인성교육 이해방식과 방법론에 관한 일고찰

Abstract

Character education begins with a clear definition of character. There are claims that humanity is reducible to human nature or personality, but when approached from an educational perspective, human nature soon boils down to the question of its ultimate goodness or wickedness. There is a significant difference between the educational systems that emerge from the standpoint that human nature is evil versus the standpoint that human nature is good. With regards to educational outcomes, this can be observed both in terms of human nature and personality. Modern education today sees education as leading the immature to a mature state from the standpoint that human nature is evil. But if human nature is evil, how could we implement an education that would render it good? If character education becomes a system of etiquette education or one of instilling manners whereby simple wrong cases are righted, it would be nothing but a follow-up to the wrong educational cases that had been carried out previously. In that sense, character education is correction; not education. Education should be done in a way that realizes and understands the perfect self rather than unfolding as a process of constantly correcting and reinforcing immature human beings. In that sense, this paper posits that enabling students to understand their own emotions would serve as a correct form of character education. This would be a system of focusing on emotions that reveal the goodness of human nature. Personality can be educated, but education at this time should be a way to bring out a student’s already good and even perfected nature. This is more realistic than replacing a ‘faulty’ character with a good character which supposedly did not exist previously. If personality education morphs into ‘emotional self-understanding,’ contemplations on ‘why not to do’ unsavory acts rather than mere negative commands ‘don’t do that,’ and listening to what one’s emotions intuit prior to and after given actions, then that would arise to the true standard of a good education.