This paper proposes a lifespan developmental model of critical moral consciousness and examines its implications for education in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Mature moral consciousness, central to negotiating the challenges of the 21st century, is characterized by a deepening lifelong integration of moral motivation, agency and critical discernment. The paper describes the evolution of moral consciousness through three levels; pre-critical consciousness (pCC), transitional critical consciousness (tCC) and critical consciousness (CC) and eight chronologically ascending psychosocial themes. It focuses on the ®rst two periods and operationalizes the role of education in cultivating the four dimensions of moral motivation: a moral sense of identity, a sense of responsibility and agency, a deep sense of relatedness on all levels of living and a sense of meaning and life purpose. The paper proposes a re-envisioning of education in the direction of integrating mind and heart, developing both moral motivation and critical discernment and integrating these into optimal consciousness.

This paper relates a series of current development in the literature of economics and psychology as they relate to decision making by households and business firms. The first part of the paper reviews recent literature dealing with happiness and subjective wellbeing. In the second part of the paper recent developments in management science that make use of intuition and mental focus are related to firm profitability and improved economic efficiency. Both of these recent developments can provide critical insights into improving the “bottom line ” performance of policy makers, managers and society as a whole at both the macroeconomic and microeconomic levels. These ideas are then used to design to and develop a series of policy suggestions that refocus attention on the concept of subjective well being or happiness as opposed to economic utility maximization as well as the role of intuition and the concept of “flow ” in the decision making process. of top managers. We can summarize these ideas succinctly by focusing on two sets of variables relating to decision making and decision outcome in a two by two matrix summarized in the Table