Service-Learning Potential in Citizenship and Character Education
Concepción Naval, Elena Arbués, Juan Luis Fuentes
Promoting citizenship in present-day societies means reinforcing those aspects of people’s characters which will allow them to behave responsibly and actively and be involved in achieving the common good. We believe that the main difficulty to be found in civic education nowadays is a lack of ethics. Learning to be a good citizen is a lifelong task and practical wisdom which not only demands intelligence to recognize which traits improve our life in society but also the will to practice them. Character education is a way of understanding and identifying moral education. It aims to reaffirm the inescapable ethical dimension of education. This proposal has its origins in classical Greece, but it was not until the 1980s and 90s that the ethics of virtue received a great boost and became the basis for a good deal of contemporary character education. It is not by chance that character education has grown so much in importance over the last few years, especially in the English-speaking world, in parallel with an increase in Service-Learning methodology.
Keywords
Citizenship Education, Character Education, Service-learning.
