Publisher's Synopsis
Evolving Citizens focuses on what all of us want for our children: "a good life." Often this includes access to food, shelter, family, and friends in a secure and stable environment. Yet, we also want them to be productive, contributing citizens to ensure that such an environment requires secure and stable. These two elements of citizenship represent our children's rights, as well as their duties.
Evolving Citizens provides the content that our educational system of family, classrooms, and friends will need to teach our children if we want them to have such a life-one that has rights and duties. The focus is on the elementary classroom because it sits between families and the other parts of our educational system.
Evolving Citizens illustrates that the hidden content to evolve our young citizens is already in front of us. Its pieces have been emerging since the Ages of Enlightenment and Science. They have just remained hidden for two reasons. First, we human beings are just beginning to put the final piece of the puzzle in place: the comprehension of ourselves in the context of the social and physical worlds that we have created. Second, our primitive, reactive selves still dominate our rational, civil selves. The goal is to evolve the former over the latter.
The content of Evolving Citizens falls into four areas: moral values, awareness, management, and technical skills. These are the foundations that will help us to evolve citizens who are rationality, awareness, civil, and technically savvy. These will allow them to change not only themselves but the world in which they will live. Presently, the focus is upon the technical or science side of their behavior. Evolving Citizens hones in on moral values, awareness, and civility. It illustrates how these three control our technical skills. The book clarifies and organizes these areas into a systems model of classrooms, so that teachers have a guide while evolving their young citizens.
