The correlation of character education with critical thinking skills as an important attribute to success in the 21^st century

This study aims to determine the relationship between character education and students critical thinking skills as the basis for success in the 21st century. The test instrument used is a critical thinking skill test using 4 items from the national exam, a character education questionnaire and Focus Group Discussion (FGD). The sample used is 99 students from all students in SMA Batik 2 Surakarta. The data obtained were analyzed using Bivariate Person to determine the content validity and Cronbach alpha to find out the reliability of the instrument. The test used to determine the relationship of character education with critical thinking skills using the Mann-Whitney U test. The analyzed result obtained content validity (Rbis> 0,05) and instrument reliability is good enough with Alpha value 0,794 (> 0,70). Test results show that there is a relationship between character education and critical thinking skills with Asymp Sig. 2-tailed by 0.011 (<0.05).