Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools - Softcover
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.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
William Damon is America's leading thinker on the moral development of children and adolescents. He is a professor at Brown University and Director of its Center for the Study of Human Development.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter 1
Introduction
Imagine an account of human life in the twenty-first century. The genre is science fiction, perhaps delivered in a futuristic novel or movie. The account is set in any city or town of the populated world. The main characters are all younger than twenty. They are the children and adolescents who inhabit the streets, the homes, and the schools of this typical community of tomorrow.
A Fable of Our Near Future
The scene opens on a bleak deserted neighborhood in the heart of town. It is daytime, just after working hours, and the place has emptied out. The sense of emptiness is not a great change from earlier in the day. From nine to five, some government offices and a few small shops provide a bit of life to the area, but it is a muted, confined life that mostly takes place off the street. Most of the area's stores and the oldtime movie theaters have been boarded up for decades. The remaining businesses, there only to serve the government workers, are barricaded behind steel grates that have been adorned with rolls of barbed wire. After the working day is done, nowhere is there an open eatery, a pharmacy, or newsstand.
Soon it is clear why. Roving bands of youth begin bringing a more vivid life to the neighborhood, though it is a macabre and chilling one. Some of the youths are crammed into cars that creep ominously around corners like big cats on the prowl. Others dart through the alleys or leap across the rooftops. The youngsters move in a quick, guarded pantomime, signaling each other by hand or by eye contact. Before long, taunts, gunshots, and screams punctuate the watchful silence. Then flashes of fire, smoke, the screeching of car motors and wheels, and the wail of police sirens bring the scene to a climax. Stretchers carry away three young corpses. No photographer comes to chronicle the grisly sight: such events have long since lost their news appeal. Next follows an uneasy calm. Then, before anything approaching a decent interval has passed, similar events unfold with a dreary predictability.
The scene now shifts to the outskirts of town. We are in a leafy residential area. But barricades and angry signs have taken away some of the idyllic suburban charm. The signs warn that only neighborhood residents and their announced guests are allowed access to the streets. Private patrols have established checkpoints to enforce the edict.
In any event, there is very little outdoor traffic among young folks in this part of town. Almost all the action takes place inside -- if one considers TV gazing, snacking, napping, and an occasional stony-eyed pass at homework to be "action." There is a listless, isolated quality to the activity. Even the phone calls that break up the monotonous silence lack the gossipy glee that one used to associate with teenage telephoning. So lethargic are the movements of the young people that we almost wonder if the scene is being shot in slow motion. Many of these youngster have a pale, flaccid, washed-out look.
Despite the overall pall, in one of the homes a genuine drama does take place. A boy of sixteen, three days away from his next birthday, quietly slips into his father's study and turns on the home computer. With a few taps on the keyboard, he opens the data base file where his dad has catalogued the family's collection of guns. The boys studies the size, type, and location of each gun listed. After some thought, and without bothering to turn off the computer, the boy walks to the hallway, opens a cabinet, and removes a thick single-barrel shotgun. He knows that the gun has been kept loaded for the purposes of instant household protection. Leaving the cabinet door open, the boy takes the shotgun down into the basement. After a ten-minute pause in which he neither leaves a note nor makes any other significant gesture, he ends his life with a shot to his head.
At the suburban high school the following day, there is some consternation at the news of the boy's suicide, but the feelings lean more toward sorrow than surprise. Suicides occur periodically, here and in every other suburb around. In the meantime, there are other happenings at school that demand more urgent talk and vigilance. The most pressing is the epidemic of knifings that is placing both students and teachers at daily risk. The sophisticated metal screening devices at the school entrances have done little to deter students from creating knife-like weapons out of sharp objects and using them against each other and the staff. Once a problem thought to be limited to students from the "tougher" parts of town, the knifings by now have no discernible link to students' social status or group identity. The girls are now as likely to do it as the boys.
A panorama of school life reveals an atmosphere that is in all other ways consistent with the sense of dread that emanates from the frequent knifings. Graffiti have been splattered everywhere, inside as well as out, easily defeating the token, halfhearted efforts of school officials to rub them out. Shaved heads, tatoos, and gaudy jewelry ornament most of the young bodies. The students wear a motley assortment of clothes or quasi-uniforms resembling degenerate war gear. The most popular T-shirts of the day bear a pair of boldface insignia, one written on the front and one on the back: "Sick of it all," and "Nothing to lose."
We move down the corridors into the school's central offices. A counselor is calling a student's home about some apparently excused absences, only to find that the parent's letters have been forged. A young boy is in the principal's office for threatening his teacher with a gun. Three students are separated from their class after hurling racial epithets at a fourth. A girl is complaining that her locker has been broken into and all her belongings stolen. A small group of boys are huddling in a corner, shielding an exchange of money for drug packets. In the playground, two girls grab a third and punch her in the stomach for flirting with the wrong boy. Throughout the corridors and classrooms, a palpable spirit of disorderliness and disrespect reigns.
The camera moves away from the suburb, past the old business district shown before, and into a truly devastated part of town where the nonworking poor live. Here many of the children and most of the adolescents no longer may be found within the walls of any school, even at the height of day. Some have formally withdrawn, others have never enrolled, and others simply never show up. Instead, they inhabit a subterranean world of crime, illicit deals, marketing in banned substances and flesh. Some run drugs, some run guns, others traffic in their own bodies. Few have any adults in their lives who are able to function as parents or guardians. For many of these youths, the grown-ups of their world have disappeared through choice or through misfortune, swept away by drugs, by criminals, by cops, or by the health hazards of poverty. Of the grown-ups who remain, few have little use for these neighborhood kids who roam the streets looking for trouble. The exception to the grown-ups who are indifferent are the hardened adults who prey on the youths by enlisting them as foot soldiers in dangerous and exploitative assignments.
The young people in this neighborhood band together in leagues of mutual protection. These are the street gangs that provide the youngsters with a sense of collective security as well as an opportunity for voicing some youthful bravado. The sense of security is as false as the bravado. Many of the children in this neighborhood will not see twenty with life and limb intact. Many of those who do will be hauled away for long stretches in prison, where they will learn even more effective ways of wreaking havoc on society.
Our science-fiction tale could show all this by documenting the tragic loss of child after child in this devastated neighborhood. Some would lose their futures quickly, through a flash of violence, a drug overdose, a criminal bust. Others would lose their futures gradually, through a steady deadening of expectations and loss of hope.
The real shock, though, comes when the camera steps back to place this neighborhood in a whole-earth perspective. We see the metropolitan area (including the leafy suburb) that flows into the neighborhood, the country that surrounds the city, and the world that surrounds the country. It turns out that this devastated neighborhood is not merely a pocket of despair in an otherwise thriving society. In all the world, wrecked neighborhoods flow together like seas that crash against a few well-guarded, frightened islands of affluence where children lethargically spend their youth on snacks and electronic entertainment. The metropolitan areas are surrounded by rural landscapes that are barren of young people because nothing is left there to hold them. As the camera scans the world, it reveals many versions of the same scene: a homogeneous global village with neither the elevated culture nor the friendly intimacy that was associated with this phrase in more hopeful times.
Back to the Present
I am not a science-fiction author, nor do I have aspirations to create fables or yarns of any sort. Happily for the average quality of fiction writing in the year that this book will be published, I shall not continue in this mode. But if this may be a small bit of good news for our culture, it is framed by some larger news that is far more serious and that is very bad indeed. Unfortunately for our society today, we do not need a science fiction account to render the circumstances that I have portrayed. Every condition and event from the "futuristic" fictional nightmare that I have just sketched can be found in quantity throughout the world today. Moreover, the prevalence of such circumstances is fast increasing. In fact, all such circumstances have grown in profusion for the past fifty years or more, in a trend that only can be described as steady acceleration.
Anyone who listens to the daily news has heard about conditions and events identical to the ones that I have just invented. We may perceive such events as aberrations, isolated misfortunes either confined to special populations or caused by unusual circumstances. There still may be a sliver of truth to this comforting sense of reassurance, but it diminishes with each passing year.
The truly bad news is that, in fact, all the news about the climate and prospects for youth development in our society is bad. As I shall show below, practically all the indicators of youth health and behavior have declined year by year for well over a generation. None has improved. The litany of decline is so well known that it is losing its ability to shock. We have become accustomed not only to the dreadful indicators themselves but also to their never-ending increase. As I recount the most recent facts and figures here, I am aware that they barely pack a punch anymore. Unfortunately, I also am sure that the data will be significantly worse by the time this statement reaches press.
Let us start with youth violence. Among teenagers living in the United States, homicide rates doubled in the decade from 1970 to 1980. After that, it doubled again in the next seven years; and by 1992 it had taken only five years to double again. "Today," reports the National Commission on Children, "more teenage boys in the United States die of gunshot wounds than of all natural causes combined." Girls, too, are joining in the mayhem, both as perpetrators and as victims of violence. Virtually every day now brings a newsstory such as the following:
A 13-year-old girl shot a cab driver to death to avoid paying a $6 fare, the police in West Palm Beach, Florida, said. The teenager was eerily calm during questioning, Sergeant John English said. "No tears, just cold," he said. "We're talking about a coldblooded, premeditated murder committed by a 13-year-old girl who shows no remorse. It's frightening."
I did not conduct extensive research to uncover this anecdote: I simply reached for the newspaper on the table next to me, confident that something along these lines would turn up. It did. Today, as I revise this section, I do the same, and I find the following:
Two children pulled a gun on a high school teacher in her classroom and stole nearly $400 collected for a class picnic. A 12-year-old who allegedly fired at a pursuer after the robber Monday was caught. A second child got away with most of the cash....The 12-year-old fired at the assistant principal before he was caught by police. A .357 Magnum was found in the bushes nearby.
(Now some more weeks have passed, and my manuscript is entering final production -- I have yet one more chance to recount the most recent news of youthful carnage. I do so sadly, with a sense that this will go on forever if we persist on our present path.) The date of this latest insert is Spetember 5, 1994. On page 6 of today's New York Times, the following story appears: "More sadness and disbelief in Chicago: Another eleven-year-old is accused of murder." The main subject of this story is a boy nicknamed "Frog" who has been arrested for beating an eighty-four-year-old woman with her cane, slashing her throat with a kitchen knife, binding her hands, and leaving her to die on her bathroom floor. The reason that the story's headline refers to "another" case is that earlier this week an eleven-year-old Chicago boy named Robert shot and killed a fourteen-year-old neighborhood girl. Robert's own life ended soon after that killing: according to police, he himself was executed by two teenage brothers in an act of vigilante justice.
But the catastrophes of this particular day are not confined to the urban streets of Chicago. Also on page 6 of the same edition we can read about a thirteen-year-old from High Bridge, New Jersey, who has just been accused of killing his longtime playmate, a "polite, shy, compliant" boy often. And it does not even stop there: according to police, two twelve-year-old boys from Wenatchee, Washington, have confessed to shooting a fifty-year-old migrant worker eighteen times in coldblooded sport. One final headline on the page announces what was perhaps the only accidental incident of the day; yet in context of the other killings, the news seems eerily prophetic: "Boy, 3, shot by brother, 5."
The current scourge of violence among the young is bad enough, but future trends look even worse. The most recent data show the youngest group of teenagers to be the most violent the world has ever witnessed. That is, within the overall increasing rates of youth violence, by far the most dramatic increase is taking place among children in their preteens and adolescents in their early teens. For example, in a five-year period from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, murder among children ages fourteen to seventeen rose 124 percent. This does not bode well for the next few decades.
With growing frequency, children are killing -- and being killed -- at appallingly early ages. Among children between the ages of five and fourteen, murder now is the third leading cause of death in industrial countries. In the United States, a child dies of a gunshot wound every two hours. More children have been killed by guns in little over a decade than all the American troops that were killed during the Vietnam war -- though with far less public protest.
Any urban medical intern can bear witness to the carnage wreaked on those who have been on the receiving end of the terror. On weekend nights, hospital wards in many of our cities and towns resemble battlefield clinics. Doctors and nurses care for once-healthy youth who, if they survive at all, will bear crippli...
Introduction
Imagine an account of human life in the twenty-first century. The genre is science fiction, perhaps delivered in a futuristic novel or movie. The account is set in any city or town of the populated world. The main characters are all younger than twenty. They are the children and adolescents who inhabit the streets, the homes, and the schools of this typical community of tomorrow.
A Fable of Our Near Future
The scene opens on a bleak deserted neighborhood in the heart of town. It is daytime, just after working hours, and the place has emptied out. The sense of emptiness is not a great change from earlier in the day. From nine to five, some government offices and a few small shops provide a bit of life to the area, but it is a muted, confined life that mostly takes place off the street. Most of the area's stores and the oldtime movie theaters have been boarded up for decades. The remaining businesses, there only to serve the government workers, are barricaded behind steel grates that have been adorned with rolls of barbed wire. After the working day is done, nowhere is there an open eatery, a pharmacy, or newsstand.
Soon it is clear why. Roving bands of youth begin bringing a more vivid life to the neighborhood, though it is a macabre and chilling one. Some of the youths are crammed into cars that creep ominously around corners like big cats on the prowl. Others dart through the alleys or leap across the rooftops. The youngsters move in a quick, guarded pantomime, signaling each other by hand or by eye contact. Before long, taunts, gunshots, and screams punctuate the watchful silence. Then flashes of fire, smoke, the screeching of car motors and wheels, and the wail of police sirens bring the scene to a climax. Stretchers carry away three young corpses. No photographer comes to chronicle the grisly sight: such events have long since lost their news appeal. Next follows an uneasy calm. Then, before anything approaching a decent interval has passed, similar events unfold with a dreary predictability.
The scene now shifts to the outskirts of town. We are in a leafy residential area. But barricades and angry signs have taken away some of the idyllic suburban charm. The signs warn that only neighborhood residents and their announced guests are allowed access to the streets. Private patrols have established checkpoints to enforce the edict.
In any event, there is very little outdoor traffic among young folks in this part of town. Almost all the action takes place inside -- if one considers TV gazing, snacking, napping, and an occasional stony-eyed pass at homework to be "action." There is a listless, isolated quality to the activity. Even the phone calls that break up the monotonous silence lack the gossipy glee that one used to associate with teenage telephoning. So lethargic are the movements of the young people that we almost wonder if the scene is being shot in slow motion. Many of these youngster have a pale, flaccid, washed-out look.
Despite the overall pall, in one of the homes a genuine drama does take place. A boy of sixteen, three days away from his next birthday, quietly slips into his father's study and turns on the home computer. With a few taps on the keyboard, he opens the data base file where his dad has catalogued the family's collection of guns. The boys studies the size, type, and location of each gun listed. After some thought, and without bothering to turn off the computer, the boy walks to the hallway, opens a cabinet, and removes a thick single-barrel shotgun. He knows that the gun has been kept loaded for the purposes of instant household protection. Leaving the cabinet door open, the boy takes the shotgun down into the basement. After a ten-minute pause in which he neither leaves a note nor makes any other significant gesture, he ends his life with a shot to his head.
At the suburban high school the following day, there is some consternation at the news of the boy's suicide, but the feelings lean more toward sorrow than surprise. Suicides occur periodically, here and in every other suburb around. In the meantime, there are other happenings at school that demand more urgent talk and vigilance. The most pressing is the epidemic of knifings that is placing both students and teachers at daily risk. The sophisticated metal screening devices at the school entrances have done little to deter students from creating knife-like weapons out of sharp objects and using them against each other and the staff. Once a problem thought to be limited to students from the "tougher" parts of town, the knifings by now have no discernible link to students' social status or group identity. The girls are now as likely to do it as the boys.
A panorama of school life reveals an atmosphere that is in all other ways consistent with the sense of dread that emanates from the frequent knifings. Graffiti have been splattered everywhere, inside as well as out, easily defeating the token, halfhearted efforts of school officials to rub them out. Shaved heads, tatoos, and gaudy jewelry ornament most of the young bodies. The students wear a motley assortment of clothes or quasi-uniforms resembling degenerate war gear. The most popular T-shirts of the day bear a pair of boldface insignia, one written on the front and one on the back: "Sick of it all," and "Nothing to lose."
We move down the corridors into the school's central offices. A counselor is calling a student's home about some apparently excused absences, only to find that the parent's letters have been forged. A young boy is in the principal's office for threatening his teacher with a gun. Three students are separated from their class after hurling racial epithets at a fourth. A girl is complaining that her locker has been broken into and all her belongings stolen. A small group of boys are huddling in a corner, shielding an exchange of money for drug packets. In the playground, two girls grab a third and punch her in the stomach for flirting with the wrong boy. Throughout the corridors and classrooms, a palpable spirit of disorderliness and disrespect reigns.
The camera moves away from the suburb, past the old business district shown before, and into a truly devastated part of town where the nonworking poor live. Here many of the children and most of the adolescents no longer may be found within the walls of any school, even at the height of day. Some have formally withdrawn, others have never enrolled, and others simply never show up. Instead, they inhabit a subterranean world of crime, illicit deals, marketing in banned substances and flesh. Some run drugs, some run guns, others traffic in their own bodies. Few have any adults in their lives who are able to function as parents or guardians. For many of these youths, the grown-ups of their world have disappeared through choice or through misfortune, swept away by drugs, by criminals, by cops, or by the health hazards of poverty. Of the grown-ups who remain, few have little use for these neighborhood kids who roam the streets looking for trouble. The exception to the grown-ups who are indifferent are the hardened adults who prey on the youths by enlisting them as foot soldiers in dangerous and exploitative assignments.
The young people in this neighborhood band together in leagues of mutual protection. These are the street gangs that provide the youngsters with a sense of collective security as well as an opportunity for voicing some youthful bravado. The sense of security is as false as the bravado. Many of the children in this neighborhood will not see twenty with life and limb intact. Many of those who do will be hauled away for long stretches in prison, where they will learn even more effective ways of wreaking havoc on society.
Our science-fiction tale could show all this by documenting the tragic loss of child after child in this devastated neighborhood. Some would lose their futures quickly, through a flash of violence, a drug overdose, a criminal bust. Others would lose their futures gradually, through a steady deadening of expectations and loss of hope.
The real shock, though, comes when the camera steps back to place this neighborhood in a whole-earth perspective. We see the metropolitan area (including the leafy suburb) that flows into the neighborhood, the country that surrounds the city, and the world that surrounds the country. It turns out that this devastated neighborhood is not merely a pocket of despair in an otherwise thriving society. In all the world, wrecked neighborhoods flow together like seas that crash against a few well-guarded, frightened islands of affluence where children lethargically spend their youth on snacks and electronic entertainment. The metropolitan areas are surrounded by rural landscapes that are barren of young people because nothing is left there to hold them. As the camera scans the world, it reveals many versions of the same scene: a homogeneous global village with neither the elevated culture nor the friendly intimacy that was associated with this phrase in more hopeful times.
Back to the Present
I am not a science-fiction author, nor do I have aspirations to create fables or yarns of any sort. Happily for the average quality of fiction writing in the year that this book will be published, I shall not continue in this mode. But if this may be a small bit of good news for our culture, it is framed by some larger news that is far more serious and that is very bad indeed. Unfortunately for our society today, we do not need a science fiction account to render the circumstances that I have portrayed. Every condition and event from the "futuristic" fictional nightmare that I have just sketched can be found in quantity throughout the world today. Moreover, the prevalence of such circumstances is fast increasing. In fact, all such circumstances have grown in profusion for the past fifty years or more, in a trend that only can be described as steady acceleration.
Anyone who listens to the daily news has heard about conditions and events identical to the ones that I have just invented. We may perceive such events as aberrations, isolated misfortunes either confined to special populations or caused by unusual circumstances. There still may be a sliver of truth to this comforting sense of reassurance, but it diminishes with each passing year.
The truly bad news is that, in fact, all the news about the climate and prospects for youth development in our society is bad. As I shall show below, practically all the indicators of youth health and behavior have declined year by year for well over a generation. None has improved. The litany of decline is so well known that it is losing its ability to shock. We have become accustomed not only to the dreadful indicators themselves but also to their never-ending increase. As I recount the most recent facts and figures here, I am aware that they barely pack a punch anymore. Unfortunately, I also am sure that the data will be significantly worse by the time this statement reaches press.
Let us start with youth violence. Among teenagers living in the United States, homicide rates doubled in the decade from 1970 to 1980. After that, it doubled again in the next seven years; and by 1992 it had taken only five years to double again. "Today," reports the National Commission on Children, "more teenage boys in the United States die of gunshot wounds than of all natural causes combined." Girls, too, are joining in the mayhem, both as perpetrators and as victims of violence. Virtually every day now brings a newsstory such as the following:
A 13-year-old girl shot a cab driver to death to avoid paying a $6 fare, the police in West Palm Beach, Florida, said. The teenager was eerily calm during questioning, Sergeant John English said. "No tears, just cold," he said. "We're talking about a coldblooded, premeditated murder committed by a 13-year-old girl who shows no remorse. It's frightening."
I did not conduct extensive research to uncover this anecdote: I simply reached for the newspaper on the table next to me, confident that something along these lines would turn up. It did. Today, as I revise this section, I do the same, and I find the following:
Two children pulled a gun on a high school teacher in her classroom and stole nearly $400 collected for a class picnic. A 12-year-old who allegedly fired at a pursuer after the robber Monday was caught. A second child got away with most of the cash....The 12-year-old fired at the assistant principal before he was caught by police. A .357 Magnum was found in the bushes nearby.
(Now some more weeks have passed, and my manuscript is entering final production -- I have yet one more chance to recount the most recent news of youthful carnage. I do so sadly, with a sense that this will go on forever if we persist on our present path.) The date of this latest insert is Spetember 5, 1994. On page 6 of today's New York Times, the following story appears: "More sadness and disbelief in Chicago: Another eleven-year-old is accused of murder." The main subject of this story is a boy nicknamed "Frog" who has been arrested for beating an eighty-four-year-old woman with her cane, slashing her throat with a kitchen knife, binding her hands, and leaving her to die on her bathroom floor. The reason that the story's headline refers to "another" case is that earlier this week an eleven-year-old Chicago boy named Robert shot and killed a fourteen-year-old neighborhood girl. Robert's own life ended soon after that killing: according to police, he himself was executed by two teenage brothers in an act of vigilante justice.
But the catastrophes of this particular day are not confined to the urban streets of Chicago. Also on page 6 of the same edition we can read about a thirteen-year-old from High Bridge, New Jersey, who has just been accused of killing his longtime playmate, a "polite, shy, compliant" boy often. And it does not even stop there: according to police, two twelve-year-old boys from Wenatchee, Washington, have confessed to shooting a fifty-year-old migrant worker eighteen times in coldblooded sport. One final headline on the page announces what was perhaps the only accidental incident of the day; yet in context of the other killings, the news seems eerily prophetic: "Boy, 3, shot by brother, 5."
The current scourge of violence among the young is bad enough, but future trends look even worse. The most recent data show the youngest group of teenagers to be the most violent the world has ever witnessed. That is, within the overall increasing rates of youth violence, by far the most dramatic increase is taking place among children in their preteens and adolescents in their early teens. For example, in a five-year period from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, murder among children ages fourteen to seventeen rose 124 percent. This does not bode well for the next few decades.
With growing frequency, children are killing -- and being killed -- at appallingly early ages. Among children between the ages of five and fourteen, murder now is the third leading cause of death in industrial countries. In the United States, a child dies of a gunshot wound every two hours. More children have been killed by guns in little over a decade than all the American troops that were killed during the Vietnam war -- though with far less public protest.
Any urban medical intern can bear witness to the carnage wreaked on those who have been on the receiving end of the terror. On weekend nights, hospital wards in many of our cities and towns resemble battlefield clinics. Doctors and nurses care for once-healthy youth who, if they survive at all, will bear crippli...
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. 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. America's leading thinker on the moral education of children argues persuasively that young people today are seriously demoralized at a time in their lives when they should be full of high expectations and noble spirits. Damon draws on his research and experience to establish guidelines on the moral development of children in the home, school and community. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780684825052
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Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools
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Book Description Condition: New. Buy with confidence! Book is in new, never-used condition 0.75. Seller Inventory # bk0684825058xvz189zvxnew
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Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_0684825058
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