American Character Education From The Perspective Of Virtue Ethics

Character education as a traditional moral education has appeared again in modern America after a century, which is regarded as an important way to resolve social moral problems. From the perspective of ethics, the paper is aimed to study American character education movement, and then research its ethics foundations. Go deeply into the core and interior part of the whole picture of American character education so that we can have a clearer look at the specific and particular parts and the detailed methods of the American character education that can be put into practical uses and applied to our country’s character education.The thesis mainly includes five chapters.The first chapter is the preface of the paper, including the origin of the research, the proposalof the question, the purpose and significance of the research, literature review, themethodology of the study, etc. In addition, the relevant concept of virtue ethics, character andfundamental categories of character will be interpreted in this part.The second chapter is the philosophical basis of character education: virtue ethics. In the light of virtue ethics, we will discuss if virtues can be taught, and if it is necessary and how to teach them on the basis of character education.The third chapter is mainly about the background of traditional character education from ancient Greece, medieval to modern western, and the ethics foundation that is lying beneath the American character education, going deeply into the deep and profound foundational moral theories to analyze the backgrounds, the challenges as well as the recession of the ethics, attempting to clarify the structures and fabrics of modern character education of America after rethinking.The fourth chapter mainly talks about the fundamental categories of the American character education, such as wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, transcendence. Moreover, it deals with the basic meanings and significance of more than twenty sub-entries of the fundamental categories of the American character education.The fifth chapter is aimed to provide the Chinese character education with the insight and thought-provoking ideas from the lessons of American character education, so that it can play a role in promoting the moral education movement in our country.