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Mahatma Gandhi – Peer Pressure

Peer pressure is real. Whether out of fear of being different or just plain lack of confidence, students love to follow the crowd. It’s safe that way; they get the rewards of being liked without the risks of alienation. But then sometimes conforming to the group strips away an individual’s dignity and self-worth and, in the worst of cases, leads to destructive decisions. Deciding when to follow the group– and when to go at it alone– is an ongoing moral struggle that students must resolve in school and beyond.

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Judy Garland – Self-Efficacy

The old adage “Just be yourself” looks good on paper but gets pretty scary in the real world when we must rely on our own instincts to make decisions. Dangers abound. What if we make a mistake and hurt somebody? These fears– fueled by lack of confidence– cause us to look to other people to do the thinking and acting for us. Our role models inspire us to be better, but sometimes they become convenient ways to escape the responsibility we have to be the best versions of ourselves.

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Marcus Aurelius – Self-Awareness

The power of self-awareness isn’t obvious to us. So often we feel ourselves to be at the mercy of life. Life just happens to us. When things don’t go our way, we often throw our energies into changing other people and events to make things right. But maybe our efforts to change the world are futile. Maybe the only thing we really have control over is our attitude towards what happens. If we realize this, then we can find the strength, peace and acceptance we’re looking for.

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Stephen Covey – Diversity

Diversity is something many students confront for the first time in school. They are required to learn with students of different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, not to mention those who embrace different traditions, learning styles and ways of seeing the world. When students confront diversity, they confront moral choices on how to react to people who are different from them.

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Margaret Mead – Civic Responsibility

When students hear the mantra “You can make a difference in the world,” there’s often an eye-roll. Students struggle to see how the actions of a few can have big consequences for the many. The fallout of this attitude is that many won’t decide to participate in that school-wide fundraiser, start that club or vote in the next election. The impulse to remain apathetic is strong but, as Mead reminds us, it just takes a different way of thinking to liberate us to act.

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Erik Erikson – Interdependence

We experience life with other people. This is true in our families, schools and workplaces. We are taught the importance of being individuals and being responsible for our own actions, yet many of our life experiences involve others and our successes and failures are determined by how well we are able to work with other people.

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Sydney Harris – Happiness

Happiness is one those concepts that students talk and think about a lot, but rarely define. They are encouraged to motivate themselves to set goals to achieve happiness but the path is never laid out with any clarity. Reflecting on what happiness actually is can help students become more self-aware of what they value in life.

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Lao Tzu – Anger

Anger is an emotion that all of us have to manage throughout our lives. Students get angry with their teachers, their friends and parents. It’s important for them to develop a self-awareness around their anger so that they can decide when getting angry, or remaining calm, is the right response to a situation which aggrieves them.

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Winston Churchill – Perseverance

Every student knows what failure and success are. They pass and fail tests. They lose and win games. Students are just beginning to learn about what they are capable of, what they excel at and what they may be lacking that will always make them question whether they should persevere or quit.

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Albert Einstein – Imagination

Some students are dreamers who live comfortably thinking about a world not yet created. Then there are the ‘down to earth’ students who find comfort in facts. Often, these two groups clash during group projects when there’s a need for a clear vision of an end goal but then also a clear, step-by-step plan to get it done.

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Henry Ford – Failure

Mark Twain famously quipped that death and taxes are the only things certain in life. We can probably add failure to that short list. Of all themes, failure is one to which students can relate most. There’s failure at home, at school and in the workplace. It is a constant. Students are taught to develop a growth mindset and learn from failure.

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