A Minister's Primer on Educational Humanism

Many churches have attacked humanist in education and have managed to almost eliminate the humanist impact. Much of that assault has been either uninformed or misinformed and has unnecessarily blunted the influence of a group of educators who wish to achieve ends, such as kindness, that are consonant with the aims of most religious groups. There is a need for ministers to become better informed about educational humanism and to present a more accurate report to their congregations.     

Religion in Public Schools

If neutrality in religion is truly to be achieved in public schools, then more emphasis must be placed on providing nonbiased instruction on comparative religions and other similar topics.     

Advocates for All Students: An American Right

The question of advocates for students in public schools has generated diverse responses. Administrators may believe that an unnecessary adversarial relationship will be encouraged by an outside advocacy organization. Yet, administrators polled for this study estimated that as many as 50% of students may not have advocates, and the advocates of an additional 25% are relatively unskilled in their advocacy attempts. Considering that the presence of advocates has been shown to increase student retention and academic success, it seems imperative that exemplary programs be identified and modeled throughout our public school system.     

VISION: A Model of Culture for Counselors

Current and popular views of multiculturalism emphasize between-group differences attributable to race and ethnicity with little appreciation of within-group differences, the individuality of each person's phenomenal field, or an individual's capacity to participate in different groups. VISION is a model of culture that accounts for within-group and between-group differences, the disappearance of groups, and the emergence of new ones. VISION has program applications pertinent to counselor education in the areas of mental health counseling and in modeling the multicultural training of counselors. A paradigmatic shift from a group level of abstraction to the individual is commonly contemplated among cultural anthropologists, but the need for this shift is illustrated in a counseling context.     

Empathy-congruence-caring are not singular

The conditions which are basic to constructive human relationships in the psychotherapeutic setting are explored as they are currently being expressed in the context of our larger society. The article's thesis is that various elements of our modern society are expressing single dimensions of these necessary conditions, and that these dimensions, when they occur separately, are insufficient for facilitative human interaction.     

Young Children's Creative Solutions To Realistic and Fanciful Story Problems

This study examined the creative problem solving of young children as evidenced in their responses to realistic and fanciful stories posing similar problems (i.e., key character trapped and in need of rescue). One-hundred young children listened to two stories; one about a puppy trapped in a hole (realistic) and one about a prince caught in a tower (fanciful). The children were asked to complete the stories by thinking of ways to get the puppy or the prince out. The children's responses were scored for fluency (number), elaboration (detail), flexibility (conceptual shifts), originality (novelty), effectiveness, and realism. Overall, the results suggest that the children's performance improved with age and experience, although their solutions tended to remain ineffective and unoriginal. As predicted, the children strongly preferred the puppy to the prince story, although preference did not generally affect their creative performance. The practical and theoretical implications of the study are discussed and suggestions for future research are presented.