New Book: Liberty: Thriving and Civic Engagement Among America’s Youth

Posted by on April 2, 2004

[posted from Bonner Foundation]

LIBERTY: THRIVING AND CIVIC ENGAGEMENT AMONG AMERICA’S YOUTH

Liberty: Thriving and Civic Engagement Among America’s Youth by Richard Lerner is a new book that examines what it means to develop as an exemplary young person – that is, a young person who is thriving within the community and on the rise to a hopeful future. The book explores several key characteristics of positive youth development such as competence, character, confidence, social connections, and compassion that coalesce to create a young person who is developing successfully towards an “ideal” adulthood, one marked by contributions to self, others, and the institutions of civil society.

Lerner is the Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science and the Director of the Applied Developmental Science Institute in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University. In this work, Lerner brings his formidable knowledge of developmental systems theory and facts on youth development to analyze the meaning of a thriving civil society and its relationship to the potential of youth for self-actualization and positive development.

This book argues that a young person?s ability to thrive is enabled by a society that supports the rights of individuals to develop their abilities as best they can and that a civil society supporting individual freedom and justice can only exist when the people in that society act to support, protect, and extend the societal institutions affording such liberty for all of its citizens.

For more information about the book and its author, please visit: http://www.sagepublications.com