Michael Josephson's Non-Profit Study

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In 1987, a man named Michael Josephson who had been teaching law for twenty years and was the CEO of a legal education company, decided to sell his business and create a non-profit agency in honor of his parents. The agency is called the Joseph and Edna Josephson Institute of Ethics. He runs this collecting no salary for his contributions. In 1992, he developed an extensive study for measuring values, attitudes, and conduct of high school students. The study is called; Character Counts, more than 23,000 students throughout the United States participate and it consists of 63 questions, characterized into the following groups of questions; What do you think, Values and priorities, Have you done these things, and Feelings about school. As stated …show more content…

No difference in rates between grade levels, all reporting a 97% rate. The most encouraging results were with their reports of answering all of the questions with complete honesty at a rate of 70% overall and males at slightly lower rate at 69% and females at 71%. One area that was a bit surprising to me is that students actually will lie more to there parents than their teachers, 48% have done this two or more times to their parents with the higher rate committed by males. Bringing back what we have learned in class that the more you lie, the easier it is to lie. You always hear people in our society claiming that youth of today do not care about anything and this is not the case as evidenced by these survey results reported in this essay. As previously stated, Kohlberg’s model of moral reasoning these students are appropriately in stages three and four which is exactly where they should be at this point in their lives. Also, Kohlberg states that there usually is a difference of how the students may actually feel and think as opposed to how they actually will