In doing some reasearch, it became clear that Character Education meant different things to different people. Nancy Steele and Garfield Gini-Newman from OISE/UT spoke to TVOParents.com about character education and what it means.
Citizenship Education and Character Education - what's the difference?
Essentially, Citizenship Education includes Character Education. While citizenship education includes teaching what is going on in the world and how governents work, character education is the nurturing of the habits of mind that create a good citizen.
Character education, is the deliberate effort to develop virtues that are good for the individual and good for society. Character Education views the social, emotional, and ethical development of young people as equally necessary and important as their academic development.
How do we choose whose values to uphold?
Sometimes it's difficult to find values that we all share. However, there are virtues that are common to all cultures. The virtues that we want to develop should:
- affirm human dignity
- promote individual and societal well-being
- define our rights and obligations
- meet the classical ethical tests of reversibility (Would you want to be treated this way?) and universalizability (Would you want all persons to act this way in a similar situation?).
How is this being addressed in the schools?
Citizenship Education is integrated into all aspects of a student's schooling. Not only does it inform the relationships and interactions at school, teachers are helping students make connections between the curriculum and current events. For example, students might be encouraged to take action on global warming or graph and discuss statistics about poverty.
In Ontario, the York Region District School Board leads the way in terms of Character Education with their program "Character Matters!". The YRDSB believes that character development is primarily the responsibility of parents and families and that schools play an important, supportive role. After consulting parents, families, educators, other community members, students, religious leaders and business partners, they decided to concentrate on the following attributes or virtues:
- Respect
- Responsibility
- Honesty
- Empathy
- Fairness
- Initiative
- Perseverance
- Integrity
- Courage
- Optimism
Other school boards have chosen different attributes.
Read more on Global Citizenship and how you can promote citizenship in your home.
Nancy Steele is Co-coordinator of Central Option and Instructor in Social Studies. Garfield Gini-Newman is a lecturer in Social Studies. They are both currently teaching in OISE/UT's B.Ed program in Toronto.
