National Values: Can Americans Achieve Consensus

摘要

Our nation and world are growing closer due to enhancements in communications.The values exhibited by our future citizens will be critical to the stability and leadership in our world order. Fundamental reasons for Americans to agree on a set of values include: the commonality of interest that all nations have in security, peace, economic issues and human rights. American values are publicized through instantaneous global communication daily for the world to see. The stability of an American value set therefore becomes critical to our national image around the world. This study reviews the current set of American values proposed by national advocacy groups who focus on Character Education. The work further reviews the American military value system and identifies areas of similarity between contemporary values and military values. Finally, the work demonstrates that Americans are very close to attaining national consensus and recommends using the methodology of Ends, Ways and Means as a mechanism to bring consensus to the topic of national values.