Values Clarification Quotes

One of the main tasks of adolescence is to achieve an identity—not necessarily a knowledge of who we are, but a clarification of the range of what we might become, a set of self-references by which we can make sense of our responses, and justify our decisions and goals.

From the lowest depths of his jail cell, Joseph identifies himself for the first time with forefathers, reconnecting to his heritage despite being cut off from his family for years. Despite living in a foreign land alone amidst a foreign people, Joseph declares that he has remained true to his people’s core values. One of those values is gratitude, and for the first time Joseph acknowledges that his talents are God-given rather than earned. He has ended up in prison because of unwavering gratitude to a human master who selflessly cared for him, a devotion that mirrors his gratitude to the Divine Master. In this terrible low moment, Joseph sounds fulfilled for the first time in his life, as the principled decision to accept imprisonment provides an uplifting sense of purpose. With renewed appreciation for God’s care, Joseph challenges his fellow inmates to reject backstabbing pagan deities whose flaring egos drive them to relentlessly pursue self-aggrandizement at the expense of others. As humans naturally emulate the characteristics of their deities, Joseph prefers an ethical and compassionate Divine Mentor.

[Nietzsche’s political thinking] consists in the attempt to make use of the ontological doctrine, the ostensible truth about the illusory nature of our experience or order and stability, but hence too of belief in the stability of values, to clear the path of history for a return to the fructifying origin, to chaos itself, understood as the source of all new forms and hence rejuvenation. Nietzsche wishes to remove the tattered mask of late modern European civilization from the face of chaos in order to replace it with a new and vital one. This requires of Nietzsche that he enlighten his own contemporaries by accelerating their dissolution; remember that clarification is destruction. The return to chaos as origin will make possible the birth of a new race of mortals and so another cycle of the eternal return. The preliminary step is to obliterate the coming of the last man but all of Zarathustra’s bombastic rhetoric fails to conceal from the sober reader the disconcerting fact that the last men share with the Nietzschean philosopher the modern spirit of the scientific Enlightenment.

Furthermore, academic fads have been forced upon successive generations of elementary and secondary school students, including the “New Math,” the “Open Classroom,” “Values Clarification,” “Cooperative Learning,” “Outcome-Based Education,” “No Child Left Behind,” and more recently “Common Core” and “Race to the Top,” for which trillions of dollars have been and are being wasted on inferior educational outcomes. Even the once-heralded school lunch program is not safe from statist overreach, where billions of dollars are spent on federally mandated lunches that many students refuse to eat.23

Proverbs offer a few clarifications: • How we treat our parents displays our values and attitudes (19:26). • Disrespecting our parents can have terrible implications for our own life (20:20). • Children have a significant impact on how parents view their lives and evaluate their significance (10:1; 15:20; 17:25; 23:24). • As our parents grow older, we should give them the gifts of listening and caring (23:22). • By pursuing wisdom, we benefit ourselves and bring our parents joy (23:25; 29:3). • By pursuing evil and folly, we can be a destructive force in our parents’ lives (28:24; 29:15). • We will suffer if we lack respect for our parents (30:11, 17). More: Proverbs says that parents are meant to offer more to children than practical care. They are to impart wisdom. See “Learning at Home” at Prov. 4:3, 4.

Focusing on the public school system, former Secretary of Education, William Bennett explains the moral crisis in that institution by contrasting the concerns of teachers in two different eras: 'Over the years teachers have been asked to identify the top problems in America's schools. In 1940 teachers identified them as talking out of turn; chewing gum; making noise; running in the hall; cutting in line; dress code infractions; and littering. When asking the same question in 1990, teachers identified drug abuse; alcohol abuse; pregnancy; suicide; rape; robbery; and assault.' During the thirty-year period of 1960 to 1990, 'there has been a 560 percent increase in violent crime; more than a 400 percent increase in illegitimate births; a quadrupling in divorces; a tripling of the percentage of children living in single-parent homes; more than a 200 percent increase in the teenage suicide rate; and a drop of 75 points in the average SAT scores of high-school students.' We do not believe it is a coincidence that the increase of moral mayhem described by Bennett corresponds with an increased acceptance of moral relativism. In fact, relativism has been officially incorporated in the educational curriculum, known as values clarification.

We were told that the most important thing was to listen, really listen, and to keep an open mind and heart. We weren’t to ask any questions until and unless we were invited to do so. We were told to be thoughtful about our questions—that they had to be genuine. It was fine to ask for more information or clarification if we were curious or didn’t understand what we’d heard. But questions were never to be used as challenges or veiled criticisms. We were warned particularly about “Why” questions. It’s hard to ask about motivation without implying that you would have handled the same situation differently. Far better to ask “How” and “What” questions (as long as the “What” was never a sarcastic “What were you thinking?”). Also, we weren’t to follow a person’s audit with statements of our own values, share our own stories in the guise of questions, or use queries to show how smart we were.

Goals, Strategies, and Fundamentals Missions are generally long term in nature. Goals translate missions into practical, quantifiable medium-term objectives that then trigger the search for short-term action plans. Goals can be broadly quantified around three main dimensions: profitability, growth, and sustainability. It is important that boards and executive teams understand the interactions and especially the trade-offs between these three dimensions. It is impossible to pursue all three goals simultaneously, at least in the short term. Boards need to address this major challenge with executives, as, at least in the short term and possibly also in the medium term, these three goals cannot be pursued simultaneously. Executive teams thus face clear trade-offs which they need to recognize and manage. Boards are there to support executives with necessary clarifications on the goals that need to be pursued. Strategies are the action plans that executives deploy following the choice of mission by owners and the selection of goals by the board, in collaboration with the executive team. In case growth is chosen as the goal, for example, typical strategic choices are: build, buy, or ally strategies.14 The selection of a strategy does not depend solely on goals, it also depends on company fundamentals: the type of industry the firm operates in, the client’s ecosystem, suppliers, competitors, regulators, where and how the company generates cash flows, the types of risks the company faces and needs to mitigate against, as well as the company’s ability to raise financing. Examples are presented illustrating how strategies are selected by examining cash flow generating opportunities.

The fundamentalist belief system is one that purports to have all the answers. It also claims to be the only way — all deviations lead to hell. It follows then that parents who believe this would be very concerned about what their children believe. Any alternative ways of thinking about major life questions would be highly threatening. Consequently, the fundamentalist household rarely encourages children to explore their own thoughts, to be open-minded about ideas, or to come to their own conclusions. In fact, fundamentalist parents are typically vocal in their opposition to the teaching of critical thinking skills or values clarification in schools.

...this account has small explanatory value, for the notion of self-contradictoriness, in the quite broad sense needed for this definition of analyticity, stands in exactly the same need of clarification as does the notion of analyticity itself. The two notions are the two sides of a single dubious coin.

The third concern I have for education is the state of confusion I sense regarding the teaching of values. Coincident with the retreat from the posture of schools as the upholders of moral norms there has been a substantial growth, due to student demand, for courses about religion. Along with this, religious services, where religion is practiced, seem to have declined on campuses. This leaves the question: Is it only appropriate to teach about values and make no judgments about what they ought to be? Is this really an adequate role for schools and colleges? Should not schools be importantly concerned with value clarification so that students are given as firm a basis as possible for making the choices they have always made—even when the schools presumed to know what their values ought to be?

Complexities in business are best managed by simple rules and principles that serve as pointers in the process of elimination and clarification.

Since The Great Recession, the global financial crash of 2008-09, the debt-fuelled post-recession recovery has been the weakest in the post-war era (since the end of World War Two). Whereas total outstanding credit in the US after the Wall Street Crash grew from 160% to 260% of GDP between 1929 and 1932, the figure rose from 365% in 2008 to 540% in 2010. (And this does not include derivatives, whose nominal outstanding value is at least four times GDP).[34] A long depression and rising right-wing populism have followed, including the stunning ascendency of property tycoon and TV celebrity demagogue Donald Trump as the President of the US in 2016.[35] The British public’s vote in June 2016 to leave the EU delivered another shock of global significance. A chronic drift towards trade wars and protectionism is accelerating and in January 2018, US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said that “great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of US national security”, putting Russia, China and – yes – Europe in the crosshairs of the world’s long-time dominant economic and military power. Adding to this age of anxiety is the accelerating automation revolution. What should be an emancipatory and utopian development only generates insecurity at the prospect of unprecedented mass unemployment. It can be no coincidence that all these crises are converging at exactly the same time. They cannot be explained away by cynical and shallow generalisations about ‘human nature’. In the course of this investigation we will see that in fact all of these crises have a common root cause: the decaying nature of capitalism and its tendency towards breakdown. Indeed, average Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates in the world’s richest countries have fallen in every decade since the 1960s and are clearly closing in on zero. Rates of profit, manufacturing costs and commodity prices are also trending towards zero. Drawing on Henryk Grossman’s vital clarification of Karl Marx’s methodology, we shall see that capitalism is heading inexorably towards a final, insurmountable breakdown that is destined to strike much earlier than a zero rate of profit. Indeed, we shall also see that the next, imminent economic crash will result in worldwide hyperinflation. We will also show that the economic crisis is intensifying competition between nation-states, forcing them into a situation which threatens the most destructive world war to date.

IRS Notice 2014-21, which provides a bit more information on tax guidance related to bitcoin and virtual currency, we find an attempt at further clarification: Virtual currency that has an equivalent value in real currency, or that acts as a substitute for real currency, is referred to as convertible virtual currency. Bitcoin is one example of a convertible virtual currency. Bitcoin can be digitally traded between users and can be purchased for, or exchanged into, U.S. dollars, Euros, and other real or virtual currencies.29 In this case, bitcoin is considered a “convertible” virtual currency.

Most of the drugs and alcohol problems are in reality probably, value clarification problems.