked the class what their parents did for a living. When it was Jimmy’s turn, he stood up and said, “My father is an exotic dancer in a strip club.” The teacher gasped and quickly changed the subject. Later she took Jimmy aside. “Is what you told the class true?” she asked him. “Is your father really an exotic dancer?”

Arthur Anderson, Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Global Crossing, Adelphia… What a difference a year makes. A year ago these names would have evoked an image of corporate strength, fiscal giants, mainstays of the American financial image.

Looking out for number one – and damn the consequences for the tens of thousands of hard working Americans who put their faith, and trust, and futures in their hands. The average Americans came up empty while hundreds of millions of dollars continued to go directly into the pockets of those same CEOs and CFOs and corporate Presidents.

How we got here is simple. We got here because we have allowed WINNING to become the highest value of our society. WINNING. Not excellence, or character, just winning. The evidence is all around us, from our schools, to our sports fields, to our political races, to our businesses.

Look at all the scandals that have plagued the last few Olympic Games. Integrity, character, and sportsmanship once again took a back seat to “winning at any price,” from skating to gymnastics to weight lifting.

We all know that the term “Amateur Athletics” is practically an oxymoron. The pressure to win in college athletics has become so great that “everybody does it” has become the mantra of nearly every college in America. It is commonplace for coaches and booster clubs to break any ethical rule in the book if it helps them recruit players who will boost their chances of winning.

Eight South Eastern Conference members have also been penalized. Nine times for major football rules violations, and six times for men's basketball team infractions.

Former Auburn Coach Terry Bowden, now a college football analyst for ABC Sports tells the stark reality: “The numbers bear out that it has now become a culture of cheating.”

It doesn’t even start in our High Schools, or our Middle Schools, or our Elementary Schools, all of which have become depressing reflections of the denigration of character and values in our society. No, I’m afraid that the “culture of cheating” begins at home.

We do just about anything to make sure our kids get into the very best schools. With an “ends justifies the means” mentality, we lie about where we live, and think it’s nothing, and our kids know it.

It’s the simple things that matter most. These are where the real-life lessons are taught, and learned. When you tell your kids you’ll be home at 11 from an evening out, and you don’t come back until 12 – you are teaching your children not to value integrity. That keeping their word isn’t really that important.

So we shouldn’t have been surprised by the results of the Josephson Institute of Ethics “Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth.” When they surveyed 8,600 high school students 71% of them admitted they cheated on an exam at least once in the past 12 months. Almost half said they did so two or more times. Of course at the same time, 90% of parents surveyed claimed their kids would never cheat.

The most blatant example was when Piper High School in Kansas made the news last year after teacher Christine Pelton failed 28 students in her Biology class. She discovered they plagiarized their term papers.

And amazing as it sounds, the school board sided with the parents. They ruled that the students would receive partial credit for the project and that it would now count for only 30% and not 50% of their grade allowing many students to pass the course who otherwise wouldn’t have.

Indeed, there is no greater truth about the power of parenting than the words of James Baldwin who wrote: “Children have never been good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” Or Robert Fulghum who said, “Don’t worry that children never listen to you, worry that they are always watching you.”

You can do something about it. This “culture of cheating” that seems so rampant in our society. This obsession with winning that has grown so out of control.

Is it any wonder that 6.5 million boys and 3.5 million girls are involved in fights every year in America? And 4.5 million more kids are threatened with bodily harm each year.

You see the most important job you will ever have, is the job of being a parent. You might be a CEO, or a CFO or a President of a multi-national company – but your most important job, and your hardest job, is still the job of parent, and it applies to anyone who is a primary adult figure in the life of a child.

1. Be the kind of adult you want your children to grow up to be. At the end of every day ask yourself, “If how I acted today is how my children will choose to act every day, what kind of world will I have created?” And if you don’t have kids, you ask yourself: “If everyone acted everyday as I did today, what would the world be like?” Albert Schweitzer said “Example is not the main thing in influencing others, it is the only thing.” 2. Act with integrity – keep your word – to kids and adults. Former Senator Alan Simpson once said, “If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.”

4. Make ethical behavior a family affair. Create family ethical action projects. Participate in one of KI’s many Tikun Olam task forces, volunteer at a school, or shelter, hospital or non-profit. Teach your children the power they have to make a difference in the life of another.

Teach them the simple wisdom of my favorite story in the Talmud. Of the two men in a rowboat out in the middle of the ocean. One man takes out a hand drill and begins to drill a hole in the bottom of the boat. The other man freaks out and begins screaming at him, “What are you doing? What are you doing? You’re drilling a hole in the boat!”

If we are to learn a lesson from the financial scandals of these past months – perhaps it ought to be the words of Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel who wrote, “In a democracy only some may be guilty, but all are responsible.”