Articles

In creating and delivering a public school curriculum that sought to reduce risk-taking behavior among adolescents, my colleague Chris Wallace and I sensed that the major factors in fostering or reducing destructive patterns of behavior were the beliefs, values and moral commitments of the students themselves. Although it is true there is not a one-to-one correlation between one’s beliefs and one’s behavior, the association of the two dimensions is strong. Nevertheless, we felt that to affect student behavior with a curriculum, the content could not escape examining values, beliefs and commitments—especially those related to the ethical and moral domain.