In loco parentis? Public‐school authority,cricket and manly character, 1855–62

This article considers the responsibility for schoolboys’ behaviour and character when in liminal spaces between home and school, in an historical account of the annual cricket matches in London between Eton, Harrow and Winchester in the late 1850s. The episode is situated in the context of the Clarendon Commission’s discussions on school sports, parental and school authority, and ‘muscular Christianity’ in the early 1860s. Set in the conceptual framework of late‐nineteenth‐century manliness and masculinity, the article suggests an enduring attachment to pursuits of the mind rather than the body amongst masters, and points to a greater role for parents (particularly fathers) and boys themselves in the rise of athleticism in schools than is usually granted by historians. The article outlines the limits of school authority in loco parentis, and calls for a reinterpretation of the history of muscular Christianity and its relationship with the public schools.     

Chinese character decoding: a semantic bias?

The effects of semantic and phonetic radicals on Chinese character decoding were examined. Our results suggest that semantic and phonetic radicals are each available for access when a corresponding task emphasizes one or the other kind of radical. But in a more neutral lexical recognition task, the semantic radical is more informative. Semantic radicals that correctly pertain to character meaning facilitated reaction time in semantic categorization tasks (Experiment #1), while radicals that had no immediately interpretable relation to character meaning had a strong inhibitory effect. Likewise, phonetic radicals that accurately indicated a character’s pronunciation facilitated a homonym recognition task (Experiment #2), whereas phonetic radicals that differed significantly in pronunciation from their character inhibited homonym recognition. In a lexical decision task (Experiment #3) where each character had either a blurred semantic radical or a blurred phonetic radical, the characters with a blurred semantic radical elicited a significantly higher error rate and a trend for longer response times. These results are interpreted to indicate that while educated native Chinese speakers have full use of both semantic and phonetic paths to character decoding, there is a slight predisposition to semantic decoding strategies over phonetic ones indicating that the semantic path is the default means of character recognition.     

On Kristjánsson on Aristotelian character education

I pursue three of the many lines of thought that were raised in my mind by Kristjánsson’s engaging book. In the first section, I try to get clearer on what exactly Aristotelian character education (ACE) is, and suggest areas where I hope the view is developed in more detail. In the second and longest section, I draw some lessons from social psychology about the pervasive role of what I call ‘Surprising Dispositions,’ and invite Kristjánsson to take up the difficult challenge of clarifying how ACE would help to address their influence on our thought and action. Finally, in section three I consider whether there is any robust empirical support for ACE, and if not, where that leaves us.     

Christianity and the character education movement 1897–1914

This article discusses the extent to which middle-class Christians, many of whom were progressive liberals, involved themselves in the Moral Instruction League (MIL) to intervene in ‘improving’ the moral character of the English working class. It considers how they reconciled their motivations and underlying theology with secular goals that sought to free morality from its theological basis in late nineteenth-century England. It argues that Christian members and supporters of the MIL, in a series of steps, began to distance themselves from the theological basis of their faith. This was in an age when people were overwhelmingly persuaded that religion and morality were inseparable and that moral education must be religious education in schools. It was the Christian faith, not doubt, that was widely assumed in Victorian England at all social levels. What was the philosophy that the organisation promoted in its approach to character-building?.     

Automatic character detection and segmentation in natural scene images

INTRODUCTION Text detection and segmentation from a naturalscene is very useful in many applications. With theincreasing availability of high performance, lowpriced, portable digital imaging devices, the applica-tion of scene text recognition is rapidly expanding. Byusing cameras attached to cellular phones, PDAs, orstandalone digital cameras, we can easily capture thetext occurrences around us, such as street signs, ad-vertisements, traffic warnings or restaurant menus.Automatic recogn…     

Jane Eyre&Charlotte Bronte--An analysis about the relationship between character and writer

Through the comparison of Charlotte Bronte’s experience and Jane Eyre’s,it proves that any character and plot have the trace of the author. Therefore,the novel can be analyzed and understood better by another way,to analyze the writer’s life.     

British values and virtues: schooling in Christianity and character?

This article examines the antecedents of the ‘British Values’ (democracy, rule of law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and the rights of all men and women to live free from persecution) which it is incumbent upon British schools to teach. But it also seeks to move the debate forward by pointing to the ‘British Virtues’ without which it is impossible to live by ‘British Values’. The argument advanced here is that the inculcation of virtues (moral habits and dispositions underpinning good character) as well as values (beliefs and ideals) is foundational in schooling for life in a liberal democracy. On the view that schools are both ‘by’ and ‘for’ society (being the products of the society they seek to serve) the article problematises attempts to conceive of schooling in general, and character education in particular, in exclusively post-Christian terms. Although increasingly secular, as British culture is not quite the palimpsest that easily permits a millennium of Christian social and legal ‘writing’ to be ‘over-written’, some of its central concepts are drawn upon in the recommendations made here for the curriculum and governance of schools.     

What can we learn from Plato about intellectual character education?

Abstract

In the Republic, Plato developed an educational program through which he trained young Athenians in desiring truth, without offering them any knowledge-education. This is not because he refused to pass on knowledge but because he considered knowledge of the Good as an ongoing research program. I show this by tracing the steps of the education of the Philosopher-Kings in Plato’s ideal state, to establish that the decades-long educational regime aims at training them in three types of virtue: (i) Moral Virtue; (ii) the Cognitive Virtue of Abstraction; (iii) the Cognitive Virtue of Debate.

Plato’s theory of education has much to teach us about intellectual character education today. The Platonic educational program does not advocate the direct transmission of knowledge from teacher to learner but rather focuses on building the learners’ epistemic dispositions. Building upon the Socratic Method, Plato’s educational program does not ‘spoon-feed’ knowledge to the learners but rather fosters the growth of intellectual virtues through problem-solving.

I explain ways in which fostering intellectual virtues through problem-solving could be applied in classrooms today. I conclude that Plato’s rigorous educational program is of definite merit for contemporary virtue education, especially since Aristotle offers us surprisingly little on how to educate for intellectual virtues.     

The effect of computer‐based multimedia instruction with Chinese character recognition

The purpose of this study was to examine second language learners’ learning achievement and attitudes toward two different types of dual coding designs (text group: image plus on‐screen text versus narration group: image plus narration) in Chinese character acquisition. A total of 66 college students who did not have prior knowledge of the Chinese language were randomly assigned to either the text group or narration group. The findings showed that there was no interaction between the treatments (text group versus narration group) and test occasions (immediate and delayed post‐tests), and there was no significant difference between two groups in the immediate post‐test and in the delayed post‐test. However, there was a significant difference between the test occasions. Furthermore, the results revealed that there was no significant difference between two groups in both the tutorial design factor and the cognitive load factor. Overall, participants in both groups achieved high scores in the post‐tests and showed positive attitudes toward the dual coding tutorials.     

Aristotelian character education: A précis of the 2015 book

This article provides a précis of Kristján Kristjánsson’s 2015 book, Aristotelian Character Education, under discussion in the present issue.     

Cultural conceptions of morality: Examining laypeople’s associations of moral character

Whether moral conceptions are universal or culture-specific is controversial in moral psychology. One option is to refrain from imposing theoretical constraints and to ask laypeople from different cultures how they conceptualize morality. Our article adopts this approach by examining laypeople’s associations of moral character in individualistic- and collectivistic-oriented cultures. Using correspondence analysis we found that the concept of moral character yielded widely shared associations with justice and welfare concerns. Yet, there were also clear cultural differences with individualistic-oriented samples associating more frequently rights-based features and collectivistic-oriented samples more frequently associating duty-based attributes. When matching freelisted trait categories with Schwartz’s value types, moral value hierarchies were similar across cultures and correlated significantly with explicit moral value ratings. We conclude that imposing constraints through an expert-designed category system can narrow the scope of inquiry to common moral aspects related to problem-solving, promotion of prosocial actions and control of antisocial behaviour.     

Ambition and Anxiety——Simple analysis of Chaucer's character the wife of Bath

<正>Among the stories in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales,The Wife of Bath is the most impressive one.In this short story,Chaucer shows us a vivid image—the wife of Bath.Belonging to both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,this short story has some special features.From Dark Agesto there latively free Renaissance,people’s thinking was liberated a lot and more and more people     

The problems of authority and the want of apprenticeship in soldiers’ character development

Militaries that take a character development approach in their moral education programs but rely heavily on authority figures as subject matter experts to teach soldiers face two serious problems. First, soldiers improperly defer to their instructors and, as a result, do not understand the moral virtues taught in class. Second, instructors are in a poor position to motivate soldiers to develop character through the goal-oriented, measurable and supervised practice of specific virtues. These problems threaten character-based moral education programs because people must understand and practice the moral virtues to form good character. Building on the work of several prominent moral philosophers, I propose that militaries can mitigate the problems of authority in moral education and enhance soldiers’ character development by incorporating an apprenticeship model which leverages the mutual trust that soldiers share with leaders and peers.     

The role of compound awareness in Chinese children’s vocabulary acquisition and character reading

This study examined compound awareness in relation to Chinese children's vocabulary acquisition and character reading. Two aspects of compound awareness were investigated: the ability to identify the head of a compound noun and the ability to construct a new compound word from familiar morphemes. The compound awareness tasks, along with rapid automatized naming (RAN) and phonological awareness tasks, were administered to 29 first graders and 30 second graders in Mainland China. Results show that (1) compound awareness develops relatively early among Chinese children and improves with age, (2) compound awareness explains unique variance in vocabulary and character reading, after controlling for age, RAN, and phonological awareness, and (3) the contribution made by compound awareness to vocabulary is much larger than the contribution made by phonological awareness. These results demonstrate that compound awareness plays a central role in Chinese children's literacy development, particularly in vocabulary acquisition.

Denoising of Chinese calligraphy tablet images based on run-length statistics and structure characteristic of character strokes

INTRODUCTION As an art form, Chinese calligraphy has a long history of several thousand years. Many ancient cal- ligraphy work created by former famous calligraphers were carved on stone tablets, and calligraphy docu- ments were produced by rubbings. The most imme- morial tablets we could look with reverence are “Shigu” stone tablets (left of Fig.1) which appeared about 2500 years ago in Warring States Period. The rubbed calligraphy document images however may look noisy, due to natur…     

The multi-paradigmatic character of contemporary educational action research: a promising perspective or an underlying threat?

From the very first moment action research started to be used in the social research field until now, it has presented significant variations. Action research looks like a mosaic of theoretical and methodological approaches, named differently from time to time and/or from place to place: for example, practitioner inquiry, practitioner research, teacher research, participatory action research, and so forth. The basic aims of this article are to find the reasons for this and to discuss the implications of the phenomenon. Starting with the first issue, we could ask ourselves: why do we today find so many and considerable variations in action research approaches in the literature? The evident reason is because action research draws upon many theoretical paradigms that – in some circumstances – are not only different, but also contradict each other. Hammersley states characteristically that action research draws upon positivism, pragmatism, hermeneutics, critical theory and postmodernism! After such claims, we can easily wonder: how can such a multi-paradigmatic approach compose cohesive methodological proposals? We can also pose another crucial question: although we can easily understand that this multi-paradigmatic nature is a real advantage which gives action research a pluralistic essence, is it really ‘a strong indicator of the power of action research to reinvent itself according to local needs’ as Somekh stated, or might it at the same time conceal serious risks?