100 Ways to Enhance Values and Morality in Schools and Youth Settings

by Howard Kirschenbaum

Book Overview

Appropriate for use at all levels from elementary school through college, this unique guide combines the best field-tested approaches to values, character, citizenship, and moral education into a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0205154891
• ISBN13: 9780205154890
• Release Date: October 1994
• Publisher: Allyn & Bacon
• Length: 269 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 7.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Great character education resource

Howard Kirschenbaum's 100 Ways to Enhance Values and Morality in School and Youth Settings combines tried and true, field-tested techniques for contemporary values education in one volume. He expands upon work done in the early 1990s in collaboration with authors such as Sidney Simon and Leland Howe. His focus is on presenting a relatively easy to use selection of exercises that can be incorporated into preexisting curriculum at various educational levels to inculcate and model traditional values in a setting that allows for student discussion, input and skill building. This work responds to the growing call for materials to help renew character education in the public and private school setting. Kirshenbaum traces a short history of the various types of character education prevalent in the United States over the past two centuries. While discussing comprehensive moral education, which consists of a pluralistic variety of approaches to this issue, he concludes that values and morals education is a "single endeavor with two goals". The four major movements of values education are values realization, character education, citizenship education, and moral education. He quickly concludes as others do, that modeling the behavior of teachers and historical figures are the principle method of values education. Community and parental involvement is also a key to success. Implementation of this adjunct to the curriculum must involve real world problems and examples. The remainder of the book is filled with (literally) his 100 methods, along with hundreds of specific examples, ideas, clever cartoons and substantial quotations. Many methods are ones that the reader is likely to remember from their own schooling; nevertheless, the extensive collection of ideas is worth the price. Of particular note are some final suggestions for measuring, quantifying, and evaluating the results of a comprehensive character education program. Perhaps the only critical note to this book is the author's politically correct notion that he must somehow balance the use of masculine and feminine pronouns by arbitrarily using male pronouns in the first half and feminine pronouns in the second half. His pronoun usage would have gone unnoticed by the reader, except that this technique is trumpeted in a footnote in Chapter Two. It then becomes an irritating distraction to see if he is indeed consistent in his usage. Perhaps a weakness of social scientists is their calling attention to this relatively insignificant non-issue. For if it matters, then why do females have the second and not the first half of the book?