The purpose of our efforts to restore the spirit of hyo, or filial piety, through home education, school education, societal education, and national education, are to correct the ethical evils of our society and construct a healthy society for a brighter future of the nation. In order to lead the youth who are wandering in the flood of foreign ideas and thoughts into a right direction and to redefine our real self through establishing a new value system and rebuilding our ethical mind, we need to think about the right way to teach hyo to our innocent and pure generation of young children in their preschool years.
Filial piety, like morality, is a human trait to conduct filially pious behaviors. The components of filial piety are related to four human traits, such as cognition, emotion, will, and spirituality. For example, "reading" is related to cognition, "fidelity" to emotion, "behavior" to will, and "belief" to the spiritual and religious side.
In the context of hyo education, it is the component of fidelity, which is related to the emotional domain, that needs to be defined. Fidelity bears a specially important meaning as it is the starting base for the implementation of agent-centered hyo education. In other words, the agent-centered hyo education requires fidelity towards the object of belief system as a prerequisite for its actual implementation.
A generalizable framework that can function as a tool for the analysis of hyo ethics should include the hyo ethics content found in both the Western philosophy, including Judaism and Christianity, and the Oriental philosophy, including Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. Based on this consideration a universal hyo ethical system for the analysis of hyo ethics can be developed with four components, such as obedience, affection, ascendants, and representation.
It is necessary to systematically expand the content of hyo education to make it a more universal virtue. In order to do so, the content of hyo education should not be limited to a single virtue like obedience, but should be comprehensive enough to include affection, ascendants, and representation as well. However, hyo education needs to be viewed from more complex perspectives as it is based on the multi-faceted relationships between parents and children.
Experience of various daily activities and tasks in the nursery schools will help the children grow up as whole persons, respect and honor parents and older people, grow up to be democratic citizens capable of playing their roles in the society. In sum, hyo education will help the basis for the children to grow up to be physically and emotionally sound persons and to be able to live harmoniously with other people in the society. Therefore, it is necessary to start hyo education early. Considering the developmental stages of young children, combined efforts of home and nursery schools to teach them will produce exemplar children who are pious to their parents.