ABSTRACT
One might say that the school reform program that was eventually to become known as the Child Development Project began in the summer of 1978, when Dyke Brown retired as Director of the Athenian School in Danville, CA, and set out on an inquiry into the nature of prosocial development. As indicated in the quote above, Brown, a graduate of Yale Law School, founder of the Athenian, and a former Vice President of the Ford Foundation, was concerned about what he and others (e.g., Lasch, 1979) saw as excessive self-interest and declining social responsibility and concern for others among youth. With support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, he spent a year interviewing scholars and researchers in the social sciences about both the antecedents of altruism, empathy, cooperativeness, and similar qualities and, especially, about how one might intervene during childhood to effectively promote the development of such prosocial characteristics. His summary report of expert opinion on these matters (Brown, 1979) was suf- ciently encouraging that the foundation decided to fund a pilot project to develop, implement, and evaluate a school-based program to promote children’s positive social development. So began the educational experiment called the Child Development Project (CDP).
