School-based Character Education in the United States

Abstract

Character education has been a part of schooling in the United States since the early years of its public education system. Starting with a religious emphasis on moral development, character education eventually transformed into more secular approaches, like the values clarification model, character word-of-the-month approach, performance approach, and finally into social emotional learning approaches. These approaches are reflective of the changes occurring in the social, cultural, and economic spheres of the country, which eventually blurred the lines between the moral and performance (the socio-cultural and economic) aspects of character development. This article provides a contextual glimpse of the processes shaping character education in the United States, indicating the universality of the social dimensions involved.