So, I’m a teacher. And one of my least favorite things about being a teacher is classroom rules. I have never thought much about creating them, and despite what my fellow teachers around me are usually doing during the first few days of class every year, I tend to avoid the entire process if at all possible. Instead, I give my students the “laws are for the lawless” speech.

In the “laws are for the lawless” speech, as my former students know, I talk about how pointless classroom rule making is, especially in a high school, and how I prefer to operate on a system where my students behave in such a way that I don’t have to control their behavior through such silly rules because… they will control themselves.

I can always tell, by the look in their eyes, which students in my classes, during those first few days of class each year, have never thought of things in that way before. I always have several students who have never realized that self-control is a better way.

In a letter thanking soldiers in service to their country in 1798, John Adams famously wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”. What is less often quoted from this letter is the few lines before this, where Adams says that there is no government that is capable of controlling unbridled human passions. To paraphrase him, there has to be something within us that is interested in self-control, as a nation, if our government has any hope of being successful.

I don’t know if you’ve looked around lately, but many different people have many different opinions as to which parts of our government –state, local, federal– are successful and to what extent they are so.

Additionally, I don’t know if you are seeing a lot of self-control going on in your neck of the woods, from the people around you.

In the end, it is as I have always told my students that it is –> laws are for the lawless. In my classes, I am happy to say, I have been able –more often than not– to foster an understanding with my students that their self-control keeps me from having to be in control. In fact, whenever a student steps out of line in my class (ask my students, they’ll tell you), I gently say to them, “Either you’re going to control you or I’m going to control you.”

Unfortunately, what you are more likely to see these days from the citizens in our once-great nation is not self-control. As unfortunate as this is, it’s even more unfortunate to see those out-of-control members of our citizenry getting irate when the government comes in to try to establish control. What hasn’t occurred to them, just like it hasn’t occurred to several of my students at the start of every class year, is that the government wouldn’t have to establish control of the people if the people would control themselves.

John Adams knew this, and he knew that the government, truth be told, isn’t even capable of controlling people who can’t or won’t control themselves. In the end, the only thing that can control any of us is ourselves.