ACT写作题目：
Should students take character education classes at school?
ACT写作题目解析：
2014年10月25日的ACT作文考试沿袭了一贯的出题思路，考察同学们对教育领域中一些有争议话题的看法。本次的作文题目是“是否要在学校中进行性格教育”。可以看出，本题的中心思想依然可归类于之前ACT作文曾经涉及过的“类型教育”、“家庭与学校责任”等关键概念的范畴，
ACT写作范文：
Breeding the young and conveying our spirits to them is always shouldered by two communities, school and household. If the two could address their respective mission effectively, we may hopefully see our next generation developed in a balanced manner, with fair values and agreeable characters. However, if we go a little bit further into this issue, we may realize that its complexity goes beyond our initial expectation and thus requires careful analysis. The first question cast onto our face may be this: what is the best strategy of teaching characters? To be specific, should characters such as honesty and responsibility be taught at school? Or at home? Or are there any other circumstances where better teaching could take place? My opinion in response to this question, in short, is that we should acquire most of our personal characters at home, but rectify some of them after we enter school due to the limitedness of household education.
To begin with, we have to realize a fact that most of our characters have settled in dust before we reach the school age, and only a few of them can still be altered when we grow up into young adults. This realization requires us to firstly clarify what characters mean to everybody. According to my understanding, characters decide the way in which we address the world. Either honesty or responsibility, every personal character contributes to picturing our image as a human being. How we react to the natural world, how we interact with other people around us, or what we find ourselves to be when deprived of the two former surroundings mentioned, all reveal our true character. Based on this concept, we may infer that character is the fundamental feature of anybody and thus begin to shape itself the minute we were born. (In a recent study it is proved that people even start to form their characters before their birth—babies whose mothers are ardent chocolate-lovers tend to be happier than those not!) As a result, it is understandable that after we come to this world, anything that comes into our world may lend a hand in sculpting us into the final selves. In spite of its importance, this artistic procedure lasts only for a very limited period of time, which is, from a baby to a child.
We are so vulnerable within this very spell, physically and mentally, that we are left completely under the influence of our parents. The mechanism goes like this: on one hand, a parent may set a perfect example for his/her kid of how to behave in the future world; on the other hand, any inappropriateness even abusiveness within the parental care may very likely leave a disastrous stroke in the kid’s character. For the former, there is a perfect case of a teenage girl who works for the Invisible Children(an organization struggling for the minority rights). Since very young age, she loved to imitate the way her mother posed in a photograph working with Martin Luther King, Jr., and later the girl became a freedom fighter herself and shouldered her responsibility, just like the mother. While many of us may recall similar stories of a young man who suffered from brutal childhood abuse but committed the same crime to his own wife after he grew up, which serves as a typical example of the latter scenario. Either one exemplifies that it is parental influence within household that plays a crucial role in molding a child’s character.
However, there are some reasons backing why we still have to alter some of our established characters at school. Firstly, characters are closely related with our future conduction, and thus are not something that could be mistakenly addressed. Therefore, compared to household education which features personal influence and is likely to be subject to irrationality, rules and provisions at school may make a better medium of regulating which sides to keep aligned with. Moreover, characters shine more lights after we become a social member, in other words, after we begin to take responsibilities as a citizen. They will affect a larger community then therefore the teaching of them should account for more people’s interests. Considering that a single household may favor its own interest and implant some fallacious values such as selfishness into children’s mind, it is a better idea to pull the deviated children back at school. The existence of school character education grant those who may rise from an evil nurturing bed a chance to grow up into a decent human being. It would show its effect when household education fails to do its job and thus make a good complement.
In short, based on our interpretation of characters, it might be a good idea to leave the characters education to households while allowing some refinements at school. In fact, the way of teaching characters may be valued in more respects, which calls for further reflection and discussion.