Analysis Of Character Education Is The Wrong Way To Teach By Bobby Ann Starnes

Bobby Ann Starnes, a former teacher and an educators’ supporter, wrote a viewport titled “Character Education Is the Wrong Way to Teach” about how character education is impractical from her own experience in teaching and how mixed up she was during that stage. This writing is significant since it talks about character education which is getting widely spread without a full understanding of its consequences. At first, Starnes portrayed how she gained her virtues and values from her mother’s tales that spoke about “blood and guts, death and despair”; as a child, she used to listen to those tales as her father drove the family home “alongside Caney Creek in Knott County” from Ohio, where they actually lived. After growing up, she taught children in a school featuring “character

Starnes was bewildered and she felt that the whole thing is not making sense as she questioned the act of recognizing every student for the tiniest actions they perform. Also, she disagreed with the principle of teaching virtues as standard definitions rather than by examples; she claims that values such as “responsibility, fairness, pride, citizenship” must be taught by life situations as they do not have a fixed definition among all people. She further asserts that a lot of those character programs care more for money and less for genuine education as they are about selling “stuff” including books, booklets, puppets, videos, and banners along with offering lectures and seminars that are expensive. Starnes concluded her writing by stressing out that she learned her qualities from her mother’s actions which are far better than just memorizing words and piling up recognitions for very basic acts such as holding a door for