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(3/2005) - The kindergarten graduation at Washington Elementary was underway on a warm May evening in my Missouri hometown. My five-year-old friends and I stood on the stage in our little white academic gowns and mortar boards basking in the admiration of a room full of parents. As I stepped out to accept my diploma, I must have caught my Mary Jane-ed foot on the hem of my gown. Suddenly, all of the snaps holding it together flew apart, and I found myself standing there I nothing but my Carter’s underwear. Had I been five in the electronic age instead of several decades ago, my embarrassing moment would undoubtedly be recorded all over the Internet instead of just in my mother’s memory.

Thank heaven, we were still in the electronic dark ages when I was growing up. Those in my generation can take some comfort in knowing the junior high confessions we wrote in dime store diaries have long ago been discarded or are packed away in the cellar and that, in general, our youthful missteps and indiscretions are not available for all to see by a simple click on Google. In other words, we were able to prepare for adulthood with some privacy, and we didn’t have to worry about our errors and excesses being recorded for posterity. As Jeffrey Zaslow has point out (The Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2004), ”Today’s kids will enter adulthood with far more of their lives in plain view,” thanks to personal websites, Internet blogs, and surveillance cameras. He quotes a consultant who works with businesses to research prospective employees: “Tell your kids,” he says, “to think of the Internet as a public stage that’ll still be playing their show 20 years from now.”

Maintaining some privacy may be more important than we realize. We need time, and a secure inner place, in order to forge our lives. We become functioning individuals, as psychologists say, by taking our essential problems inside ourselves and taking responsibility for them. The danger in everyone knowing everything is not embarrassment alone but the eroding of personal boundaries. Instead of developing a distinct inner core, we become diffuse, vulnerable to influences that we would otherwise discard.

There is another unintended consequence in making everything public, as in reality television and Internet confessions. It turns out that our worst characteristics, the ones we once had the luxury of examining and discarding, are now widely available for imitation in this voyeur culture we have created. In other words, by sharing and baring all, we generate epidemics of bad behavior as public displays are imitated endlessly by people who haven’t yet developed the self-discipline required to live honorably. Our public discourse has changed from calm, reasoned debate to a contest of who can shout loudest and be most insulting.

Here is an example. In The New York Times on January 23, 2005, an article called “Awful America?” described Fox’s new season of “American Idol” as “a series of vicious encounters between hopeful but pathetically untalented young people and celebrity judges being paid to make fun of them.” According to the Times piece, some contestants seem to have been advanced to the level of appearing on the show not because they can sing but because they are “poor, of low intelligence, or even mildly disturbed.” They sing their hearts out hoping to be chosen for Hollywood, only to be ridiculed and demeaned by adults who should know better.

This kind of behavior is everywhere. Our children do not have to look very far in our society to see people being watched, humiliated, and degraded. But what they don’t see often enough is society’s disdain for this kind of behavior. Those who are bullied and harassed used to be shunned. Now they are applauded on national TV. It is society’s response to inappropriate behavior that has changed so dramatically. How much harder it is to teach children to respect others as well as themselves in this kind of environment?

Sustaining an atmosphere of respect is rooted in our founding vision at Miss Hall’s School. We know that girls need the chance to take risks, discover who they are, and discard the parts of themselves they don’t like or that don’t work. With the help of mature, understanding adults, girls grow up the old-fashioned way, according to their own strength and better selves.