On The Effectiveness Of School Moral Education

Moral education is now a hot issue of the educational circles and the whole society, of which the emphasis and difficulty lie in the effectiveness of moral education. How to understand the effectiveness of moral education, how to measure it, the cause of its inappropriate execution and how to improve its performance, these are all the problems related to moral education. However, both theoretical and practical educators haven't carried a thorough research on these problems, thus causing many faults to the practice of moral education and imposing a bad influence on the effectiveness of school moral education.Basing ourselves on the understanding of moral education itself and introspecting and summarizing the research achievements of moral education in our country within the recent 20 years, we hold the opinion that the effectiveness of moral education is connected with the goal of moral education and therefore it should be decided by whether the goal of moral education has been fulfilled. The goal of moral education has three levels: Firstly, to boost effectively the development of students'morality; secondly, to raise the level of social morality through enhancing students'morality; thirdly, to obtain the maximal output of results and benefits with minimal input of time and thus to get comparatively high efficiency. Therefore, we should measure the effectiveness of moral education in three dimensions, namely internal result, external benefit and efficiency of moral education. Internal result is the basic yardstick for moral education result. It means whether the requirements of education have transformed into students'mentality and morality. In other words, it means whether the process of internalization has happened. There are two standards for measuring internalization. On one hand, whether the elements of a moral character, namely knowledge, emotion will and action are consistent with each other. On the other hand, whether an individual has reached the level of self-discipline. External result means the level of social spiritual civilization is elevated through the enhancing of students'mentality and morality. This is also an important index for internal result, since internal result have to be demonstrated by external benefit. Efficiency of moral education means acquiring the best result and biggest benefit in the shortest time. Checked in the three above-mentioned dimensions, the effectiveness of our moral education is not desirable. The main manifestations are as follows: internal result is poor; there is a big margin between the present condition of students'morality and the requirement of the society and school; the moral level of the society is discouraging; the efficiency of school moral education is low.There are many reasons that cause the poor effectiveness of school moral education, but we consider the substantial one is concerning about our concept. The situation of nowadays society has changed quite a lot. The erection and development of the Market Economy System in the economic fields has definitely evoked the individual consciousness; with the more and more wildly opening of our society and the coming era of the technology and information, humanity are facing more and more conflicts and choices concerning our concept of value, so the request of being given more rights to choose the direction of our concept of value is becoming much eager. Students in present society greatly differ from the former ones. They are eager to express their desire of choosing their own life and to be given more rights to do so and accordingly, they would like to bear consequence resulted by their own choice more consciously. The change of the social situation and students has presented the impacts and challenges before the school moral education. Actually, our school moral education doesn't make corresponding preparation to change from concept to practice, but remains its former pattern which is unaware of individuals. The reason that causes the present situation of the moral education is basically due to the influence of the instrument-oriented education. Without changing the concept of instrument-oriented education, the purpose of moral education shouldn't become the one with the purpose of caring about the growth of individuals, and accordingly we will get nowhere in the moral education.According to the above analysis, we raise some countermeasure proposals on how to improve the effectiveness of school moral education: Firstly, establish the concept of human-based education. This concept is decided by the essential, function, and value of education and is proposed in considering the history of Occidental Humanism which paid much attention on cultivating the characteristics of individuals and meanwhile, we base the proposals upon the malpractices of the present school moral education. Secondly, the practice of changing the human-orientated concept to school moral education should stick to some basic principles, that is the main body principle, practice principle, the psychology principle in moral education and the entirety principle. Following out such principles, we cannot assure the improvement of the moral education, but we definitely believe that it should cause the low efficiency if we violate these principles.