These emphases respect the student as rationally capable of framing and pursuing questions while also respecting the student’s freedom in determining which questions to pursue and how to pursue them… with some guidance from the teacher. GHA’s STEM classes also exhibit a respect for pursuing truth in mathematics and the natural world, but adopt recent pedagogical strategies, and so many GHA schools use Singapore math, not Euclid’s Elements, when teaching mathematics.Īs students get older, GHA places greater emphasis on inquiry, Socratic seminar, and the independent reading of original sources. GHA draws from Core Knowledge’s emphasis on learning key content and on direct instruction because the organization regards education as the pursuit of objective truth. Īn outstanding example of a traditional approach can be found at Great Hearts Academies. A key part of Western civilization is openness to other civilizations, and so this approach may also integrate elements from other traditions. often acknowledge and highlight Western civilization as part of America’s cultural backdrop. Moreover, traditional approaches in the U.S. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that a traditional approach integrates the kind of corporal punishment common during the Founding era. A traditional approach may accept the argument of the American Founders that virtue education was essential to exercising liberty responsibly and therefore essential to the success of a representative democratic republic. This does not mean idolizing or otherwise treating the past uncritically, though. Traditional approaches are defined by their respect for pedagogical strategies, writings, exemplars, and understandings of virtue that have been handed down to us by our forebears, not as what was commonplace in their respective times, but as what was best according to their judgments-judgments that are themselves built upon the judgments of those who came before them. These approaches often, though not always, place greater emphasis on reason than liberty, insofar as reason helps to illuminate the difference between the free pursuit of virtue and the licentious pursuit of vice. This approach understands the human person as rational and free, and explains education as the pursuit of an objective unchanging truth, which entails intellectual, moral, and civic formation toward a virtuous life. More so than the other approaches, the traditional approach often does explicitly answer the three questions raised above. Even so, within each approach, there are adherents whose outlook is, or comes close to being, exclusive of the others. As we shall see, these approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. As we explore different approaches to character education, we will find that some approaches address these questions more explicitly than others, but we should try to keep the questions in the back of our minds regardless.įor simplicity, we will consider three major categories of approaches, which have evolved over the past three decades: traditional, social science based, and progressive. But such an education can become problematic when it suggests that being an employee is all we are or what is most important about us. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with this. For example, if all we do is speak of marketable skills, then, whether we intend to do so or not, we convey something to the student of who they are (i.e., a prospective employee), what their place is (i.e., to work in a company), and what the end of education is (i.e., work preparation). Any approach to character education assumes answers to three key questions: (a) How do I understand the human person? (b) What is the place of the human person in society and the world? and (c) What is the end of education? Very few practitioners within any given approach will explicitly address these questions, but we sometimes unwittingly address them through our content and pedagogy.
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