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NOT your father’s 1980s “values clarification”

Bruce Dickson
4 min readAug 14, 2019

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#4 of 4 related to a live event script on values

hierarchy (silhouettes) from Pixababy

​Starting in the 1960s, continuing into the 1980s, in group therapy, it was learned discussion and exercises, focusing on “values,” if-if-if successful — contributed strongly centripetal, center-seeking force in a group.

“Values clarification” became a buzzphrase in the 1980s among academics and middle-school thru college educators. “Values clarification” in the 1980s was discussions of moral teaching goals, strategies for introducing the subject of morality to students, and specific teaching tactics.

Q: What did they DO?

A: Mostly intellectual stuff, paper and pencil journaling, list-making, list analyzing, discussion, talk. Not much fun. The effort was more abstract than concrete.

To engage Cultural Creative Progressives, book-learning pencil-and-paper activity has to evolve into live, FUN, social, interactive group processes, games, exercises. That’s what engages generations X, Y and Z.

“Values clarification” was a trailing-edge phenomena after cooperative-collaborative learning got going in K-12 schools in the early 1980s. The big breakthru was bringing into classrooms cooperative-collaborative group process formats, exercises and tactics carried over from Human Potential live events…

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Bruce Dickson
Bruce Dickson

Written by Bruce Dickson

Health Intuitive, author in Los Angeles, CA

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