Importance of character education

Character education is the teaching of people in a manner that will help them develop as moral, civic, good, mannered, behaved, non-bullying, healthy, critical, successful, traditional, compliant or socially acceptable beings. It is not a new phenomenon, rather it is as old as religion since its main them is produced from religion.    
In addition, character education is everything that influences the character of the children. Dr. Thomas Lickona, a renowned educationalist, defined character education as the deliberate effort to help people understand, care about, and act upon core ethical values. In his landmark book, Educating for Character, he asserts that "when we think about the kind of character we want for our children, it's clear that we want them to be able to judge what is right, care deeply about what is right, and then do what they believe to be right-even in the face of pressure from without and temptation from within."
 The goal of character education is to develop, reinforce and model positive character traits for children and the best forms of character education also involve students in honest, thoughtful discussion and reflection regarding the moral implications of what they see around them, what they are told, and what they personally do and experience.
 Character education helps schools create a safe, caring and inclusive learning environment for every student and supports academic development. It fosters qualities that will help students be successful as citizens, in the workplace, and with the academic curriculum. It lays the foundation to help students be successful in all of the goals we have for our public schools. In addition, character education teaches students to understand, commit to, and act on shared ethical values-in other words, "know the good, desire the good, and do the good." Typical core values include respect, responsibility, trustworthiness, fairness, caring, and community participation.
Apart from these, character education can greatly help students with their academic subjects as well. Diligence and a sense of responsibility are some of the main core values taught in character education. With these students will learn how to focus on their studies, and more importantly they will have the drive that will make them want to do well in their academic subjects.
Building character also helps them to interact properly with their teachers and fellow students, turning their classroom into a better learning environment. Research done on the subject found out that schools that employ character education have fewer incidences of disciplinary referrals, suspensions, and truancy.
It is true that the main reason that you enroll your children to a school is to learn about academic subjects like math, history, science, and so on, but these are not the only things that children need to learn if they ever want to become successful in the real world. Character education gives them the necessary tools that they will be using more often than those that they learn from the other subjects.
So it is crystal clear that the phrase 'character education' has two meanings. In the broad sense, it refers to almost anything that schools might try to provide outside of academics, especially when the purpose is to help children grow into good people. In another sense, it denotes a particular style of moral training, one that reflects particular values. Besides, it tells us that we need to engage our kids in activities that make them think critically about moral and ethical questions, inspire them to become committed to moral and ethical actions, and give them ample opportunities to practice moral and ethical behavior.
It goes without saying that, when money is lost- nothing is lost, when health is lost-something is lost but when character is lost everything is lost. In reality, in the recent periods this proverb is less important where most of the people are running after money. The family and educational institutions are just emphasizing on their children towards materialistic gaining where morality is absolutely absent.  As a result people with good character are hardly found. People away from morality are adopting any means with a view to fulfill their interests/needs/desires no matter whether legally or illegally deviating from social norms and customs that accelerating social devaluation rapidly. For this reason, Theodore Roosevelt noted a historical statement that, 'to educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society'.
It should be mentioned here that exclusive of people with good character it is quite impossible to build a peaceful and ideal country. So, in order to avert social devaluation and to uphold the development of the nation as well as for peaceful coexistence character education should get first and foremost priority as it is the foundation of all lessons.  
The writer is a senior lecturer in Social Work, Centre for General Education, Northern University Bangladesh, email: [email protected]