I was listening to an interview with Entourage star Adrian Grenier today about a documentary he’s completed that looks at the role of celebrity in our culture. It’s no secret that a lot of us have an unhealthy relationship with people we don’t even know (or, perhaps more accurately, people we think we know.) But it’s still surprising to me just how screwed up we’ve become.

Consider the shock and betrayal people felt when the truth about Tiger’s exploits hit the tabloids. Or how irate we became when Mel Gibson’s mouth opened and we learned just how deeply his odd hatred runs. For some reason, many felt these were personal affronts, as if Tiger wasn’t only cheating on his wife, he was cheating on the rest of us, too.

Why should we care? If we didn’t put them up on their false pedestals to begin with, would it matter to us? Every day, people are doing depraved things to people that they are supposed to love, honor, and cherish; yet few of us even know of their transgressions. It’s only with celebrity that we feel that they owe us something. And maybe they do, in some respects, since we have given them the celebrity they craved and the financial success that sometimes comes with it. Maybe the covenant that they made with us is that they will respect us as much as we respect them. (Personally, I don’t think that’s how it works. I think we should be all looking a little closer to home for our heroes… parents, teachers, service members, firemen, policemen, etc. all do more for us everyday than Paris Hilton has done in 20 years. If you have any doubt, consider Mr. Stroup.)

It’s bad enough that we (and ‘we’ in this sense could be read as ‘people who should know better’) give too much credit and too much influence to people who likely don’t deserve it. What’s more disturbing is how our children feel. In Grenier’s documentary, he references an eye-opening study that looked at how teenagers view the celebrity world and how it affects their goals. Cited in Jake Halpern‘s book Fame Junkies, it “asked middle school and high school students whether they’d rather be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a president of a college, a Navy Seal, or an assistant to a celebrity,” Grenier recalls.

The result? Forty-two percent said they’d want to be a celebrity’s personal assistant. As Halpern says, in the film’s voice-over: “That was twice as [the percentage who wanted to be] president of Harvard or Yale, three times as much as a U.S. Senator, four times as much as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.” These kids, Halpern continues, “put such a premium on fame that they’re willing to give up some of the most coveted jobs in America just to be a bag-carrier to the celebrity.”

Grenier agrees. “For a long time in our culture,” he says, “there was an emphasis put on working hard and contributing to your society. Now it’s not about that anymore. It’s about the bling and how quickly you can get it without working.”

If that’s not a searing indictment of our culture, I don’t know what is. There’s a great Kurt Vonnegut quote that says “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” That may well be true, but at the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, I’ll be truly terrified when people more concerned about fame than hard work or service are running the country.

I wonder if we’re already there.

Sure, school is great. Kids will learn a lot of things they need to know. But regardless of the quality of the education, there are simply some things they’ll need to learn at home. From you. So you’d better get busy.

To help you get started, I thought I’d share this list of 14 Rules Your Kids Won’t Learn in School. It was originally written by Charles Sykes, author of the 1996 book Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can’t Read, Write, Or Add. This list didn’t appear in that book, but was actually a newspaper article that in turn spawned a second book, 50 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School: Real-World Antidotes to Feel-Good Education. I know you don’t have time to read all 50 things, and you’re not likely to get your kids to read them either, so here are the original 14 for both of you to chew on. I suggest you print them out and put it on the fridge:

Rule No. 1:  Life is not fair. Get used to it. The average teen-ager uses the phrase “It’s not fair” 8.6 times a day. You got it from your parents, who said it so often you decided they must be the most idealistic generation ever.   When they started hearing it from their own kids, they realized Rule No. 1.

Rule No. 2:  The real world won’t care as much about your self-esteem as much as your school does. It’ll expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. This may come as a shock. Usually, when inflated self-esteem meets reality, kids complain that it’s not fair. (See Rule No. 1)

Rule No. 3:  Sorry, you won’t make $40,000 a year right out of high school. And you won’t be a vice president or have a car phone either. You may even have to wear a uniform that doesn’t have a Gap label.

Rule No. 4:  If you think your teacher is tough, wait ’til you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure, so he tends to be a bit edgier. When you screw up, he’s not going to ask you how you feel about it.

Rule No. 5:  Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity. They weren’t embarrassed making minimum wage either. They would have been embarrassed to sit around talking about Kurt Cobain all weekend.

Rule No. 6:  It’s not your parents’ fault. If you screw up, you are responsible. This is the flip side of “It’s my life,” and “You’re not the boss of me,” and other eloquent proclamations of your generation. When you turn 18, it’s on your dime. Don’t whine about it, or you’ll sound like a baby boomer.

Rule No. 7:  Before you were born your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. And by the way, before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your bedroom.

Rule No. 8:  Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn’t. In some schools, they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. Failing grades have been abolished and class valedictorians scrapped, lest anyone’s feelings be hurt. Effort is as important as results. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life. (See Rule No. 1, Rule No. 2 and Rule No. 4.)

Rule No. 9:  Life is not divided into semesters, and you don’t get summers off. Not even Easter break. They expect you to show up every day. For eight hours. And you don’t get a new life every 10 weeks. It just goes on and on. While we’re at it, very few jobs are interested in fostering your self-expression or helping you find yourself. Fewer still lead to self-realization. (See Rule No. 1 and Rule No. 2.)

Rule No. 10:  Television is not real life. Your life is not a sitcom. Your problems will not all be solved in 30 minutes, minus time for commercials. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to jobs. Your friends will not be as perky or pliable as Jennifer Aniston.

Rule No. 11:  Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.

Rule No. 12:  Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you’re out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That’s what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for “expressing yourself” with purple hair and/or pierced body parts.

Rule No. 13:  You are not immortal. (See Rule No. 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven’t seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.

Rule No. 14:  Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school’s a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you’ll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You’re welcome.