The contradictions are everywhere. Parents preach personal responsibility, but the media offer a barrage of gratuitous sex and violence. A teacher urges honesty, but Mom says it's okay to lie about your age to save a few bucks on a movie ticket. The soccer coach says playing dirty isn't cheating -- unless you get caught. Children won't learn strong values that way, William Damon says. "They learn when there's a community of adults, some sense of solidarity and people who dare to use moral terms like 'right' and 'wrong.' "
In an experiment designed to help whole towns get their message straight, Damon launched what he calls the youth charter movement in 1996. So far, a few communities in New England, Oregon and Texas have tried the program, in which residents agree on a set of community values -- written or unwritten -- designed to guide kids toward the "fundamental standards of honesty, civility, decency, respect, the pursuit of excellence, courage, skill and a sense of purpose in work." The details get hammered out in a series of town meetings, task forces and other events.
Damon fleshes out the idea in his 1997 book, The Youth Charter: How Communities Can Work Together to Raise Standards for All Our Children (Free Press; $18). It gives a step-by-step, month-by-month blueprint for communities wishing to adopt their own youth charters -- everything from the initial public meeting to focus groups that help nail down community standards and expectations for youth. "It's a way to get people to open lines of communication and to work together, to get on the same page and to support one another," Damon says. "When people do it, there's a sense of relief and exhilaration" as community members with different backgrounds come together and discover that they share core values.
Since he arrived at Stanford in 1997, Damon has been considering several Bay Area communities for a new set of youth charters. "I want not only to do it the right way, but also to evaluate it, to see what's happening. We haven't been able to do that before," Damon says. "Research evaluation is expensive, so I really want to get the ducks in a row before I get going again."
For now, he says the youth charter concept is really just a "gleam in the eye" of its creator and that it has not spread as far as he would like. "It's not easy to scale up," Damon says. "So far, it has relied on somebody like me going in and being a little bit charismatic and drumming up the troops. The question is: can this be self-initiating? We're working on that, trying to figure that out, but I don't know the answer yet."
-- T.G.
