The Character Education Research

The main and fundamental aim of this paper is to provide the Chinese character education with the insightful and thought-provoking ideas so that it can play a role in promoting the character education movement in our country.With the background and under the objective moral education circumstances of the modernity and modernization, the American character education has attracted an increasingly large amount of attention from the academic circles, as a result, it has become one of the most important fields of research within the moral education area.Undoubtedly, the globalization and modernity have constituted the historical background of the contemporary character education research, therefore, while reflecting and reexamining the issue of how to construct and carry out the current Chinese character education practice among the youth, it will be extremely significant for us to actively construct a paradigm that is based on the angle of relationships. To efficiently and effectively improve as well as implement the modern China character education, we are supposed to broadly absorb and take in the essentially valuable experience from the developed countries, including the experience of the American character education. Only by absorbing the essence of both other countries and our own moral education traditions can we rebuild and reconstruct the contemporary successful model of character education that can be adapted to the modern times and at the same time transcend the modern times. Eventually, the most effective way to go out of the character education crisis is to successfully build and construct the featured model of Chinese character education with our own unique characteristics.Therefore, this paper aims to go deeply into the core and interior part of the whole picture of the American character education so that we can have a clearer look at the specific and particular parts and the detailed methods of the American character education that can be put into practical uses and applied to our country’s character education. Furthermore, another creative point or feature of this paper is to——unlike some other papers——put the American character education back to the whole and continuous moral tradition of the Western moral education. Based on this point, the paper also combines with the latest research findings with regards to the positive psychology to illustratively map out the basic and fundamental structures as well as the basic functions of the American character education. Finally, the paper has thrown some in-depth lights about the general character category of the American character education.The thesis mainly includes six chapters.The first chapter mainly discusses the inner theory of character education, including the function of character education, the structure of character education and the category of the American character education.The second chapter is mainly about the ethics foundation that is lying beneath the American character education, going deeply into the deep and profound foundatinal moral theories to analyze the backgrounds、the challenges as well as the ethical pillars of ethics, attempting to clarify the dimentional structures and fabrics of the American character education.The third chapter touches upon the psychological foundations of the Amercian character education, particularly the Kohlberg’s moral developmental theory and the positive psychology, which play an indispensable role in shaping the American character education.The fourth chapter goes deeply into the philosophical foundations of the American spirits. It’s mainly about the characteristic ideas concerning the American character education, such as the following:"life constitutes the moral education"、the pragmatism、the individualism as well as the civil organization spirits that have been elaborated by Tocqueville in his classic book De la democratie en Amerique. It can even be said that if you don’t truly understand the philosophical traditions of America, you can not essentially understand the essense of the American character education.The fifth chapter mainly talks about the fundamental categories of the American character education, such as wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, transcendence. Moreover, it deals with the basic meanings and significance of more than twenty sub-entries of the fundamental categories of the American character education.The sixth chapter is about the reflectings and self-examinations concerning the American character education.Specifically speaking, this chapter analyzes the essential issues that are closely associated with the fundamental character categories of the American character education, such as the paradox between the moral rules and characters, the challenges confronting the character education caused by the powerful public sphere life, the frailty of the American character education. Meanwhile, this chapter has made an attempt to sum up the possible insightful ideas concerning the American character education that can contribute positively to the sustainable development of the Chinese character education.