Leading Children Beyond Good and Evil

Mon, 01 May 2000 00:00:00 -0400

Perhaps the enduring subtext in the evolution of moral education in America, and its continuing story to the present, has been a quest for inclusiveness. While the need to provide moral instruction to young people has never been questioned, neither has the impulse to accommodate the ever-growing diversity of moral cultures. In the face of potentially contentious and disrupting cultural differences, theorists and practitioners adopted inclusive accommodation as a strategy to neutralize the likelihood of conflict, since when put into practice, cultural inclusion means that no one’s interests are neglected, no one is left out, and, therefore, no one is slighted, snubbed, or offended. William Glasser captured the sum and substance of the quest for our own day as early as 1969 when he stated that “certain moral values can be taught in school if the teaching is restricted to principles about which there is essentially no disagreement in our society ” (emphasis added).

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What Americans Really Think About Abortion

Mon, 01 Jun 1992 00:00:00 -0400

At the foundation of any democratic society is the principle that the laws that order our lives together are legitimate only so long as they enjoy popular consent. This is precisely why the series of Supreme Court decisions allowing and protecting a woman’s access to an abortion on demand are so deeply contested. These decisions do not, in the main, reflect the “will of the people.” However, it would be a mistake to imagine that merely fine tuning the law in some way to reflect the arithmetic mean of public opinion in America would make any difference in resolving the controversy.

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Leading Children Beyond Good and Evil

What Americans Really Think About Abortion