Introduction
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The Lighthouse Project is a cost effective and viable blueprint for helping a generation of America’s children to lead more successful and productive lives. Many of America’s 36 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 years are experiencing serious problems and others are not reaching their highest potentials. School is an ideal place to help our children learn about the experience of life in ways that will help them to become self-sufficient and well-adjusted citizens. American schools unfortunately focus much of their attention on academic achievement as opposed to life achievement. Although academic achievement is important, it is not the most important challenge confronting the generation of children about to enter the 21st century.
Our children need to learn more beneficial ways of successfully coping with the complicated challenges of contemporary American life. They need to understand themselves better, learn more constructive ways of interacting with other people and made good decisions about the important elements of constructive living. The most significant of these decisions involve matters related to personal development and interpersonal relationships. That is because personal development and interpersonal relationships account for much of how well we grow, mature and function in our families, jobs, communities and society at large.
Many American children across the entire socioeconomic spectrum are no longer reaching their maximum potentials. They consequently do not always achieve as much success in their lives as they are capable. This is because they have so much difficulty adjusting to the tremendous amount of change that has occurred in America over the last 35 years. Excessive change causes a lot of stress and conflict. Our children react to this stress and conflict with exaggerated feelings of anger, fear, sadness, loneliness and confusion. The intensity of these feelings causes our children’s life development, or biodevelopment, to be negatively affected. When this happens, it is called negative biodevelopment. Negative biodevelopment accounts for most of the destructive symptoms that are now so common in our society including violence, depression, drugs, apathy, crime and gangs.
The major goal of The Lighthouse Project is to help our children change negative biodevelopment to positive biodevelopment. This would happen as our children have access to influential experiences that support this change. These experiences must also be powerful enough and abundant enough to counteract the forces in our society that cause negative biodevelopment. The best place for providing these experiences is in our schools. This is because children spend the greatest proportion of their productive time in schools. Every American child attends school daily for a total of about 10,000 hours from kindergarten to ninth grade. The quantitative access that or schools provide to our children, therefore, offers a very beneficial opportunity for them to experience positive biodevelopment.
The Lighthouse Project would work by retraining the faculty of America’s 80,690 elementary and middle schools in the technologies that promote positive biodevelopment. This retraining would be efficient, cost effective and successful. It would help school to again become a respected and meaningful component of our children’s lives. It would also provide an entire generative of American children with opportunities to achieve broad-based personal success and to contribute more effectively to America’s national agenda.