The Mike Rice episode might be easily dismissed as a dark chapter in the history of Rutgers University men’s basketball, but it’s significant enough to shed light on all of us.

What it reveals is that we haven’t learned much.

In sports and life, we still accept and even embrace macho drivel. Too many of us still equate berating and belittling people with building character or toughening them up. And no matter how titanic or trifling the offense, the inhabitants of our ivory towers still find it easier to suppress damning information than enforce accountability.

Here’s the deal, kids of all ages: Nobody has the right to put their hands on you in an unsolicited manner. Not anywhere. Not ever.

Nor do they have the right to hurl a heavy object at your head or any other sensitive part of your anatomy. It’s also not remotely acceptable for them to bombard you with obscenities, particularly words that are known far and wide as the vilest synonyms for female genitalia and homosexuals.

I’d love to know which part of that is hard for a person with even a shred of respect for others’ dignity to comprehend. I’d also be indebted to learn why any institution would grant such a bully the right to coach or teach young people.

Surely you don’t believe this was Rice’s first offense. Please tell me you haven’t drawn the unfathomable conclusion that the infamous viral videos simply captured Rice having a bad day, or two, or three.

How Rice followed the prescribed career path through six schools as a Division I assistant before winning for three seasons at Robert Morris, then sputtering through three more at Rutgers, is beyond my comprehension.

Did none of those schools videotape practice? Did not one player in two decades have the courage to stand up and say, hey, I’m a scholarship athlete, not an inmate in debtor’s prison, and complain to somebody?

More likely, I’m afraid, it’s an indication that the outdated jock culture equating sports with war and seeing it as some microcosm of life is still alive and well.

Rutgers got caught, in other words, but you can bet other coaches and administrators around the country are loosening their ties, dropping their blazers on a folding chair and sweating bullets.

Don’t believe me? Then tell me how many basketball enthusiasts you know, young and old, who still worship at the altar of Bob Knight.

Too many to count, I suspect. They drool over his wins, his championships, his gold medals, easily glossing over the plain-as-day truth that he frequently was a boorish jerk. The end justified his means, they will say. He was, ahem, “molding them into men.”

Sorry, but being captured on film doing things that could get you arrested if they occurred on a sidewalk has nothing to do with being a man, a leader or an authority figure. And Rice’s actions made Knight look like the Dalai Lama.

They were drowned out by the rest of us with our heads screwed on straight, but I encountered people this past week who actually defended Rice. “That’s nothing compared to what Ol’ Coach Whatshisbucket did to us in high school.”

Really? Then why didn’t you haul off and deck the guy in self-defense? “That’s not how my generation was brought up. We respected our elders.”

Sure, and people respected Jerry Sandusky, too. But, OK, even if I can accept and respect that point of view in less extreme cases, why wouldn’t you tell your parents? “My old man would have told me to quit whining and get my butt back to practice.”

Then I regret to inform you that your old man was an even bigger doofus than you are. Times change. Sometimes, in oh-so-rare cases, our sick society even learns from its mistakes. Yes, even in athletics.

Compared to our knowledge of the 1960s or ’70s, we now understand that sending a kid into a sporting event after he gets his “bell rung” is tempting long-term damage, even death. We recognize that running wind sprints to the brink of vomit in 95-degree weather benefits nobody except emergency room doctors.

Our thinking has evolved so far in those areas. Hard for me to imagine why the truth that assaulting a kid is wrong isn’t self-evident. Or why any fool would think it’s OK to bellow words that get you fired immediately at any office in America.

Rice didn’t get it. His immediate supervisors, either.

The important question is do we get it? Do you get it? Until the answer is an unequivocal yes, this episode will repeat itself. Maybe closer to home next time. Perhaps involving younger victims.

Don’t wait until your loved one is an unwitting star of the show to acknowledge the problem.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @Oaksie72.