The character education approach, based on virtue ethics and communitarianism as its theoretical backgrounds, has attracted many educators in the West since the mid 1980\'s as an alternative moral education model to the highly criticized rationalist approach, such as moral reasoning or value-clarification models. While it also appeals to our culture, which is traditionally more community-oriented, it should be noted that the character education approach is basically a western society\'s response to their own problems, i. e., atomized individualism and an extreme form of fragmented culture. Thus, in applying the same approach to our own context, we need to be more careful in diagnosing our own problems and taking into account our own cultural contexts in which the rationalist moral approach has never been properly and fully implemented. As a way of diagnosing our problems, this paper aims to examine the main features of our traditional norms-oriented moral education to find out its educational possibilities and limitations for moral education today. Wilson\'s liberalist view of indoctrination is first introduced as a prism, through which the Confucian traditional norms-oriented moral education is reviewed and reassessed in the following section. But the main purpose of this investigation is to find out the ways in which the traditional norms-oriented moral education can be made compatible with a more liberalist moral approach; the latter seems to be required for our society to make our future citizens civically more responsible and individually more critical. In conclusion, the character education approach based on traditional moral norms needs to be carried out at the school in such a way as to introduce to our young students big ethical questions, i. e., how to live or what sort of a person to be, as to leave room for civil education which pursues norms potentially in conflict with traditional norms, and as to be complemented by education for personal happiness as another form of value education.