A Study Of The Core Values ​​in "New Character Education" In The United States

The new character education, which begins at 1980 s in America, is the return of traditional moral education.It swims with the tide and responds to the widespread appeal of American people, and has a clear purport that moral education should teach children and adolescents a series of common and universal core values, to form a moral consensus which can accepted by people regardless of nation, colour,custom, or creed. Through a series of theoretical foundation and practical processing, the core value education of the new character education has played an important role in promoting the development of children’s character.The comparative study on the core values of the new character education is an important topic for us to know the process and the trend of the American moral education. The social and historical conditions of American and the globalization of the world, remind us that we should strengthen the core value education. The core value education of the western world is unique by its own times, nation, and ideology, so we can not mechanically copy it or blindly apply it. But some achievements, experiences, modes, methods of the core value education, both in theory and practice, have important reference and enlightenment for our country, which is constructing the socialist core value education.In addition to the introduction, the basic framework includes five parts:The first part is the evolution of the core values of the American character education. It analyzes the different core values in different stages of character education, from the colonial period to the period of the new character education. The second part discusses the connotation and the formation of the core value education, which is the prominent feature of the new character education, and focuses on the connotation of the core values, including respect,responsibility, caring, compassion, honesty, courage, effort, perseverance. The third chapter analyses the reasons of the core values of the new character education.The social widespread opposition of the children’s moral self-willed by the liberal education, the widespread appeal of the value education, the influence of the new conservative political philosophy which pursues the order of the society are the three reasons. Based on a large number of first-hand original documents, the fourth part studies the practice of the core value education. This part includes the guiding principles of the core value education- CEP’s Eleven Principles of Effective Character Education, the evaluation system which taking the Character Education Quality Standards as the mainstay, and the effective methods used by the school, family, community.The fifth part properly analyzes the enlightenments for our country’s moral education from the core value education, contains perfecting the goal and the content of the moral education,improving the methods of the moral education, and reforming the evaluation of the moral education.