There's a bit near the end of Arthur Miller's All My Sons where a desperate idealist tries to understand his own father's callousness. The tragedy comes when he realises that he can't condemn him. In a world where no one looks out for each other there's no reason to treat his father's sins as any worse or any more inexcusable than the next man's. What comes next is vital. It's an odd mix of nostalgia for his wartime days and an all out assault on free-market morality:
"We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honour was real there ...But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don't love a man here, you eat him. That's the principle; the only one we live by."
Maybe that's the insight Res Publica were grasping at when they released their latest proposal for a system of military academies across the most deprived areas in Britain. Maybe they saw a culture that's in places badly broken and decided the best way to fix it was to give young people a purpose and a code and something to be properly proud of. It's just a huge shame that the only ethos they could imagine was a military one.
The Sun headline says it all: "Army Schools for feckless youngsters". By opening these schools we'd be telling young people that it's them and them only who've failed their country. We'd be telling the worst kind of half-truth. People like David Cameron, Rowan Williams, and Phillip Blond have all blamed the way society is on a cultural and moral problem. They say there's a vacuum and that we've become atomised, that communities no longer hold together in the way that they used to. But you can't magic some moral standard into existence just by preaching obedience to the worst off. Military virtues are the virtues of loyalty, a sense of duty, obedience, and pride. How can we ask anybody to feel those things unless they have something worthy of them?
There is an alternative. We could engage people. We could offer them something that they might want to be a part of. At the moment the education system's been transformed into a game, one which constantly seems to churn out the same result. Four years ago I heard a maths teacher stand exasperated in front of his class and declare that life is about collecting "little bits of paper" and that it's something we all have to get used to. It's a sentiment that often goes unsaid but never unfelt. The overwhelming message is that school is a means to personal success and realising ambition. That's an alienating thought for anybody whose entire life experience tells them that success is for other people.
So we need an ethos. But we need it to be a citizen ethos, not a military one. If we're going to make some kind of service mandatory then why not volunteering and community projects? Arts programmes and debating workshops work. What gets taught in schools needs to be more flexible because good teachers are capable of inspiring difficult students but not with little pieces of paper. And Citizenship teaching has to be an absolute priority so that we can regain some form of participatory democracy.
Cameron claims he's serious about filling a moral void in this country. If that's so then he needs to understand that you don't shout a bad culture into submission. You change it by making something better.