Character Education – A Shared Responsibility
Character, it’s who you are, what you say, and what you do even when no one is listening or watching. But what does that mean to you? What does that mean to your child?
Each day, kids are influenced by hundreds of messages that portray beauty, wealth, pleasure, power and popularity as the “right” path to happiness and success. This is a lonely pursuit that often strips away confidence and self-esteem leaving one feeling unvalued, unappreciated and unmotivated.
Character Education Lessons to Grow – Part 2
Part 1 showed we need to overhaul our national character education. Lessons from the past can inspire us to adopt good, positive, character traits that serve our children and our nation.
If you’ve paid any attention to the financial turmoil traumatizing the world during September, 2008, you agree change is necessary.
September 16, 2008 represented a historic move in the US: our government bailed out one of the world’s largest financial institutions, AIG, with a gift of 85 billion dollars.
This may or may not stop the hemorrhaging of our financial institutions and since I’m no financial expert, I won’t attempt to answer that.
The Character Education Movement Takes on Pragmatism, Confuses it with Instrumental Reason
Recently I stumbled across what looked like a very succinct description of the pragmatist philosophy (or as I like to call it “the pragmatist disbelief system”). In fact, Bob Sherman’s article provides a nice summary of core concepts of the pragmatist movement. He does what at first glance appears to be an admirable job of explaining the relationship of pragmatism to “truth-claims,” emphasizing that pragmatists define the truth of any particular proposition as a) not an absolute position and b) based on the usefulness of that proposition.
The article is well worth looking over if you want to understand how those endorsing “character education” view pragmatism. It does not take long to realize that while Mr. Sherman gets some of this right, he has fundamentally misunderstood the implications of reasoning pragmatically. His mischaracterization is not unusual. I thought I might take the opportunity to clarify what is in fact the pragmatist system of thought and how it works itself out in the sphere of social and economic policy.