When students go to school, they learn about academic subjects and take the majors that will help them land the career of their dreams, but these are not the only things that they need to learn if they want to be successful in the real world. It is character education that will give them the necessary tools that they will be using more often than those they learned from academic classes.
American schools used to pay attention to character education and civic virtue, and according to The Atlantic, it is not being old-fashioned; but it is about bringing religion in to the classroom. And this is actually true, because students who are found to do well in college are not the ones who are gifted when it comes to academics, but are the ones who exhibited characteristics including resilience, optimism and social adaptability.
These are the discoveries of Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, the two founders of KIPP high-performing charter schools. They discovered that being able to adjust and overcome obstacles are the determining factors of a person's long term success, according to Gazettes.
This is supported by a study conducted at Stanford in 1972, which involved 92 children at the Bing Nursery School. The children were offered marshmallow and were told that if they do not eat them until the examiner returned, they will be getting more. Those students who managed to restrain themselves were found to score 210 points on the SAT, decades later. They were also seen to have better self-control, attained higher levels of education and had lower body mass indexes.
The researchers found that the reason for the self-restraint was the students tried to focus on other things entirely, just anything to distract themselves. Character education may not be perfect nor scientific, but the positive impact it makes on the lives of students makes the effort worth it.
