The communitarianism is one of the outstanding social thoughts and movements in modern times. It critisizes the assumption of liberal-individualistic philosophy and emphasizes community, social cohesiveness and moral reponsibility in modern society to...
The communitarianism is one of the outstanding social thoughts and movements in modern times. It critisizes the assumption of liberal-individualistic philosophy and emphasizes community, social cohesiveness and moral reponsibility in modern society to restore the meaningful human life and social happiness. In addition, the adocates of the communitarianism think that moral education is the most important way to solve the problems of the modern liberal society and to achieve the communtarian's ends. But the interesting thing is that they do not have any specific ideas about moral education that is corresponding to communitarianism. That was why I started this study on communitarianism and moral education.
So I, as the purpose of the study, wanted to inquire the theory of moral education based on communitarianism. To accomplish this purpose, I analyzed the characteristics of the communitarian theories(especially, the theories of M. J. Sandel, A. MacIntyre, C. Taylor, M. Walzer, A. Etzioni, and so on.) for the first thing and clarified that communitarianism focused on the development of the community, desirable values, good personality, moral virtues, and social responsibility.
Second, I inquired the directions, tasks, and contents of moral education based on communitarianism. On this process of the inquiring, I suggested that the communitarian approch to moral education have to pursue the essential things as follows. 1) to bring up children's good character, 2) to develop children's moral virtues in order to form the character, 3) to correctly choose and organize the important virtues as the teaching-learning contents that are corresponding to the three fields of individual activities, social cooperations, and national-global citizen's life
Third, I tried to investigate the principles of educational approaches and the practical methodologies for communitarin moral education. As the results, I suggested three principles: 1) the integrated approaches to the formation of moral virtues and characters, which are based on Aristotle's point of view, 2) the comprehensive-holistic approches to moral education that include all possible educational activities in classrooms, schools, and communities, 3) the formation of good environment that is contribute to the children's immediate moral experiences and values learnings in community life. Moreover, on the basis of these principles, I discussed several methodologies that are related to the classroom management, the teaching methodes of the subjects, the student guidances, the school administration, and the cooperation among schools, families, and communities.