A Research On Practice Of American Character Education

American character education is one model of the moral education in American schools; it is also a practical and operational education reform involved by family, school and community. American character education has got nationwide promotion and popularization, and accumulated much effective experience after a longtime exploration and rise and fall. American character education aims at delivering social values and virtues generally accepted by the society to the students though various ways, and developing the students' good moral behavior and moral ability to reflect. This paper tries to study the practice of American character education to summarize its successful experience and provide reference and inspiration for the moral education in our country, finally improve our Moral Education at schools.This paper carries out a careful and comprehensive study on the practical research of the American character education from five aspects, including the school, the government, out—of—school organization, the family and the community by literature reading, case analysis, historical analysis, comparative analysis and other method. The paper mainly includes five parts as follows:Firstly, the introduction concludes the existing research of American character education and define the term character and some terms related to it. According to the research, there are much study on American character education in and abroad, but not too much systematic study on its practice. There has been no one consistent and definite definition of character education so far, but many famous scholars and authorities put forward their different views on it, and reached a consensus that they all believed character education is to cultivate the students good character, develop their good moral consciousness, emotion and behavior, and finally create a citizen of good virtues and cultivation.The second part is about legislation and planning of American character education. The central and state governments enact a series of laws and regulations to regulate and guide the implementation of character education in America, which supports and help the character education and push its development forward. The third part is about the practice of American schools'character education. Advocates of character education regard schools as the main site to conduct character education; they propose to implement character education via curriculum, school life and the cooperation of schools, family and community. The curriculums include not only special character education curriculum, but also the integration of subject curriculums. The material and spiritual atmosphere of school life all helps to character education, American schools usually hide character education in class culture, school system, campus environment, teaching method and some other factors. This part also evaluates and induces the practical effects and its feature of American schools'character education by giving some cases.The fourth part is about out—of—school character education organizations and their activities. With the popularity of character education in the United States, all kinds of character education organizations and institutions spring up like mushrooms, and process lots of activities in order to promote and advance the character education. These organizations provide teachers with trainings and resources on character education and develop some character education programs. The part lists two out—of—school character education organizations, "Character Education Partnership" and "Character Education Partnership", which show the support with character education from out—of—school institutions.Finally, the paper sums up the revelation from American character education. The last part gives a basic comment on character education in America and shows that American character education will play an important part in enlightening the development of our schools'moral education. According to the research, our schools' moral education should get strong support from government, out—of—school organization, society and family; Make full use of moral education resources; strengthen the integrity of moral education theory and practice; enhance the research and development of moral education course; finally construct a model with wide public support.