Character education loosely refers to teaching children in a manner that imparts one or more positive character qualities—such as to make them moral, civic, good, well mannered, non-bullying, healthy, critical, successful, traditional, compliant socially acceptable. Concepts that now and in the past have fallen under this term include social and emotional learning, moral reasoning, cognitive development, life skills education, health education, violence prevention, critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and conflict resolution and mediation. Some consider many of these failed programs, i.e., religious education, moral education, and values clarification.
Today, dozens of character education programs take place in, or vie for adoption by schools and businesses. Some are commercial, some non-profit, and many are uniquely devised by states, or by districts and schools. These programs commonly provide a list of principles, pillars, values or virtues that are memorized or provide the basis of themed activities. It is commonly claimed that the values included in any particular list are universally recognized. However, there is no agreement among the competing programs on core values (e.g., honesty, stewardship, kindness, generosity, courage, freedom, justice, equality, and respect) or even how many to list. There is also no common or standard means for assessing, implementing or evaluating programs.
Read more about Character Education: Terminology, In-school Programs, History
Famous quotes containing the words character and/or education:
“No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavouring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)