The Lesson of Confucius for Today’s America: Education in ethics is the road to building a just and peaceful society

According to Confucius, what confers humans their special status and dignity among beings in nature is the moral virtues they can achieve. Humans should build good character, for which they need education to acquire values. He found no correlation between the ability to learn and the socio-economic status. He believed that people with the ability to learn deserved an opportunity to learn. Confucius would not approve of the prevalent American conception of education as transmitting technical knowledge and skills to students without an education in the values to promote by their use. Purely technical education would be an oxymoron for Confucius. For Confucius, individuals need a moral society to be moral, and a society needs moral leadership to be moral. He considered the education that leaders of the state received to be crucial because their character would have a decisive influence on the character of society, e.g., today’s America.