As many social problems have increased, the society becomes aware of the importance of character education. Especially, in the light of developmental characteristics, it is very important for young children to have character education. But the parents...
As many social problems have increased, the society becomes aware of the importance of character education. Especially, in the light of developmental characteristics, it is very important for young children to have character education. But the parents, as a first teacher, play the most important role to form the personality of young children. Moreover, our childhood education facilities can exist only to follow parents demands, the actual demander. So, the purpose of this study is to search parent's general interest and demand about character education of young children. And then the study did a questionnaire to survey the specific demands of parents who have child age's one to five. This study analyzed the questionnaire and compared character virtue factors for character education to 2007 kindergarten curriculum.
The results of this study are following: The Korean parents think 'health', 'security', 'character education' are the most important factors in the respect of “parenting”, but in "education", character education has the first priority. But only 25% parents invest a lot of time and efforts to character education of their young children. In the concrete, they can't practice the character education effectively than they thought. But while, the parents are using various kinds of methods and materials for character development. The study shows that the parents regard, in this order, 'honesty', 'politeness', 'courage', 'curiosity', 'nature of life', 'self control', 'cleanliness', 'arrangement', 'respect others', 'appreciation', 'responsibility', 'consideration', 'love', 'creativity', 'listening' as the most important virtues which are the necessary character virtues 39 for young children.
There are some recognition differences of characteristic virtue between parents and kindergarten curriculum. In kindergarten curriculum, there is a preponderance of certain one or two virtue categories except 'healthy life' category. Meanwhile, parents of young children are aware of the importance of various kinds of virtue categories. And their importance of each category is not biased like kindergarten curriculum does.