The Influence Of Neoconservatism To American Moral Education

Neoconservervatism is a cosmopolitan hot topic. In the late 1960's and early 1970's, Neoconservervatism sprang up in the West and soon became a train of thought, especially in the United States.In the United States, Neoconservervatism grew up owing to the crisis of New Deal. Since the 1960's, the president Kennedy and Johnson had put forward "great society plan" at home and launched Vietnam War in the world. The two movements based on Liberalism were all failed, and the Liberal intellectuals carried out a debate about American cold-war politics and moral rules. From then on, Liberalism sank into crisis with neoconservervatism springing up. After the Reagan became the president, neoconservervatism ushered its first stage of fast development. Reagan employed a great number of neoconservatives in many important positions and adopted their ideas during his administration, which pushed the fast development of neoconservervatism. The neoconservatives'thoughts about morality, value and anti-Russia, anti-communism policy coincided with Reagan's and were appreciated by Reagan, which made great influence on Reagan-administration at that time. George Walker Bush moved into the White House owing to neoconservatives'vigorous support in 2001. He put a great number of new conservatives into decision-making core of government. Neoconservervatism moved forward into its second stage of prosperity.New conservatives occupied the important positions including Vice-president and Defense Minister, so the foreign and domestic policies of Bush-administration had a strong color of neoconservervatism. Especially, '9.11' terrorist incident made the thoughts and policies of neoconservervatism propagated on a large scale, which affected every aspect of American politics, economy and culture.Neoconservervatism put homage to religion, family, morality and traditional value and system such as elegant culture in western civilization, believing there are basic qualities and ethical values which exceed the restriction of nation, race and area, even exceed the segmentation of different civilization and time.In the face of sexual liberation and counterculture thought in 1960's, and moral crisis and serious social problem in 1980's, neoconservervatism advocated fighting against counterculture thought firmly and emphasized important influence of family and religion in order to consolidate the foundation of moral culture in western society and protect public order and traditional culture.Neoconservervatism's viewpoint reflected in American moral education is that emphasizing the value of tradition and traditional culture, prompting moral education to return to tradition, especially the return to character and religious education. They believe there are some basic values, such as honesty, respect, responsibility, sympathy and so on, which require us to do value education and cultivate citizen thoughts. Neoconservervatism exerts great influence on American moral education and changes the methods and approaches of school moral education, mainly manifested in the following aspects: infiltrating moral education into all courses with the formal moral education curriculum as the main way; integrating moral education channels to unify the strength from all sides; forming high-quality teachers'teams to set a moral education model; carrying out various social activities to strengthen the practice of moral education; improving psychological counseling to cultivate a sound personality.Along with the enhancement of globalization trend and the coming of information society as well as the development of China's reforming and opening policy, our country's culture and value has changed enormously with each cultural trend and value pouring in, producing a lot of conflicts such as the conflict between tradition and modern, backward and advanced, China and the West etc, which aroused moral anomie in every area. So it is necessary for us to draw lessons from the successful moral education experience in the West to value moral education and change its methods to adapt to the fast developmental society. Neoconservervatism offers such inspirations to China's moral education as to inherit the brilliant cultural tradition of the Chinese nation; to implement the education of the core values promoted by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China to enhance civic awareness; to further improve the moral education at school through the combination of non-compulsory education and recessive instill education, family education and public environment influence, campus activities and social activities, as well as consulting services and psychotherapy, etc.