In October, Magician’s and other Performers who understand the secret to the Golden Rule presentations, can present in schools for anti-bullying curriculum which is important for students to practise and to ponder.
To date, this performance—Attention, Magic, and the Golden Rule by Steffan Soule—has been performed in hundreds of schools and youth organizations in Utah, with over 200,000 students attending, along with their teachers and administrators. With our program, “The Golden Rule Magician,” in the month of October can reach another 15,000 young people.
Need for Program: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC.gov) considers bullying among youth a “major public health problem.”
- Across the country, 30% of students grades K-12 are victims of bullying or are themselves a bully. Every day, 160,000 students stay home from school for fear of bullying (bullyingstatistics.org).
- 7 in 10 young people are victims of cyber bullying through the use of computers,
cell phones, and other electronic devices (ditchthelabel.org). - Victims of bullying are four times more likely to earn failing grades than their non-bullied peers (DeVoe & Kaffenberger, 2005).
- Bullying victims are from 2 to 9 times more likely to consider suicide than non-victims (bullyingstatistics.org).
- Suicide is now the leading cause of death in Utah for young people, ages 10-17 and 18-24 (health.utah.gov). Utah has consistently had a higher youth suicide rate compared to the national average for more than a decade; in 2013, suicide surpassed unintentional injuries to become the leading cause of death among youth ages 10-19 in Utah.
The effects of bullying, such as poor school performance, lack of self-esteem, and self-harm can continue to affect individuals into young adulthood.
Program Description: In an effort to help address these challenges, we offer our signature assembly, Attention, Magic, and the Golden Rule, free of charge, to schools (public, private and charter) and various youth organizations. We also offer a complete on-line magic educational series on how to replicate the assembly entitled, “The Golden Rule Magician.” And we offer funding for live presentations of material from The Golden Rule Magician series, free of charge. Presenters can be teachers, performers or assembly and classroom demonstrators. Our program objective is to experientially introduce the concept of the Golden Rule through the ageless enchantment of magic and the arts, delivering anti-bullying messages in an engaging approach—for students, teachers, and administrators to experience together. When combined with other evidence-based bullying prevention efforts, the long-term impact of this work may include reduced truancy rates, improved academic performance, and higher graduation rates.
The topic and experience of bullying are emotionally charged; because high amounts of anxiety are contraindicated for absorption of new knowledge, any approach to teaching on this subject necessitates regulating learners to positive states of awareness. The magical environment provides this regulation, supporting children/teens in being in a state of restful alertness that facilitates learning.
In Attention, Magic, and the Golden Rule we have crafted an educational performance that is positive and transformative. With our “Golden Rule Magician” teaching series, teachers, performers and presenters all over the world can now utilize our curriculum and each vignette we developed during the previous seven years of assembly tours. Magic captures students’ attention, while the visual effects demonstrate the source of bullying behavior, and stories offer strategies for diffusing bullying based on the tenets of the Golden Rule. The performance teaches students how to work with increasing their attention and focusing it both on themselves and, very importantly, on others. They learn how to make a difference by treating others with kindness – an important first step to improving all kinds of relationships.
As we measure the effects of our program, we keep in mind CDC statistics on the Direct Costs of injuries from violence and bullying. These data show that if our program changes the behavior of “one bully” which in turn prevents injury to “one youth,” out of just 1,000 students, the cost savings (e.g. medical costs, increased insurance rates, job and work loss, etc.) would be from 10 to 100 times what we spend to deliver our program to those 1,000 students. When we examine the CDC’s estimates on Indirect Costs, which are in addition to the Direct Costs, we find that the cost of prevention, even while difficult to measure, is comparatively inexpensive.
To ensure Attention, Magic, and the Golden Rule is meeting its intended objectives, we coordinate and collect surveys from teachers and administrators via online forms through our website. The results are consistently highly positive. In addition, we provide curriculum-based activities for teachers to use in the classroom in conjunction with the magic performance or as stand-alone lessons. Teachers may continue to download the “Learning Tools” for free from the Golden Rule Project website. These materials, as well as our performance, align with the Utah Core Standards for social studies, language arts, and visual arts.
Please make a donation to the Golden Rule Magician program now.
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