The Necessity in Custom-Made Moral Education

How the socialization of morality starts at home, and is, reinforced in the schools, the classrooms, but the individual personality traits of children also plays a vital part too…from the honorary professor of Chingwha University, Lee, the expert in education, off of the Front Page Sections, translated…

In the academic subjects, we are told of the importance of making the lessons more customized for the students, same of moral education.  First, I’m sure that we all agree, that there are, many faces of moral education, the various cultures all mentioned the many kinds of virtues.

Think, if we ask our students, “Should you abuse animals?”, any child would tell you that you shouldn’t; then, if you ask the children, should you treat your parents kindly?  All children would tell you yes.  But I believe, that moral education is not this simplistic.

Most children, if they grow up in normal conditions, they would have good characters, we can’t guarantee that they will be saints, but, we don’t need to worry that they will do something awful, wrong, or bad.  I believe, that moral education is vital to the high-risk children, what we need to do, is to make sure that the students don’t, stray from the right paths of life.  If in the middle school years, the students started getting involved in the bad crowds, after middle school, they stopped going to school, gotten into the gangs, in the end, they head down that path to crime.  These are the children we should pay the most attention, to.  To these students, giving them the ultimatums would never work, we need to understand WHY these kids have the inclinations to turn bad.

Kohlberg’s theory of Moral Education, from online

If a child has no worries of the most basic needs, has the love s/he needs from the parents, and is doing okay in school, there’s no need to worry.  But if a student grows in a family that’s lost its, functions, and can’t catch up in school, with almost NO allowances, and there are the bad gangs locally, then, these bad gangs would do all that they can, to attract the child to them, giving the child money, and as this student couldn’t withstand the temptations, slowly, the student will become, an individual who walks on the boundaries.

And what this group of children need the most is care and concerns, if we show that to them, other than giving them the monetary assistance, most importantly, to get them to improve in their schoolwork, to help them understand what the instructor is talking about in class, to make sure they catch up to the rest, then, they would feel that they have a hopeful future that will be available to them, and not hang around with the bad crowds.

We need to understand that there’s that connection between the moral characters and the academic performances, those students who are performing well enough in school, most wouldn’t go down the wrong paths of life, so, in the moral education of children, we must, also pay close attention to if the students are, catching up in the academia.  For those children from the families without the normal functioning, and not doing well academically, if you try to reason with them, it would be completely, ineffective.

For children from ordinary upbringing, the most important character education is to help them learn to have compassion for others, meaning, that they need to learn to empathize.  The teachers should realize, how easily the students receive violent messages from the environment, how the games they play had violence in them, how violence is in the movies as well.  This is a huge challenge for the school instructors, because our society placed less and less emphasis on love, and focused more on competition to survive.

starting small with something like this…photo from online

As educators, we should work harder, to let the students understand how violence harm people, we should not reinforce our students’ interests in war, but to teach them to despise it.  We should NOT worship the heroes in the wars, but instead, let the students know, how these leaders of military had caused, too many, orphans and widows.

In summation, moral education should be personalized, and NOT a one-size-fit-all.

NOTHING IS, one-size fit all, because there are the considerations of the children’s differences of upbringing, their family backgrounds being, diverse, and the personality traits of every child is also, different, and considering ALL of this, you CAN see, how difficult it is, to teach a class of say, thirty students, and, there’s NO easy FIX of this problem of the world heading down the immoral path of things, with all those bad things broadcasted on the news media, the violence in the games that children are playing, and moral education, just like everything, starts in the, nuclear, families, if you give your kids a good background to grow up in, socialized them to be, caring, loving toward others, the general values of what good people should be when they’re younger, chances are, they won’t go bad, even IF the outside world is, trying to, turn them toward the WRONG directions of life.