Probably the most crucial developments in the field of professional continuing education (CPE) is the relatively recent emphasis on ethics, leading to the proliferation now of many an ethics CPE course.
While certainly a good thing when the professions insist on not just what is legal but what is ethical and, even, moral, it’s also quite sad that simple human decency should today be so uncommon as to warrant an explicit prerequisite.
Of course, malpractice jokes roasting doctors, lawyers, and accountants have long been a staple of humor and given such a context the now-official understanding for proper behavior is to be applauded.
There are certainly more serious scenarios than having ethics CPE specifications – namely, the lack of them with the world still being the way it is: the very way which primarily made such courses so essential!
But there’s no denying the fact that when fundamental human decency needs to be taught so many years after kindergarten, where they were initially encountered (likely an ill-fated fact in itself, as the first place anyone should come across their ethics should be the home!), society is doomed to an evermore miserable race to the bottom for all.
Why, just take a look at the well-established practice now of companies hiring unpaid interns to do full-time jobs – real jobs, for which these volunteers are not even given the defense of common workplace discrimination and harrassment laws.
No, really!
Even multi-billion-dollar corporations, for example General Electric (which managed to pay no taxes for the filing season of 2011), make extensive use of these unpaid workers daily.
What good has all the ethics CPE courses in the world truly achieved when corporate bean-counters still continue to simply invent new ways of posting a profit while improving productivity and lowering costs on the backs of young people without money?
