A analysis study on the concepts and backgrounds of character education in England

Abstract

Background: In 2015 Character Education Act was introduced into formal education system in South Korea, By the Act, the government produced a National Plans for Character Education per five years. However, there are still confusions about the meaning and concept of character education, and the lack of clear guidelines for the education practices, Purpose: With these reasons, this study aimed to analyse the background and the contents of character education in England, Secondly, this study aimed to find out the practices of character education in schools and thirdly, tried to draw the implications into character education in Korean education context. Methodology/Approach: The method used in this study was contents analysis. In order to be critical and objective analysis for the character eduction, this study had tried to find the official documents. Findings/Conclusions: This research found that the background of character education was originated from the religious education, in particular, Christian Education with faith and virtues. This kind of character education was traditional until 1940s in the States. However, between 1940s and 1990s, character education has been reformed under the name of moral education or virtue education due to the close of religious education in the national curriculum. Even though the character education had been changed in to another education, there were still critical issues around the approaches of eduction. There have been two approached of character education, one was value-neutral and the other was value-focused approach. Especially, value-focused moral and virtue education had tried instill the values to students with christian related faiths and ethos. After the 1990s, this education movement had been changed again as character education which influenced the character education in England now. This reserch found that value-focused character education is very controversial and critical for students. Implications: As a result, this study suggests three implications for the development of character education in the South Korean context. Firstly, character education should not try to instill certain values for young people. Secondly, we need to be very careful about the character tests for young people recently. Finally, character education should more focus on social development rather than individual development in combination with citizenship education.