Character education is the development of knowledge, skills, and abilities that help scholars make informed and responsible choices. Character is derived from a Greek word that means “to mark," as on an engraving. Plato and Aristotle called it Arte (pursuit of excellence) and explained the Golden Mean as an ideal way to live. 2500 years later those foundations of a complete education never went away.
Our curriculum team has embedded virtue prompts throughout each of our subjects. We identified 18 Values and Virtues and programmed two or more of these virtues into each month of instruction. We help our teachers to find ways to explore a particular character trait in their English, art, history, and science courses. This integrative approach allows our teachers to help our students with what it means to be a complete member of society.
Catholic, Jewish, Lutheran, and Christian schools have integrated character development into their private schools for a couple of hundred years. These concepts we are teaching are not new. Typically, these schools use the Bible as their go-to for character education, in our model we integrate classical novels, and stories of the Great Men and Women from history to teach these important life lessons.
Our team embarked on reviewing 25-plus years of Character education research, experimented with various best practices in our classrooms, and ultimately built a 10-point plan to successfully implement and monitor a character ed program in our schools. This work is now available to our homeschool families.
The Ethos Logos Character lessons provide instructional materials, methods, and strategies that have been crafted into interdisciplinary curricular themes.
