Previous Story
The plea for character education in our schools
|
Posted on Nov 20 2000
When a child doesn’t understand that cheating is wrong, or stealing someone’s lunch, or lying to teachers and parents to get his way, whose fault is it? Where did he learn this type of thinking? When he decides to skip school, did he overhear his parents talk about skipping work pretending that they are sick? Where is the child to learn right from wrong–in the home or school? It appears that as more families become dysfunctional, the schools must take up the burden in addition to teaching the ABC’s.
Despite all the advanced technology and instant media access, our children seem to graduate as moral illiterates. Lack of sufficient emphasis on character education in the home and in the schools is the basic cause for poor academic achievement and the high rate of juvenile delinquency.
All information points to this fact–lack of good character development in young people is the main reason so many of them become problem adults later. And the sooner we accept this fact, and the sooner we take steps to remedy it, the sooner our youth will grow into better adults. Once students, teachers, administrators, and parents accept that all of us must change our attitudes and must seek to become better human beings with a greater respect for one another, than everything that follows will be easier to accept and adapt to.
Character building or ethics or moral education, whatever one wishes to call it, is the other side of the coin in education–one without the other results in an incomplete educated child. The great Chinese philosopher Confucius, several thousand years ago wrote
