America's School System Needs More Character Education
The school system in America has its good and bad points. On the good side, it provides kids a place to go while parents are at work: they get an education, they get lunch, they get supervision, and they get a place where they can learn math, reading, and writing. On the negative side, it can be a place where time is wasted, where students are not allowed to learn up to their potential, and where a limiting kind of indoctrination can take place. This paper will discuss school issues in America and show why the school system is failing our nation’s children.
One of the most important aspects of education is character development, and yet our schools do not engage in character education or what used to be called moral education (Lickona). Instead, schools focus on promoting politically correct doctrines that give an unrealistic portrait of the world. The same mistakes that the leaders of the Soviet Union made in terms of insisting upon a politically correct worldview is now being made in the US in the schools to which our children are being sent. There is no emphasis on Aristotelianism or on classical philosophy, virtue ethics, or even much on Christian principles (Kristjansson). Rather, the learning process is filtered through the lens of progressive, liberal politics, and all the emphasis is on getting away from Old World values.
If schools are going to support the development of children in the US, they need to focus on the development of their character in traditional, classical terms (Kristjansson; Lickona)....…challenges and overcome obstacles. Too many people now think that everything should be given them because the system is not fair. The system may not be fair and it may be rigged, but expecting Soviet-style solutions to fix things is a bit naïve and shows a lack of understanding of both human nature and human history. The problems of this world can neither be legislated away nor socially engineered out of existence. However, people can be taught how to think, how to use logic, how to engage in actual philosophy, and how to live in a manner that is in alignment with the traditional system of virtue ethics that has always had true universal appeal, since it can be found both in the teachings of Aristotle in the West and Confucius in the East.
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Works Cited
Kristjánsson, Kristján. "There is Something About Aristotle: The Pros and Cons of Aristotelianism in Contemporary Moral Education." Journal of philosophy of education 48.1 (2014): 48-68.
Lickona, Thomas. "The return of character education." Educational leadership 51.3 (1993): 6-11.
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