By William Raspberry, Washington Post Writers Group

November-December 1995 – The idea was to get my students thinking of the infl uence of income on the ability of families to raise healthy, happy children.

“Grinding poverty,” they agreed, would make the task virtually impossible. But, they also reasoned, having lots of money (as opposed to merely “enough”) would not necessarily make it easier. But what is “enough”?

Then I hit them with a device I remembered from the only Charles Murray book I ever really liked, In Pursuit of Happiness. Here it is. Imagine you will have to give your own young child over to someone else to raise and that your choices are these: First, a poor couple, mother and father both working but barely making ends meet. But they are as honest as the day is long, believe deeply in the value of education, and they place a high priority on integrity and personal responsibility.

The other couple, though they have never worked, have an adequate supply of income – perhaps winning a million-dollar lottery has guaranteed them an income of $50,000 a year. Unlike the first couple, the lottery winners would never be forced to dress a child in hand-me-down clothes. But they are indifferent to education, to integrity and to personal responsibility. Both couples would treat your child with equal affection. Which do you choose?

Too easy? I thought so, too, and I was prepared to offer a complication: The second couple would be rich, not merely comfortable, implying the possibility of boarding school.

In fact, I never got to the complication. About half the class preferred to place their child in the care of the “merely comfortable” couple. Poor but honest? Puhleeze!

My gasp must have been audible. The “right” answer had seemed so obvious to me that I was prepared to examine the reasons why my students – bright, mostly affl uent upperclassmen at Duke University – placed such a low priority on wealth. Well, as it turns out, many of them didn’t.

One young man explained that home isn’t the only place where children learn values. He’d opt for economic security and take his chances that his child would learn integrity and other positive values somewhere else – in school, in church or from neighbors.

Several of his classmates disagreed, of course, but a lot of them didn’t. And I’ve been trying to figure out why.

I took up teaching this semester because I thought it a useful way to avoid falling into the comfortable ruts of my own thoughts. Dealing with bright young people, I was convinced, would keep my mind fresh. Did I misjudge? Would it turn out that the only thing I’d learn from my students is how out of date I am, or how great the values gulf between us? How could something that seemed so plain to me seem so problematic to them?

Two possibilities occur to me. The first is that today’s parents may spend less time than those of my generation talking about values. Maybe many of today’s young people really do learn their core values from teachers and neighbors and peers.

The second possibility is that these particular young people may be so far removed from poverty, in income and in memory, that they overestimate its negative consequences. And why shouldn’t they? Haven’t we (and I do include myself) implicated poverty as the fount of everything from school failure to teen pregnancy to violence? Haven’t we implied that it is poverty that tempts our young people away from regular school attendance and into drug dealing and other crimes?

Maybe my students believe that a child placed with the poor-but-honest couple would grow up so sad and resentful, so lacking in the self-confidence that affluence seems to provide, that almost anything would be better than poverty.

Well, yes, maybe better than the poverty we describe as “grinding,” better than squalor, better than the desperate state of so many in what we call the underclass.

But here is the truth – and just maybe the cause of my consternation. That poor couple: who value education and integrity and personal responsibility – that household brimming with everything important except money – those are my parents, that is the home I grew up in, happy and healthy and confident. And I never saw anything remotely tragic about it. Quite the contrary.

Would I have been happier if my parents had had the money to give us more things? Quite likely. Would I have traded what they did give my siblings and me for money? Not for any amount you could name.