Aggression and Morality in Adolescents

It is often claimed that the world in which we live is full of cruelty, ruthlessness and violence. Media reports on violence among students often paint a bleak picture of teachers and the school environment struggling to cope with manifestations of aggression among young people. It was such a news story, which reported on an...

Encouraging Virtuous Living Through Poetry

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words – Robert Frost In this blog post, I wish to describe my proposed PhD project that I’m undertaking as of this coming autumn. I’d like to begin by briefly explaining the concept of character education, before describing the elements of...

Telling Stories: Using Cinema for Character Education Part I

The art of cinema is the art of telling stories. For thousands of years we have used the persuasive power of stories to build cultures, imbed morals and to understand what it is to be human. From Jesus’ parables to Grimm’s fairy tales, stories resonate with us on a far deeper level than rhetoric. Today,...

Do Flawed Super Heroes or Saints Make the Best Moral Exemplars for Young People?

The role of moral exemplars in character education is often neglected, despite the fact that pointing to models of virtue is an effective way of reminding us of the kind of person we wish to be. It is common to hear teachers tell pupils to “be yourself, don’t copy anyone!”, making emulation sound like poor...

Three Conceptions of Integrity and Two Important Questions

The virtue of integrity used to be the darling of virtue ethicists and character educators in the 1980s and 1990s, but for some reason it seems to have fallen out of favour. I return to that apparent ‘fall from grace’ at the end of the blog. During the halcyon days of integrity, three broad conceptions...

Character Education in East Asia and England

The goals of character building in East Asian countries is often presented as a shared cultural construct and positioned within an East-West dichotomy. However, it is not at all clear that East Asian forms of character education are as easily identifiable and distinct or that they always transcend national and cultural values. The former Secretary...

Encouraging Pupils’ Virtue Literacy through the Visual Arts

Several years ago, I started to include philosophical discussions in my art classes, driven by my desire to deepen pupils’ moral reflection on art projects. I established a community of inquiry in groups of 8th grade pupils, and the first artwork I proposed was René Magritte’s “Not to be reproduced” from 1937. Given the paradoxical...