Educating for character

Informationen zum Autor Thomas Lickona Klappentext Calls for renewed moral education in America's schools, offering dozens of programs schools can adopt to teach students respect, responsibility, hard work, and other values that should not be left to parents to teach.CHAPTER 1       The Case for Values Education   To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society. —THEODORE ROOSEVELT The core problem facing our schools is a moral one. All the other problems derive from it. Even academic reform depends on putting character first. —WILLIAM KILPATRICK, Why     Johnny Can’t Tell Right from     Wrong   Should the schools teach values?   Just a few years ago, if you put that question to a group of people, it was sure to start an argument. If anyone said yes, schools should teach children values, somebody else would immediately retort, “Whose values?” In a society where people held different values, it seemed impossible to get agreement on which ones should be taught in our public schools. Pluralism produced paralysis; schools for the most part ended up trying to stay officially neutral on the subject of values.   With remarkable swiftness, that has changed. Escalating moral problems in society—ranging from greed and dishonesty to violent crime to self-destructive behaviors such as drug abuse and suicide—are bringing about a new consensus. Now, from all across the country, from private citizens and public organizations, from liberals and conservatives alike, comes a summons to the schools: Take up the role of moral teachers of our children.   Of all the moral problems that have fueled this concern, none has been more disturbing than rising youth violence. From 1978 to 1988, according to FBI statistics, rape arrests for 13- and 14-year-old males nearly doubled.2 Over a 20-year period (1968 to 1988), there was a 53 percent increase in all violent crime—murder, rape, robbery, and assault—for males and females seventeen or under.3 Moreover, juvenile crimes of violence, often carried out by kid-next-door teenagers, have of late combined new lows in brutality with a seeming total lack of conscience or remorse.   In Brooklyn, three teenage boys, described by neighbors as “nice kids,” were arrested for dousing sleeping homeless men with gasoline and setting fire to them. As the youths were booked at the police station, one of them said, “We just like to harass the bums.”   Five teenagers in affluent Glen Ridge, New Jersey—including two brothers who were cocaptains of the high school football team—were arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a 17-year-old mentally retarded girl in the basement of the brothers’ home. Eight other teenagers watched.   There is today a widespread, deeply unsettling sense that children are changing—in ways that tell us much about ourselves as a society. And these changes are reflected not just in the violent extremes of teenage behavior but in the everyday speech and actions of younger children as well. In New Orleans, a boy in first grade shaves chalk and passes it around the classroom, pretending it is cocaine. In a small-town school in upstate New York, a first-grade boy leans over and asks the girl in the next row, “Are you a virgin?” A Newsweek story titled “So Long Wonder Years” reports the findings of a new Carnegie Corporation study: One quarter of all junior high school students are involved in some combination of smoking, drinking, drug use, and sex; fully half are involved in at least one of these activities.   Children with the most glaring deficiencies in moral values almost always come, their teachers say, from troubled families. Indeed, poor parenting looms as one of the major reasons why schools now feel compelled to get involved in values education. Another part of the problem is the mass media and the prominent place it occupies ...

Product details

• Authors: Thomas Lickona, Lickona Thomas
• Publisher: Bantam Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.09.1992
• EAN: 9780553370522
• ISBN: 978-0-553-37052-2
• No. of pages: 496
• Dimensions: 153 mm x 229 mm x 26 mm
• Subjects: Education and learning > Teaching preparation > Vocational needs; EDUCATION / General, Education