The All-Sports Ministry of PA NJ & DE - Executive Summary Start-Up Budget & Prospectus
The All-Sports Ministry of PA NJ & DE - Executive Summary Start-Up Budget & Prospectus
The All-Sports Ministry of PA NJ & DE - Executive Summary Start-Up Budget & Prospectus
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CIRCLE Working Paper 44: February 2006<br />
<strong>Sports</strong>, Youth and Character: A Critical Survey<br />
important claims but conceptual sloppiness robs the<br />
claims <strong>of</strong> credibility. <strong>The</strong> athletes Bredemeier and<br />
Shields interview intuitively draw the right lines,<br />
but Bredemeier and Shields won’t listen to them.<br />
<strong>The</strong> athletes refuse to be hobbled by an unsuitable<br />
definition <strong>of</strong> aggression. <strong>The</strong>y distinguish between<br />
robust play and “boundary-policing,” on the one<br />
hand, and dangerous play outside the constitutive<br />
skills and rules <strong>of</strong> the game, on the other. <strong>The</strong>y<br />
know what is legitimate and what is not. <strong>The</strong>y<br />
further understand that their single-focused pursuit<br />
<strong>of</strong> victory takes place within a fair and egalitarian<br />
contest that honors the desires <strong>of</strong> competitors all<br />
around. <strong>The</strong>ir single-focused play doesn’t make<br />
them inferior or immature moral thinkers.<br />
B. STOLL, LUMPKIN, BELLER AND HAHM<br />
Work generated out <strong>of</strong> Sharon Kay Stoll’s Center<br />
for Ethics at the University <strong>of</strong> Idaho deserves a<br />
brief mention. Angela Lumpkin, Sharon Kay Stoll,<br />
and Jennifer M. Beller are authors <strong>of</strong> a text, Sport<br />
Ethics: Applications for Fair Play, that, because<br />
it is endorsed by the National Association for<br />
Sport and Physical Education, gets used in a lot<br />
<strong>of</strong> college classrooms. 195 Moreover, work by Stoll<br />
and associates <strong>of</strong>ten gets cited on behalf <strong>of</strong> the<br />
proposition that athletes reason at a lower moral<br />
level than nonathletes. A great deal <strong>of</strong> this work<br />
remains unpublished. Some <strong>of</strong> it relies on the<br />
DIT to measure moral development and some<br />
on the Hahm-Beller Values Choice Inventory<br />
(HBVCI), devised by Chung Hae Hahm and Jennifer<br />
Beller in 1989 - 1992. It and the “intervention”<br />
programs run by the Center for Ethics purport to<br />
be based on “deontological” moral theory, which<br />
holds that “an inherent rightness apart from all<br />
consequences exists in making moral decisions.” 196<br />
<strong>The</strong> HBVCI “evaluates, from a deontological or<br />
ideal philosophy, how individuals use principles to<br />
reason.” 197 It has been used on 40,000 athletes,<br />
Stoll and Beller contend, 198 and the findings are<br />
grim:<br />
empirical evidence from the HBVCI<br />
supports previous sport psychologist’s<br />
[sic] and sport sociologist’s [sic]<br />
hypotheses that the longer athletes<br />
participate in sport, the less able they are<br />
to reason morally. Specifically, results<br />
show a steady decline in moral cognitive<br />
reasoning from ninth grade through<br />
university age populations... In essence,<br />
this evidence tells us that athletes have<br />
lost or turned <strong>of</strong>f their abilities to think<br />
and reason for themselves. 199<br />
But there is hope. “<strong>The</strong> philosophical intervention<br />
program [run by the Center] proposes that all sport<br />
and social dilemmas can be solved using a morally<br />
reasoned approach based on impartial, consistent,<br />
and reflective critical thinking” 200 – and the<br />
intervention program works astonishing success.<br />
Athletes “can meet or move beyond their peer<br />
group” in moral thinking in as little as eighteen<br />
weeks. 201<br />
<strong>The</strong> clumsy and fractured accounts <strong>of</strong> moral theory<br />
that accompany Sport Ethics probably do little<br />
harm to its intended readers, who can give most <strong>of</strong><br />
their attention to the many case descriptions and<br />
hypotheticals that make up the book. <strong>The</strong> HBVCI<br />
figures in few research projects beyond those at<br />
the Idaho Center. It’s relation to the Kohlberg<br />
stages is obscure; its equivalence to the DIT is<br />
unexplained; and its scoring is done by the Idaho<br />
Center. Most <strong>of</strong> the work based on it remains<br />
inaccessible. <strong>The</strong> alleged findings <strong>of</strong> Stoll and<br />
associates need not be taken seriously.<br />
VII. APPENDIX B<br />
A. KOHLBERG<br />
<strong>The</strong> stage theory <strong>of</strong> moral development set out<br />
by Lawrence Kohlberg in the 1960s and 70s has<br />
had enormous influence in the social sciences<br />
and educational theory. Although the theory has<br />
now faded considerably as a live research project<br />
(until recently a residual neo-Kohlbergian program<br />
remained active at the University <strong>of</strong> Minnesota),<br />
it continues to hold sway over the textbook<br />
knowledge <strong>of</strong> thousands <strong>of</strong> teachers, education<br />
<strong>of</strong>ficials, psychologists, and others. It shows up in<br />
www.civicyouth.org 27