Educating for Character: How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibility

Educating for Character received a 1992 Christopher Award ''for affirming the highest values of the human spirit''.

One of the greatest challenges facing our schools today is teaching our children respect, responsibility, hard work, compassion, and other values so desperately needed in today's society. Most parents say they want help from the schools in teaching children a basic sense of right and wrong, but "values education" can be profoundly controversial, even feared. In a pluralistic society where values often clash, schools struggle with fundamental questions: What values should they teach? And how should they teach them?

Now Dr. Thomas Lickona, an international authority on moral development and education and the author of Raising Good Children, cuts through this controversy to report on dozens of practical, successful programs that are teaching the values necessary for our children's moral development and a decent, humane society. His twelve-point program offers practical strategies designed to create a working coalition of parents, teachers, and communities -- anyone who cares about the character of young people today.

In Educating for Character, Dr. Lickona discusses:

1. The educator as role model, mentor, and caregiver
2. The classroom as a moral community, in wich civility and compassion are part of the curriculum
3. Positive patterns of discipline involving home and school
4. Confronting the tough issues of drugs, alcohol, and sex
5. and much more...