DashingLeech

I was on console for that mission. We were pretty proud of him too.

Not the pandas. They'd make sure she's taken care of first.

As a Canadian astronaut, are there any Canadian space technologies he's particularly proud of? The Canadarm is an obvious one, but there is a lot of Canadian technology on the shuttles and space station. Are there others he finds impressive?

I don't know why I never thought of this before.

If you mean what can we do collectively ("society") to concentrate in development of the character of the individual, there are a number of things:

• Focus on programs that aim at individual growth, like educational opportunities, skills training, life training, etc.
• Address issues of discrimination as individual acts that violate the social contract, not as acts against groups based on traits (e.g., race, gender) or by groups (e.g., whites, police, men). For example, a woman screaming in a restaurant at a couple of immigrants is not "society" or "whites" being racist or discriminatory against "Muslims" or "immigrants". It is one woman being discriminatory against a couple of immigrants, and she is violating our social contract that we do not judge people or treat people based on their skin colour, race, national origin, or language. (This is the correct way to address such violations following from Realistic Conflict Theory, ingroup/outgroup psychology, human rights legislation, history, and moral philosophy.)
• Stop endorsing the idea of trait-based role models, such as "women who achieve X" or people of various minorities achieving things and being role models for other people with the same trait (skin color, ethnicity, etc.). This reinforces tribalistic behaviours and actually limits people to thinking that they can only do what other people with their traits can do, which is both negative and absurd. (Can a left-hander only achieve what other left-handers have achieved? Then why does race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation define what you can and can't achieve?) Instead either ignore such traits of "role models" or ignore it completely. Achievement comes from looking at doing more today than you did yesterday, and success comes from looking at what things other people haven't done yet, not what they have done.

There are other ways, but these are a good start. This is largely what liberal policies of human and civil rights have been doing for a long time, eliminating judging people by group or trait but instead by individual merit. This is written right into the Canadian Human Rights Act (Section 2), and the basis of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, at least as far as treating people as individuals.

As for developing individuals, that comes from the (equal) opportunities to develop those merits.