A common approach of these programs is to provide a list of principles, pillars, values or virtues, which are memorized or around which themed activities are planned.
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.
"[6] More recently, psychologist Robert McGrath has proposed that character education is less focused on social skill acquisition and more on constructing a moral identity within a life narrative.
1) Cheerleading involves multicolored posters, banners, and bulletin boards featuring a value or virtue of the month; lively morning public-address announcements; occasional motivational assemblies; and possibly a high-profile event such as a fund-raiser for a good cause.
4) Forced-formality focuses on strict, uniform compliance with specific rules of conduct, (i.e., walking in lines, arms at one's sides), or formal forms of address ("yes sir," "no ma'am"), or other procedures deemed to promote order or respect of adults.
Depending on the program, the means of implementation may be by teachers and/or any other adults (faculty, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, maintenance staff, etc.
The concept of inherited "race character" has long been used to characterize desirable versus undesirable qualities in members of groups as a whole along national, tribal, ethnic, religious and even class lines.
Eastern philosophy views the nature of man as initially quiet and calm, but when affected by the external world, it develops desires.
When the desires are not properly controlled and the conscious mind is distracted by the material world, we lose our true selves and the principle of reason in Nature is destroyed.
Study, for Confucius, means finding a good teacher, who is familiar with the ways of the past and the practices of the ancients, imitating his words and deeds.
One theme of Zhuangzi's that links Taoism to the Zen branch of Buddhism is the concept of flow, of losing oneself in activity, particularly the absorption in skilled execution of a highly cultivated way.
Plato wrote that to be virtuous, we must both understand what contributes to our overall good and have our spirited and appetitive desires educated properly and guided by the rational part of the soul.
For Aristotle, the key to finding this balance is to enjoy and recognize the value of developing one's rational powers, and then using this recognition to determine which actions are appropriate in which circumstances.
Because moral character requires communities where citizens can fully realize their human powers and ties of friendship, there are hard questions of how educational, economic, political, and social institutions should be structured to make that development possible.
[citation needed] Situationism Impressed by scientific experiments in social psychology, "situationist" philosophers argue that character traits are not stable or consistent and cannot be used to explain why people act as they do.
In the first of these experiments,[16] the great majority of subjects, when politely though firmly requested by an experimenter, were willing to administer what they thought were increasingly severe electric shocks to a screaming "victim."
In the Christian tradition, it is believed that humans are flawed at birth (original sin), requiring salvation through religious means: teaching, guidance and supernatural rituals.
This belief in America, originally heavily populated by Protestant immigrants, creates a situation of a-priori assumption that humans are morally deficient by nature and that preemptive measures are needed to develop children into acceptable members of society: home, church and school.
Yet, as waves of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Italy came to the country from the mid-nineteenth century forward, they reacted to the Protestant tone and orthodoxy of the schools.
The most successful textbooks during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the famed McGuffey Readers, fostering virtues such as thrift honesty, piety, punctuality and industry.
McGuffey was a theological and conservative teacher and attempted to give schools a curriculum that would instill Presbyterian Calvinist beliefs and manners in their students.
During the late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century period, intellectual leaders and writers were deeply influenced by the ideas of the English naturalist Charles Darwin, the German political philosopher Karl Marx, the Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, and by a growing strict interpretation of the separation of church and state doctrine.
It continues to be fueled by desire from conservative and religious segments of the population for traditionally orderly schools where conformity to "standards" of behavior and good habits are stressed.
[20] State and national politicians, as well as local school districts, lobbied by character education organizations, have responded by supporting this sentiment.
It is a character attribute associated with University of Pennsylvania professor Angela Duckworth who wrote about her research in a best-selling book[23] and promoted it on a widely watched Ted Talks video.
Neuropsychology addresses how brain regions associated with emotional processing are involved in moral cognition by studying the biological mechanisms that underlie human choices and behavior.
A 2011 study conducted by Itzhak Fried found that individual neurons fire 2 seconds before a reported "will" to act (long before EEG activity predicted such a response).
[9] Previous and current research on the subject fails to find one peer-reviewed study demonstrating any scientifically validated need for[11] or result from character education programs.
Not found, even though they are fundamental to the success of modern democratic societies, are such noted values as independence, inventiveness, curiosity, critical thinking, skepticism, and even moderation.
the famous saying by Ms. Frizzle on the much celebrated TV show, The Magic School Bus,[47] embodies values that would be antithetical to those found on today's character education lists.