Damon, William

In Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (1990), Ernest Boyer proposed a conception of professorial scholarship and research that is much broader than the traditional focus on the discovery and examination of phenomena. He described scholarship that tries to understand and integrate ideas from within one's field and across other fields as well as scholarship that employs academic ideas in service of world improvement. William Damon's work over the past 30 years reflects this full range of scholarly activity. As the author of 16 books and numerous book chapters and articles, his work on moral development has put him at the center of public and academic conversations about what is important for us as parents and as a society to do in order to nurture moral persons.

By the time Damon captured the attention of the popular press with his book The Moral Child: Nurturing Children's Natural Moral Growth (1990), he had written seven traditional scholarly books on the social and moral development of children. His early works include The Social World of the Child (1977), Moral Development (1978), and Social and Personality Development: Infancy Through Adolescence (1983). These studies focused on how moral action plays out in real social situations of children and adolescents. Damon emphasized that moral thinking and behavior develop in dynamic relationship with family, peers, teachers, and the larger social world. Moral emotions (such as empathy, shame, and guilt) and the principles of distributive justice (which can be seen in sharing) flourish, or are smothered, within these relationships.

The Moral Child marked a shift in Damon's scholarship. The book surveyed and synthesized the vast and complex body of knowledge about moral development and translated it for the general public. In addition to bringing him a new audience, it proposed ways that readers might use this information in their homes and schools. Howard Gardner described this book as

In 1995, Damon gained an even larger popular audience with his book Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools (1995). The book proposed that prevailing child-rearing beliefs and practices are not leading to morally developed children. Damon argued that “with best intentions,” parents and schools have been in large part responsible for this situation: our unwavering focus on self-esteem and child-centered practices were misguided, and we have a general lack of understanding of “the nature of children and their developmental needs…. All the commonly accepted standards for young people's skills and behavior have fallen drastically. Less is expected of the young, and in turn less is received” (Damon, 1995, p. xiii). [Page 316]To build character and competence requires high moral standards and expectations. This book won the Parent's Choice Award and garnered Damon appearances on Oprah, The Today Show, and National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation. Eminent developmental psychologist Deana Kuhn writes that Damon's “books have served the invaluable purpose of communicating academic research in the field of child development to a broader audience. Few academics are able to write in a way that does this successfully” (personal communication, February 10, 2004).

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