Introduction
Character education is a concept quickly gaining ground in the field of education. It assumes a premise that most parents accept and purport; children should leave school not simply as educated in the sciences and arts, but also as morally upright citizens, virtuous in their actions and behaviour. Thus, a new pedagogy is being developed that formally teaches character in the classroom, with pioneers in the UK including the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtue and the Narnian Virtues project, aiming at developing and producing research that can contribute to this end.
Theoretical underpinnings
Character education stems from an Aristotelian meta-ethical position: Virtue Ethics. In this realist ethical framework, moral action stems from fixed internal traits known as ‘virtues’ that are consciously developed within the moral agent over their life. The canonical Nicomachean Ethics is the culmination of Aristotle’s philosophy in this regard. He begins with an in-depth teleological discussion, in which he denotes the concept of eudaimonia. In popular culture, eudaimonia has been translated as “happiness” (and indeed in some translations of the Nichomachean Ethics), but Aristotle intended much more than this. Eudaimonia is described by Aristotle as “living well” and “human flourishing” (Nicomachean Ethics 1095a20) – i.e. the idea of reaching one’s full potential as a rational human being through actualising all of one’s best traits. And in order to reach one’s full potential, one must be virtuous. In other words, having virtues and behaving virtuously is essential to and constituent of living well and flourishing.
What is virtue?
The Greek word used in Aristotle’s words is arete – roughly translated to virtue. Virtue is identified as a stable character trait or disposition found within a person. Arete also denotes a subtler point; arete is that trait that contributes to that individual being a good agent of its kind (Carr, 1991, pg 45). For example, sharpness for a knife is an arete – it contributes to its good function and success. Similarly, Aristotle looks towards those traits that contribute to an individual being an excellent human as stable dispositions of a flourishing individual (Ibid). From those virtuous traits comes not only virtuous action, but rather, virtuous action that is supported by virtuous emotion and intention, because there is intrinsic motivation from stable dispositions rather than external dictation regarding the correctness of an action (deontological ethics) or a profitable benefit from doing a particular action (utilitarian ethics), both of which lack the fervour of the internal motivation to flourish. The Jubilee Centre for Character categories these internal traits into 4 (Jubilee Centre, 2017, pg 5):
Moral virtues – including virtues such as integrity, honest, respect and compassion
Civic virtues – including virtues such as awareness, civility, neighbourliness
Intellectual virtues – including virtues such as open-mindedness, judgement, critical thinking, reflectiveness
Performance virtues – including virtues such as grit, resilience and motivation.
Why do we need character education in schools?
This question is leads back only the question: “why do we want our children to be moral?” Although debated hotly in moral philosophical circles, virtuous action is accepted in society as an ideal and an aspiration for all types of people. There are numerous facts and figures that can be cited to support the claim that character education in schools is needed based on the moral decline seen in society, or that youth depression and social disaffectation is on the rise, or even to link this discussion to crime rates (Kristjansson, 2015, pg 4), but those seem to be supplementary to the fact that teaching character to a young person is seen as a part of their intrinsic development and growth and an ideal for all parents.
How is it taught?
There are various ways to teach character in the classroom. One approach centres on 3 main areas: virtue knowledge, virtue reasoning and virtue practice (Arthur, 2016, pg 72). This is a recursive approach in which the classroom is a place to learn about different virtues and their role in daily life (virtue knowledge), as well as learn how to approach various ethical situations and/or conflicts between two virtues (virtue reasoning), and finally to put those virtues in practice. This process is recursive as virtue reasoning and practice will refine and deepen the virtue knowledge previously gained, which will in turn improve moral reasoning and practice. Another approach absorbs the previous approach into the ‘taught’ portion of character education whilst also focussing on the ‘caught’ portion (Jubilee Centre, 2017) – harnessing the power of a virtuous role model one’s own moral status to also give a student an indirect character education as well as a direct, formal portion of their curriculum. There are scores of pedagogies that can be used and adapted to fit the goals of this project, and the Association for Character Education (ACE) provides nationally recognised awards in the form of Character Kitemarks to schools who are actively implementing character into their learning. Particular pedagogies also include dissecting literary texts to extract virtues understood to be universal – the Narnian Virtues project specifically looks at the works of C.S. Lewis and has developed a curriculum centred around this approach.
Further Research
There is considerable research being published year on year to strengthen the pedagogies being developed in this field. This is a comparatively new field and so there is room for further research – especially in its theoretical underpinnings. Virtue ethics has much to be explored. A pertinent area for research is the nature of these innate dispositions and how they form; is there room for the existence of a soul in Aristotle’s framework? Another is the issue of moral motivation and whether it is an externalist or internalist phenomenon: e.g. is the proposition “justice is good” sufficient in its own right to oblige the moral agent to be just, or do they need a factor external to the proposition to oblige them (van Roojen, 2015, chapter 4)? Elucidation of some of these issues will serve only to strengthen the pedagogy in this field. For example, if morality is an internalist [moral/reason judgement] phenomenon, simply teaching students about the different virtues will serve as sufficient to give them moral agency. However, if the opposite is found to be more likely, this changes the pedagogical approach entirely to fit the external factors that are needed to sufficiently drive a young person to behave virtuously. Thus, the metaethical stance that one takes will deeply affect the theory that is subsequently developed and thus it is essential that the character education project is grounded on robust and nuanced principles.
Bibliography
Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics. (2004). J. A. K. Thomson trans. Penguin Classics.
Arthur, J et al (2016) Teaching Character and Virtue in Schools. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group.
Association for Character Education: http://character-education.org.uk/
Carr, D (1991) Educating the Virtues. Routledge, Chapman and Hall
Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues: www.jubileecentre.ac.uk
Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues (2017) A Framework for Character Education in Schools.
Kristjansson, K (2015) Aristotelian Character Education. Routledge Research in Education.
Narnian Virtues: A Character Education English Curriculum: https://narnianvirtues.leeds.ac.uk/
Van Roojen, M (2015) Metaethics: a contemporary introduction. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group.
