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This book exposes a very real threat to America's future-a threat
far more serious than any foreign enemy could ever pose. The most
serious danger that the United States now faces, says William
Damon, is that our country's future may end up in the hands of a
citizenry incapable of sustaining the liberty that has been
America's most precious legacy. In Failing Liberty 101, he argues
that we are failing to prepare today's young people to be
responsible American citizens-to the detriment of their life
prospects and those of liberty in the United States of the future.
He identifies the problems-the declines in civic purpose and
patriotism, crises of faith, cynicism, self-absorption, ignorance,
indifference to the common good-and shows that our disregard of
civic and moral virtue as an educational priority is having a
tangible effect on the attitudes, understanding, and behavior of
large portions of the youth population in our country today.The
author places the blame squarely on today's grown-up generation of
parents, educators, opinion leaders, and public officials for
failing to prepare young Americans properly for futures as citizens
in a free society. He explains why, unless we begin to pay
attention and meet our challenge as stewards of a priceless
heritage, our nation and the future prospects of all individuals
dwelling here in years to come will suffer, moving away from
liberty and towards despotism-and this movement will be both
inevitable and astonishingly quick.
Education in the United States has at last ended its failed
experiment with separating the intellectual from the moral-and
schools from K-12 to college campuses are increasingly paying
attention to students' values and accepting responsibility for
students' character. But how can we bring in this new era in
character education in a way that makes the right kind of
difference to young people? What are the approaches that will
provide character education the solid foundation necessary to
sustain it now and into the future? What obstacles in our current
educational system must we overcome, and what new opportunities can
we create? This book provides a unique perspective on what is
needed to overcome the remaining impediments and make character
education an effective, lasting part of our educational agenda.Each
chapter points out the directions that character education must
take today and offers strategies essential for making progress in
the field. The expert contributors explain, for instance, how we
can pass core values down to the younger generation in ways that
will elevate their conduct and their life goals. They reveal why
relativism has threatened the moral development of young people in
our time-and what we can do to turn this around. And they show the
critical importance of reestablishing student morality and
character as targets of higher education's central mission. The
authors make a strong case for "moral exemplarity"-actual human
examples of moral excellence-as an effective tool of educational
practice and describe how stoic "warrior" principles can offer a
moral manner of managing one's emotions in times of pressure.
Perhaps most important, they clarify the necessity of authority in
any moral education endeavor-and show how it is actually a powerful
force for both personal freedom and character building.
What does it mean to carry out "good work"? What strategies allow
people to maintain moral and ethical standards at a time when
market forces wield unprecedented power and work life is being
radically altered by technological innovation? These are the
questions at the heart of this important collaboration by three
leaders in psychology. Enlivened with stories of real people facing
hard decisions, Good Work offers powerful insight into one of the
most important issues of our time and, indeed, into the future
course of science, technology, and communication.
Greater Expectations is the book that exposed the low standards that children are confronted with in our homes, our schools, and throughout our culture. It exploded many of the misconceptions about children and how to raise them, including the cult of self-esteem, "child-centered" learning, and other overly indulgent practices that have been watering down the education and guidance that we are providing our young people. It disclosed how the self-centered ethic is damaging our youth. Greater Expectations started America talking about these issues and about how young people need to be provided with challenges and a sense of purpose if we want them to survive and thrive in life. Provocative and challenging, Greater Expectations was a wake-up call, a must-read for anyone concerned about the growing youth crisis in America and what we can do about it.
Although many people believe that this is a barren time for moral
leadership in this country, in Some Do Care, Anne Colby and William
Damon show that moral heroes do exist. Drawing on in-depth
interviews they offer a revealing look into the lives of
twenty-three Americans who have provided exemplary moral
leadership. Some Do Care traces the lives and goals of these
dedicated people from their first moral awakening in childhood to
the wisdom and enduring moral commitment of their later years.
Drawing on these lives, the authors offer new insights into the
role of faith and the importance of role models.
Drawing on the best professional research and thinking, Professor
William Damon charts pragmatic, workable approaches to foster basic
virtues such as honesty, responsibility, kindness, and
fairness-methods that can make an invaluable difference throughout
children's lives.
Cynicism often seems a smarter choice than idealism, and there are
seemingly good reasons for this. Politicians have disappointed us
time and again, trusted institutions have proven silf-serving and
corrupt, and social inequities persist and increase, unabated by
even the grandest of charitable efforts. Moreover, trends in
contemporrary moral psychology support this bleak view of the human
condition. Famous studies have shown that we have an almost
unlimited potential for cruelty when placed in the wrong
situations. Other studies imply that our moral responses are
dictated by inborn biological intuitions, or that people do little
more than act out conventional cultural scripts when confronted
with moral chices. The Power of Ideals presents a different vision,
supported by a different kind of evidence. It examines the lives
and work of six 20th century moral leaders who pursued moral causes
ranging from world peace to social justice and human rights. Using
these six cases to illustrate how people can make choices guided by
their moral convictions, rather than by base emotion or social
pressures, authors William Damon and Anne Colby explore the
workings of three virtues: inner truthfulness, humility, and faith.
Through their portrayal of the noble lives of moral leaders, the
authors argue that everyone -including those of us with ordinary
lives - can exercise control over important life decisions and
pursue ideals that inspire us. The Power of Ideals offers a hopeful
and much-needed vision for moral progress in the worl. This message
flies in the face of contemporary thought in moral psychology, much
of which has drawn mainstream media coverage in recent years. But
the more accurate, constructive, and inspiring view in The Power of
Ideals provides a sound basis for helping all people achieve their
moral potentials. The Power of Ideals offers a needed and hopeful
vision for personal well-being, for rebuilding trust among
disillusioned citizens, for the flourishing of democracy, and for
moral progress in the world.
America's leading expert on adolescence offers his prescription for
instilling a sense of purpose and fulfillment in today's youth.
Drawing on the revelatory results of a landmark study, William
Damon-one of the country's leading writers on the lives of young
people, whose book Greater Expectations won the Parents' Choice
Award-brilliantly investigates the most pressing issue in the lives
of youth today: why so many young people are "failing to
launch"-living at home longer, lacking career motivation,
struggling to make a timely transition into adulthood, and not yet
finding a life pursuit that inspires them. His groundbreaking study
shows that about one-fifth of youth today are thriving-highly
engaged in activities they love and developing a clear sense of
what they want to do with their lives-but approximately one-fourth
are still rudderless, at serious risk of never fulfilling their
potential. The largest portion are teetering on the brink, in need
of guidance to help them move forward: some are "dabblers" who
pursue strings of disconnected interests with no real commitment;
others, "dreamers" who have no realistic plans or understanding of
what success will require. What makes the difference? Damon shows
that the key ingredient for the highly engaged is that they have
developed a clear sense of purpose in their lives that motivates
them and gives them direction. Based on in-depth interviews, he
takes readers inside the minds of the disengaged and drifting kids
and exposes their confusion and anxiety about what they should do
with their lives. He then offers compelling portraits of the young
people who are thriving and identifies the nine key factors that
have made the difference for them, presenting simple but powerful
methods that parents and all adults can and must employ in order to
cultivate that energized sense of purpose in young people that will
launch them on the path to a deeply satisfying and productive life.
This important book provides a comprehensive look, from a
developmental perspective, of how children and adolescents come to
understand themselves during the first two decades of life. It
explores every aspect of this central area of social cognition,
including the physical, social, active, and psychological aspects
of self. The authors present data from several cross-sectional and
longitudinal studies of children's and adolescents'
self-conceptions, and they present alternative methods for
interviewing children about themselves and for analyzing children's
responses for developmental level and schematic orientation. They
offer theoretical explanations about the processes that account for
normal development of self-understanding and contrast these with
abnormal processes that arise in populations of clinically
disturbed youth. A chapter is also devoted to the study of children
living in a remote agrarian setting, whose self-understanding is
contrasted with the self-conceptions of children in the United
States.
This timely volume brings together twenty-six classic and
contemporary articles on the social and personality development of
the child. Focusing on major events in a child's life, from infancy
through adolescence, these multidisciplinary essays provide the
essential statement on the central topics in the field: attachment,
peer relations, play, identity crisis, and so on. This collection
is an ideal companion to the editor's textbook or a supplement to
courses on human development.
In it, the author provides a broad-based and integrative account of
both the child's social relations and the child's search for
self-identity and personality. To add coherence to a diverse field,
Professor Damon has organized the material chronologically rather
than present topics like attachment, aggression, and so on
separately, isolated from one another. There is a special chapter
on childhood peer relations and an entire section on adolescence.
not a compendium of research findings, this text focuses on the
major theories, each one illustrated with everyday examples and
case histories. The textbook and its accompanying reader should be
required reading for all students of human development.
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