Abstract:

School has never been only about teaching its students new information. The influence on their character and behavior is undeniable.

There are many ways how to include character education into everyday educational system (and with that the curriculum). One of them - and many researchers believe it to be a good way - is to teach the values through the literature classes.

Connecting values and literature bears some positives and researchers agree on it being a very easy and natural process.Books have the power to change people's thinking and with that their character. They can help them learn the difference between good and evil and can help them understand their own self and its place in today's world.

The combination of character education and literature might be the answer to how to incorporate values into the everyday life of today’s young people.

In this article, we focus on the combination of literature and character education. Firstly, we explain some of the positives of combining these two. Then, we also suggest a way such classes can be done in order to help other teachers to adopt this approach. We use our experience in the field of character education from the quasiexperiment we are currently conducting.

Keywords:

Character education, values, students, secondary school, reading, books, literature classes, quasiexperiment.