A Study On Praise In School Moral Education

Praise is widely applied as a type of moral educational methods in the primaryand middle schools. Many educational works in China advocate"taking praise as thedominant factor"in moral education. In practice, the course of action,"virtue deposit",is adopted in some primary and middle schools under the influence of"moral bank".Praise is prevalent mainly because it has been proved to be a workable approach tomotivating the students' study and cultivating their good habits and achieving goodresults during discipline and law education; It is also a reaction against corporalpunishment or punishment which was prevalent in the previous education, and it maymake teacher-student relationship harmonious. However, praise cannot cultivate thestudents' moral character. On the contrary, it will probably be adversely affected. Itwill cause students to regard praise as the purpose of behavior and forget moralpractice; It also causes moral show, and hypocritical personality; And it will makestudents rely on the praise and lack an independent personality; and so on.The prevalence of praise in the contemporary moral education results from themisunderstandings of the role that praise plays in moral education. Praise mainlytakes behavioral psychology as its theoretical basis. Teachers control students'expected behavior through praise. That is to say, only after the students show thebehavior that the teachers expect, they can acquire this positive evaluation from theteachers. This control may have an active role in students' habit and disciplinetraining, as well as moral knowledge learning. It even may get instant result incorrecting the infant students' bad behavior, but the control in moral education isineffective. If praise is used as a method of moral education, it will be the contrary tothe nature of morality. Judging from the nature of morality, ethical behavior is a kindof conscious, voluntary and autonomous activity of the behavior subject. Evaluatingwhether an activity is moral behavior or not depends on whether it proceeds from thesubject's free choice, and it should investigate the motive of subject's behavior. Praisecan be regarded as a kind of repayment for students' behavior, but morality has nothing to do with repayment, because repayment for morality is a kind of repaymentafterwards, and what repaying training is a kind of heteronomous morality.From the aims of the school moral education, moral education should helpstudents achieve moral autonomy. Moral autonomy requires the teachers to guidestudents to pursue self-perfect, and cultivates students' ability of moral choices andthe sense of moral responsibility, not to make them care about the praise from outsideworld. Regarding praise as a method of moral education will also affect theimprovement of the students' moral character which may be as follows: first, praisewill affect the students' interest in ethical behavior itself; secondly it is not beneficialto enhance the ability of students' moral judgments; thirdly it may hinder students tocultivate the moral emotion.Therefore, the praise, as a means to strengthen the external, can not play the rolein moral education. If it is taken as the principal method, greater problem will beproduced. In moral education, teachers should abandon the external control means,and guide students to pursue self-improvement. The teachers also should adopt theeducational ways of cooperation and communication so as to combine the traditionaland modern moral education ways together to cultivate the students' moral character.