Our Children, Our Future: Living Ethics with Children is offered as a guide for parents and teachers. It is designed to be a living workbook to evoke thoughts and aspirations on your journey to excellence in parenthood and education. If you are a parent or a teacher, you already know that we all share the responsibility for molding our children's futures. The goal of this book is to be of support to you in this wonderful endeavor. Perhaps it would be useful to sketch the background or context for this book. It came about during my tenure at Omega Vector, a volunteer seminar organization project headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S.A. Omega had sprung from the Human Potential Movement inspired by the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, as a self-mastery seminar to present concepts of unconditional love and sacrificial service. It was provided by a Phoenix couple who wanted to "give something back to humanity." The seminar was offered free to all and presented by a team of volunteer professional facilitators and psychologists. It was the founders' dream to launch an Omega School - a school of the future, which would combine state-of-the-art in education, brain research, and brain-compatible education while promoting the tenets of love and sacrificial service for one humanity. I was asked to work on this project. As I considered the Omega landscape, it occurred to me that the most vital ingredient of the school had yet to be conceived; that is, an arsenal of trained teachers whose hearts and minds would be alive with this shared vision, and who would abide in lives of discipline and Living Ethics. Assuming their enthusiasm for a school of this kind, their hearts and minds still had to be cultivated and integrated before a school could be opened. The Greek ēthikē is defined as the science of morals, based also on the Greek ēthos, meaning moral character or disposition. If we define Living Ethics as a path by which we can be very present today in our study of positive and enduring individual and societal morals (defined from the Latin moralis as customs or norms), then Our Children, Our Future is an attempt to develop a path for conscious teachers and aspiring parents. The book can be used on its own, perhaps even as a manual or as part of a training program and offered to parents and teachers via wider dissemination. While the book is written with this constituency in mind, it also tries to serve a broader audience; that is, any interested parent, grandparent, teacher, child-life professional, or caretaker of a child who is willing to consider the child, family, school and society in a new and expanded light. With this perspective, readers can seek to model virtues in their lives- to live ethics with and for the children in their lives. To this end, the book seeks to inspire and motivate the reader to become the best role model/teacher/parent possible. It provides specific chapters on values and virtues to cultivate hearts and minds. The reader is invited to assist the child in becoming integrated and whole, to sidestep the modern concern with approval-seeking outside oneself, and to develop the child's infinite capacities! You are invited on an adventure of living ethics with your children, as a bridge to all children's futures. Our children will hold the reins and inherit the responsibility to create a safe and peaceful world. Living ethics can help them build that bridge to serve on behalf of all humanity.
