Talk:Character education

message: I think this is a pretty terrible article. It's useless, because it doesn't explain what character education is (which is why most people will probably check the page), it skews towards history when the term is primarily used in Ed and Ed Psych, it's non-NPOV, littered with scare quotes, and it presents a non-Mainstream perspective on Character Education that's primarily critical and lacks any actual helpful info or links. It also seems to suggest that Character Education occurs primarily with the aid of intervention programs. It should also mention how Character Ed differs from Service Learning, Values Clarification and Cognitive Moral Ed.
In Ed Psychology, Character Education refers to something fairly specific, it's not the same as those things provided in the extended history lesson at the beginning of the page. What's that taken from anyway? It reads like a history thesis. It's boring and mostly irrelevant. As much as I like Chuang Tzu, a paragraph with some Bennet, Damon or Walker cites would be more appropriate than a description of the rise and fall of civilization and cites that contain Bush-bashing.
Also, it attacks Character Education for problems that are common to Educational Research as a whole and seems to conflate the inductive problems of specific deployments of Character Ed with the concept as a whole on a deductive level.
Additionally, this article cites several non-published and spurious sources, it takes an IES report out of context (part/whole?). Several of the Character Education programs on the page cited work fine. It says so - ON THAT PAGE. It's relatively unsurprising in education for this kind of evidence problem to happen. The field has low standards of research and scholarship, especially related to interventions. Not just on this intervention, but everything. There's a reason it's held in such low esteem amongst academics. Are most of the intervention programs mentioned nonsense? Yes, probably 90% of them. I'm sure they involve colors and buzzwords and groupwork for no reason, etc. But even if all of them were, that doesn't mean the concept itself is bunk.
You will find virtually no quantitative unsponsored studies performed on a representative sample in real conditions. Quite sadly, that applies to nearly all Ed research, not just this. You should see the Reading Intervention programs (Voyager, et al). Even worse.
Also, it's outrageous to claim character education cannot be tested. It isn't being adequately tested, but neither are 99% of the other Education programs that are accepted without batting an eyelash despite being proven completely wrong (balanced literacy, whole word, the new drill and skill interventions etc). It's psychology, if you have a problem with reduced bad behaviors evidencing a change, you might want to consider a different line of work. Most personality disorders (and schizophrenia) employ the same outward criteria for diagnosis. I say it could use some work, but good enough.
At least it's capable of being operationalized and tested vis-a-vis empathy, resilience, etc. Also, let's be practical. If the child isn't yelling obscenities at you every day or stealing cars anymore (and, yes, this happens in many of the schools we teach at), it's probably working. Don't get too worked up on the thing as a construct - most psychologists really don't. It's about respecting yourself, others and property. It's devoid of religious sentiments when used by psychologists. Sure, it's certainly true that some groups use it as a code word for crypto-religious education and I have no problem leaving that in there, but that's not really what it is in Education anymore. I think you're completely overlooking the influence of Dewey and Value Theory.
Anyone mind if I clean this up a bit?
Guinness4life (talk) 14:42, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Early list of complaints

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Doesn’t sound like moral education to me. 
This article misses the point Hwfr (talk) 12:48, 31 March 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  “Define and drill” 

message: The lede gets the article off to a good start. It seems that character = a hard-to-define quality, desirable but missing in American public education system. References are adequate. The topics mentioned in the lede are followed-up by Issues and controversies section, which is also well-written and well-referenced. Most of what comes in between is an embarrassment: poorly referenced sections which have the nature of stubs that can only be expanded by dubious means. In particular, I nominate the following for deletion: 3.1 Understanding character; 3.1.1 Psychic arts; 3.1.2 Race character; 3.1.3 Generational character; 3.2 Developing character; 3.2.1 Eastern philosophy; 3.2.2 Western philosophy; 3.2.3 Contemporary views. 3.1.1 Psychic arts if for the sake of argument we assume that some people have psychic powers ("arts"), they are also in a position to violate social norms and in this sense are not models for character development. Is Faust a model of character? 3.2.2 Western Philosophy—Socrates Remember? Socrates was found guilty by a jury of 500 Athenian citizens of corrupting the youth of Athens. Aristotle: no mention is made of Nicomachean Ethics; if mentioned, it will expose the banality of the other sentences in this section. If, after two months, no one can give reasons for keeping these sections and subsections, I would like to delete them. (Others are welcome to preempt me.) Vagabond nanoda (talk) 06:31, 15 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Candidates for deletion 

message: Speakers talk about a success story in assemblies, which are basically how the six pillars of character affected their life for the positive which assumes that many students are not already following the six pillars of character until they hear their story or else they wouldn't be sharing it. It is similar to a priest preaching to children about the Ten Commandments with a bible story or personal story, which assumes that people are not already following the Ten Commandments or else they wouldn't be conducting sermons. Most people arguing for character education are christian conservatives. https://charactercounts.org/character-counts-assemblies/ 69.196.37.152 (talk) 20:50, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposal to add to religion section how similar assemblies are to sermons 

message: In all honesty, after having read most of this article multiple times, I'm still at a bit of a loss with regards to character education as a larger topic. There are multiple moments where a contributor draws a conclusion with no citation included, and SO many generalizations with no links to back them up. I don't have a complete list of suggestions yet, but does anyone agree that this article seems fairly unhelpful and incomplete as is? I don't think the article reads as objective, and that feels unfortunate given that, if someone is googling the term character education, they will likely come here first.PigeonAnecdotes (talk) 21:34, 14 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Continued bias/lack of neutrality in this article