Mar 1 2016
Seven years ago, when Christine Ma- Lau Lo-ming told parents that her newly established learning center would focus on teaching character education, most would give her a blank look.
"What do you mean by teaching character? Like cartoon characters?" she said, recalling the questions that parents often raised. "They had no idea. Till this day now, when we talk about character [education], more people know what it is even they don't call it that."
Coined social emotional skills, positive education or positive parenting by academics, character education is only one of the umbrella terminologies used to describe helping children develop a set of good character traits that hold the key to happiness and success in their later years.
The doctrine advocates the explicit teaching of character building in classroom - just like how English or mathematics is taught as an academic subject, believing that will give people the vocabulary to define what different character traits mean.
"If you ask people how to define integrity, I would say that most people don't really