Aristotelian Character Education 9781317619062, 9781138804753, 2014042279, 9781315752747

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Aristotelian Character Education

This book provides a reconstruction of Aristotelian character education, shedding new light on what moral character really is, and how it can be highlighted, measured, nurtured and taught in current schooling. Arguing that many recent approaches to character education understand character in exclusively amoral, instrumentalist terms, Kristjánsson proposes a coherent, plausible and up-to-date concept, retaining the overall structure of Aristotelian character education. After discussing and debunking popular myths about Aristotelian character education, subsequent chapters focus on the practical ramifications and methodologies of character education. These include measuring virtue and morality, asking whether Aristotelian character education can salvage the effects of bad upbringing, and considering implications for teacher training and classroom practice. The book rejuvenates time-honoured principles of the development of virtues in young people, at a time when ‘character’ features prominently in educational agendas and parental concerns over school education systems. Offering an interdisciplinary perspective which draws from the disciplines of education, psychology, philosophy and sociology, this book will appeal to researchers, academics and students wanting a greater insight into character education. Kristján Kristjánsson is Professor of Character Education and Virtue Ethics, Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, University of Birmingham, UK.

Routledge Research in Education

For a complete list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com. 118 Professional Uncertainty, Knowledge and Relationship in the Classroom A Psycho-social Perspective Joseph Mintz 119 Negotiating Privilege and Identity in Educational Contexts Adam Howard, Aimee Polimeno and Brianne Wheeler 120 Liberty and Education A Civic Republican Approach Geoffrey Hinchliffe 121 Constructing Narratives of Continuity and Change A Transdisciplinary Approach to Researching Lives Edited by Hazel Reid and Linden West 122 Education, Philosophy and Wellbeing New Perspectives on the Work of John White Edited by Judith Suissa, Carrie Winstanley and Roger Marples 123 Chinese Students’ Writing in English Implications from a Corpusdriven Study Maria Leedham

124 9/11 and Collective Memory in US Classrooms Teaching about Terror Cheryl Lynn Duckworth 125 African Americans and Homeschooling Motivations, Opportunities and Challenges Ama Mazama and Garvey Musumunu 126 Lesson Study Professional Learning for our Time Edited by Peter Dudley 127 Refugee Women, Representation and Education Creating a Discourse of Selfauthorship and Potential Melinda McPherson 128 Organizational Citizenship Behavior in Schools Examining the Impact and Opportunities within Educational Systems Anit Somech and Izhar Oplatka 129 The Age of STEM Educational Policy and Practice across the World in Science, Technology,

Engineering and Mathematics Edited by Brigid Freeman, Simon Marginson and Russell Tytler 130 Mainstreams, Margins and the Spaces In-between New Possibilities for Education Research Edited by Karen Trimmer, Ali Black and Stewart Riddle

136 Landscapes of Specific Literacies in Contemporary Society Exploring a social model of literacy Edited by Vicky Duckworth and Gordon Ade-Ojo 137 The Education of Radical Democracy Sarah S. Amsler

131 Arts-based and Contemplative Practices in Research and Teaching Honoring Presence Edited by Susan Walsh, Barbara Bickel and Carl Leggo

138 Aristotelian Character Education Kristján Kristjánsson

132 Interrogating Critical Pedagogy The Voices of Educators of Color in the Movement Edited by Pierre Wilbert Orelus and Rochelle Brock

140 Educating Adolescent Girls Around the Globe Edited by Sandra L. Stacki and Supriya Baily

133 My School Listening to Parents, Teachers and Students from a Disadvantaged Educational Setting Lesley Scanlon 134 Education, Nature, and Society Stephen Gough 135 Learning Technologies and the Body Integration and Implementation in Formal and Informal Learning Environments Edited by Victor Lee

139 Performing Kamishibai Tara McGowan

141 Quality Teaching and the Capability Approach Evaluating the Work and Governance of Women Teachers in Rural Sub-Saharan Africa Alison Buckler 142 Using Narrative Inquiry for Educational Research in the Asia Pacific Edited by Sheila Trahar and Wai Ming Yu

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Aristotelian Character Education

Kristján Kristjánsson

First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 K. Kristjánsson The right of K. Kristjánsson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kristjánsson, Kristján, 1959– Aristotelian character education / Kristján Kristjánsson. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Moral education—Philosophy. 2. Aristotle. Eudemian ethics I.Title. LC268.K75 2015 370.11'4—dc23 2014042279 ISBN: 978-1-138-80475-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-75274-7 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by FiSH Books Ltd, Enfield

To Monica Taylor and David Carr for their inspiration, encouragement and support over the years – and as always to Nora and Hlér, for being there

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Contents

Preface

x

1

Introduction: what is Aristotelian character education?

1

2

Some persistent myths about Aristotelian character education

44

3

Measuring virtue for Aristotelian character education

60

4

Phronesis and Aristotelian character education

85

5

Can Aristotelian character education undo the effects of bad upbringing?

104

Towards method: dialogue and Aristotelian character education

117

Educating the educators: teachers and Aristotelian character education

129

Concluding reflections

144

References Index

164 181

6

7

8

Preface

I began working on this book at about the same time I moved from the University of Iceland and took up my new post as Professor of Character Education and Virtue Ethics in the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, School of Education, University of Birmingham, in September 2012 – and I completed it exactly two years later. I am grateful to my colleagues at the Jubilee Centre for their advice, support and comments on earlier drafts of many of the following chapters. I would especially like to single out David Carr, Randall Curren, James Arthur, Tom Harrison, Aidan Thompson, Wouter Sanderse, David Walker, Sandra Cooke, Chantel Jones, Michael Roberts and Ben Kotzee. Other scholars and friends with whom I have conversed in ways that have left their mark on the writing of this book include Tom Lickona, Marvin Berkowitz, Barry Schwartz, Julia Annas, Howard Curzer, William Damon, Hyemin Han, Blaine Fowers, Steve Thoma, Owen Flanagan, Dan Wright, Erla Kristjánsdóttir, Ólafur Páll Jónsson, Atli Harðarson, Sigrún Aðalbjarnardóttir, Nora Tsai, Hlér Kristjánsson, Yen-Hsin Chen and Angela Chi-Ming Lee. I would also like to mention, with gratitude, all the academics who attended the 2014 Oriel College Conference, ‘Can Virtue Be Measured?’ Without their contributions, I would not have been able to write Chapter 3. I am indebted to the John Templeton Foundation for funding the work of the Jubilee Centre. Clare Ashworth and Jane Madeley at Routledge deserve thanks for being unreservedly supportive of the book project throughout its gestation. Emma Brown and Ashley Cook provided invaluable editorial assistance towards the end, so did Proofreading Birmingham. I have received helpful feedback from audiences at the Annual Conference of the Asia-Pacific Network for Moral Education, Chia-Yi, Taiwan (2012); the Battle of Ideas Conference, Barbican Centre, London (2012); the Inaugural Conference of the Jubilee Centre, University of Birmingham (2012); the Annual Conference of the Nordic Educational Research Association, University of Iceland (2013); the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Conference, New College, Oxford (2013); the Conference on Moral Education: Ancient and Contemporary, Northwestern

Preface

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University, Chicago (2013); the International Conference on Malaguzzi and Contemporary Early Years Alternatives, University of Winchester (2013); the Symposium ‘Can Psychology Replace Ethics?’, University of Tübingen (2014); and the Conference of the European Positive Psychology Society, Amsterdam (2014). I am grateful for permission to reproduce material from the following articles: ‘Some Aristotelian reflections on teachers’ professional identities and the emotional practice of teaching’, in Towards Professional Wisdom: Practical Deliberation in the ‘People Professions’, eds. L. Bondi, D. Carr, C. Clark and C. Clegg (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011); ‘Ten myths about character, virtue and virtue education – and three well-founded misgivings’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 61 (2013); ‘There is something about Aristotle: The pros and cons of Aristotelianism in contemporary moral education’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 48 (2014); ‘Phronesis and moral education: Treading beyond the truisms’, Theory and Research in Education, 12 (2014); ‘Undoing bad upbringing through contemplation: An Aristotelian reconstruction’, Journal of Moral Education, 43 (2014); and ‘On the old saw that dialogue is a Socratic but not an Aristotelian method of moral Education’, Educational Theory, 64 (2014). Lastly, I would like to reiterate my thanks to Monica Taylor and David Carr, to whom this book is dedicated, for gently guiding me into the field of moral education, and helping me stay on course, both personally and professionally.

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Chapter 1

Introduction What is Aristotelian character education?

Retrievals of character This book is about an idea, one that is growing clearer and gathering momentum in classrooms and clinics and labs and lecture halls […] According to this new way of thinking, the conventional wisdom about child development over the past few decades has been misguided. We have been focusing on the wrong skills and abilities in our children, and we have been using the wrong strategies to help nurture and teach those skills. (Tough, 2013: xv) These rousing words from Paul Tough’s recent bestseller on the power of character building are indicative both of the fervour and panache of his rhetoric and the inherent pull of the core idea he wants to get across: that the magic bullet for helping children to ‘succeed’ may be character rather than subject knowledge. I explain below the timeliness of this idea and why it has struck a chord with parents, teachers and policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, after reading Tough’s book, I did not put it down any lighter of heart. Much as I admire the good intentions behind it, I consider his core idea to be saddled with a philosophy that is at best unhelpful, at worst calamitous. More specifically, although Tough’s book is meant as an antidote to fears that schools have become spoon-feeding factories, Tough’s instrumentalist, performance-driven and amoral view of character makes his message about the power of character development vulnerable to the very vice it was created to resist. Being something of an if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them pragmatist myself, I understand where Tough is coming from. He does not think that his message will carry the day unless it is couched in terms of goals that laypeople and politicians will understand: the Holy Grail of grades and jobs. However, being conciliatory is one thing, ceding most of the territory to your supposed opponents is quite another. Or to put it in terms of a famous metaphor, what is the use of straining at a gnat if you swallow a camel?

2

Introduction

Do not misunderstand me. The book you have just opened does not offer a running, critical commentary on Paul Tough’s work, although I shall be giving it further attention shortly. It is instructive, however, to use Tough’s bestseller as a springboard to explain the gestation of the present work, because it was after reading his blueprint for character, on how to Tough-en up kids through grit, persistence, self-control and injections of self-confidence (2013: xv), that I decided to fashion an alternative view of what character is and why and how it should be promoted in education. This alternative view is based on time-honoured – if by no means uncontroversial – Aristotelian principles about the intrinsically and irreducibly moral nature of character; hence the title Aristotelian Character Education. Although I have explored the nuts and bolts of such character education from various angles before (see, especially, Kristjánsson, 2007 and 2013, and more journal articles than I care to recall), I have never attempted a systematic, holistic account of it that would be accessible to readers without a ready-made Aristotelian philosophy in their pockets. This is precisely what I aim to do here. I am motivated by the belief that although Aristotelianism is not the only possible foundation for programmes of character education (perhaps Confucianism or a sophisticated virtue-based utilitarianism in the style of John Stuart Mill could work equally well, for example), using Aristotle’s general character-and-virtue framework as a prism through which to shed light on character and its cultivation enables us to refract this light and send it out fully charged, ready for practical illumination in the home or the classroom. To couch the remit of this book in slightly more academic terms, my aim is to flesh out a theoretical account of character education – as a form of moral education focusing on the development of virtues – designed along broadly Aristotelian lines. I also aim to elicit some of the practical ramifications of Aristotelian character education for working with young people, although a full manual of classroom tools and techniques will remain a topic for another day (and it is, indeed, on the to-do list of the Centre where I am working). The targeted readership comprises theoretically minded educationists, professionals and parents, but also moral psychologists and those moral philosophers who are interested in the practical application of character-and-virtue constructs. As what is on offer here is to a considerable extent ‘reconstructed Aristotelianism’ (explained in in the penultimate section of this chapter), this book is not primarily an exercise in Aristotelian scholarship, any more than my 2007 book, Aristotle, Emotions and Education, which explored the relevance of an Aristotelian theory of emotion for education. The challenge of writing a book of this kind is to avoid making it too cheaply practical for the theorist and too abstractly theoretical for the practitioner. That is the challenge I take on in what follows. A number of misgivings have been expressed about the viability of character education in general, and its Aristotelian variant in particular, for use in

Introduction

3

today’s schooling. While I consider some of those misgivings misjudged, my objective is to offer an account that is sensitive to a number of salient concerns or, more specifically, an account that ameliorates shortcomings of previous (classic and contemporary) versions of Aristotelian character education. In the penultimate section of this chapter I outline these shortcomings in more detail and relate them to the aims of subsequent chapters. Prior to that, however, more extensive scene-setting is required in order to explain how my general aim is motivated by, and responds to, recent pleas for a retrieval of character-based approaches to education in public, political and academic discourse (the remainder of this section); to introduce some of the concepts that are typically aired in this discourse (the second section); to expand upon what characterises a genuinely Aristotelian approach to character education and makes it appealing (the third section); to acknowledge what its main putative shortcomings may be and how I aim to rectify them (the fourth section); and finally to offer some personal considerations that have motivated my journey (the final section). In my view, the best way to argue for the pros of a position is often to explore its potential cons – the actual or possible counter-arguments that have been or can be lodged against it – and then try to respond to them. This is very much the method adopted in ensuing chapters, after laying out the basics of Aristotelian character education in this one. As indicated above, a groundswell in favour of character seems to be evident among policy makers and the general public on both sides of the Atlantic. For example, in December 2012, two reports were published: one by the Central Bureau of Investigation (the UK’s top lobbying business organisation), based on discussions with business leaders, teachers, school leaders and academics, which argues that through its narrow focus on achievement as measured by grades in academic subjects, the education system is failing the majority of children (CBI, 2012). The second, by Russell Sojourner, Director of the US Leadership, Development, Character Education Partnership, documents the widespread call for a more characterbased focus on teaching. The paper even generates a sense of anxiety that if this is not comprehensively achieved, social crisis will ensue (Sojourner, 2012). Yet the aim of cultivating character in schools continues to be described as controversial (see e.g. Evans, 2012). For those unfamiliar with the historical and often politically partisan discourse on character and virtues, the controversial nature of this aim may seem baffling. After all, the Final Report of the Riots Communities and Victims Panel (2012), published in the wake of the August 2011 UK riots – a report which inter alia recommended new school initiatives to help children build character – seemed to have been warmly received by the media and the general public. Nagging doubts and suspicions remain, however, in academic circles and among politicians on both the ‘left’ and ‘right’, and I address some of the most persistent and ‘myth-like’ in

4

Introduction

Chapter 2. Those enduring ‘myths’ make it even more surprising why so many politicians, in the UK at least, are now willing to jump on the character bandwagon. A quick look at recent manifestos and speeches by spokespeople of the two leading political parties in the UK indicates, at least at the time of writing (in late 2014), that in the next general elections, ‘character’ will feature high on educational agendas across party lines (although, admittedly, it seems to be understood more in Toughian than Aristotelian ways). Most often cited is evidence showing that when students enter the rough and tumble of the workplace and ‘the real world’, school grades seem to have only modest value in predicting how well they will do in their work, let alone in predicting their general well-being. An optimistic view also tends to be showcased about how character can both be taught directly in the classroom and conveyed more indirectly (or ‘caught’) through a positive school ethos. Parents concur with this message. In a recent UK poll of 1000 parents, nearly nine-in-ten agreed that schools should develop character rather than just deliver academic results. Ninety-five per cent of parents agreed that it is possible to teach children values and shape their characters in positive ways, and 84 per cent believed that it is the teacher’s role to encourage good morals and values in their students. Importantly, that minority of parents who expressed doubts or disagreed did so not because they thought grades matter more than character, but because they considered themselves better equipped to instil character than teachers (Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, 2013). This is by no means the first poll to show overwhelming parental support for character education. Yet parents may be less than apt in getting their view across, as children and teachers often seem to think that, when push comes to shove, parents only care about grades. One can only make an educated guess as to what has motivated the recent public and political turn towards character. Below is an unsystematic collection of some possible (but by no means exhaustive) explanations: •

• •

• •

A perceived increase in youth depression and social disaffection, culminating in events like the London 2011 riots, indicates problems that many commentators interpret as a sign of moral decline in need of rectification. Internationalisation and multiculturalism have created a need for cosmopolitan values. More secularisation and individualisation (witness the so-called ‘me’generation) have formed the perception of a spiritual void or a ‘value gap’ that needs to be filled. More female employment has led to increased demands on schools to help ‘bring up’ children. Finally, the 2008 financial crisis was a wake-up call for many theorists and politicians, who viewed it as being caused more by general character flaws than financial bad judgement.

Introduction

5

But what do public-policy makers really understand by the magic bullet of ‘character’? In the corridors of Whitehall, at least, it tends to be referred to – somewhat euphemistically – by the labels of ‘soft skills’ or ‘non-cognitive competences’, but neither label is particularly well suited. The so-called ‘soft skills’ do not seem ‘softer’ in terms of being easier to administer or learn than their allegedly ‘harder’ counterparts. Moreover, what is being talked about here, even on Tough’s amoral view, are surely not raw feelings and desires, but rather certain attitudes based on complex self-beliefs and beliefs about the world. These are anything but non-cognitive! For example, self-confidence is not just a non-cognitive feeling, like a toothache, but involves ‘cognitions’ (beliefs, judgements) about what future tasks people think they can master. Perhaps, then, ‘non-cognitive’ is simply meant to denote ‘nonacademic’ – but this is a different notion altogether. Anthony Seldon (2012), the colourful ex-headteacher of Wellington College, and some of his colleagues both in the independent and state school sector have long argued that there is nothing mysterious about this magic bullet, and that it should simply be called what the layperson knows it as, namely ‘character’. This is, however, the right juncture to revisit Paul Tough’s work, for Tough has been pivotal in promoting the language of ‘non-cognitive skills’ for character – derived from the work of economist James Heckman (Tough, 2013: xvi–xxi). Tough is particularly excited about the focus on a particular subset of character skills in the so-called KIPP (‘Knowledge-Is-PowerProgram’) charter schools in the United States and how this focus has transformed the lives of disadvantaged kids in terms of their future study and career prospects, by enabling them to ‘climb the mountain to college’ (2013: 50). The main skills in question are grit/resilience and self-confidence. Tough is impressed by the way in which character has here been severed from ‘finger-wagging morality’ and how the new approach is ‘fundamentally devoid of value judgment’ (2013: 60; ‘value judgment’ must mean ‘moral judgement’ in this context, for clearly grit and self-confidence are values!). Tough does not doubt that some schools may benefit from a focus on the moral features of character; those for privileged kids who already come to school equipped with the necessary psychological tools to do well. However, for those who lack these basic skills, schools that concentrate on the performance aspects of character will be more useful (2013: 78–81). Tough rests his theory of two facets of character – ‘moral character’ and ‘performance character’, between which schools can and must choose according to the habitus of their students – on a document by the Character Education Partnership (2008) explicating and defending ‘performance values’. However, Tough seems to have misunderstood this document completely. Its remit is not to suggest a bifurcation of – let alone a dichotomy between – performance values and moral values, nor is there any hint in it about schools being able, with impunity, to divorce performance from morality and focus only on the former. Quite the contrary, the document

6

Introduction

repeatedly stresses that moral values must ‘remain foundational’ in a ‘life of character’ (p. 1), and while the cultivation of performance matters in addition to moral coaching, performance only has value in so far as it complements moral aspirations and makes them more serviceable. From an Aristotelian perspective there is a deeper worry here than whether or not Tough has read the document in question correctly or how useful a certain programme of character education is in getting kids into college. To be sure, resilience helps us bounce back from negative experiences and selfconfidence makes us more efficacious in achieving our ends. The deeper worry is, though, that those ‘virtues’ can be positively dangerous if they are untethered from moral constraints. The missing element in the character make-up of the ‘banksters’ in the run-up to the financial crisis, or the average heinous dictator, is clearly not a higher level of resilience and self-confidence. What we want to instil in kids is not the grit of the repeat offender. The truth is, as the proverb has it, that the higher the ape climbs, the more he shows his tail. If the choice is between an immoral high climber and a moral low climber, the Aristotelian will opt for the latter. This is not just an obscure Aristotelian observation. In his debunking diagnosis of the KIPP ideology and Tough’s celebration of it, Jeffrey Snyder (2014) does not invoke any Aristotelian philosophy. Simply, he makes the point that ‘when your character education scheme fails to distinguish between doctors and terrorists, heroes and villains, it would appear to have a basic flaw’. For Snyder, the basic flaw lies in the vulgar sense of ‘climbing’ that is surreptitiously assumed here: ‘Character is treated as a kind of fuel that will help propel students through school and up the career ladder.’ Virtue has been demoted to a calculated, instrumental climbing device and is no longer ‘its own reward’. It is almost as if the Gradgrinds from Dickens’s Hard Times have returned. Again we are not talking rocket science. Similar concerns were raised by the great seventeenth century educational reformer Comenius when he warned of the ‘unhallowed separation’ that follows if morality and efficiency are not ‘bound together as if by an adamantine chain. How wretched is the teaching that does not lead to virtue […]!’ And in much the same vein as Snyder a few hundred years later, Comenius remarks: ‘He who makes progress in knowledge but not in morality […] recedes rather than advances’ (1907: 74). Paradoxically, Paul Tough – the writer who has done more than most to give ‘character’ a new public profile and stifle some of the obsession with mere ‘academics’ – severs this ‘adamantine chain’ and buys into much of the underlying rhetoric of his supposed adversaries, a rhetoric implicitly motivated by a view of schools ‘not as communities or cultures in which children can be nurtured to some kind of moral and spiritual growth, but as factories or assembly lines with respect to which the dominant value is productivity’ (Carr, 2012: 11). This is why I wonder whether Tough has done the cause of character education more harm than good. What we need in order to replace the one-sided focus on league tables and high-stakes

Introduction

7

testing are educational institutions that foreground alternative values (cf. Sockett, 2012), not simply institutions that have devised new ways of harnessing grades through ‘character’. As Tough – himself a college dropout and a pretty successful one at that – should well know, getting into college is not the be-all and end-all of a flourishing life. I realise that some readers may find my remarks about Tough and the KIPP schools churlish and quibbling at best – seriously uncharitable and careless at worst. Surely there is reason for celebration if kids who might have ended up in the street get into college instead, thanks to a programme of grit and self-confidence. My argument might seem as lop-sided as one posed against giving all kids Omega-3 fish oil because of its ability to imbue the mischievous among them with improved physical health and thus an ability to cause more harm! I feel I need to make myself clearer. Far be it from me to object to the cultivation of performance virtues in children – indeed, I applaud the good work that the KIPP schools seem to have done in designing interventions that work in this area and I certainly do not consider performance virtues as ‘value parasites’ but, rather, as necessary means to put moral aspirations into practice. But I do not accept the narrow definition of (rat-race) ‘success’ at work here, achievable by hook or by crook, and I cannot help wondering, if the KIPP philosophy really has been as ‘successful’ as Tough makes it out to be, how much more successful (on a broader conception of ‘success’) it could have been if it had combined the cultivation of performance virtues with the cultivation of moral virtues. Even if we stick to Tough’s narrow definition of success at school as getting good grades, however, considerable empirical evidence does exist which suggests a link between (morally informed) character education and traditional academic achievement (e.g. grade attainment). A study of 681 elementary schools in California showed that schools with higher total character-education implementation tend to have higher academic scores by a small but nonetheless discernible margin (Benninga et al., 2003). According to Park and Peterson’s research (2006), lessons in character education can apparently manifest in a 16 per cent improvement in academic achievement. Snyder and colleagues (2012) present findings highlighting how characterdevelopment programmes improve academic achievement, as well as an array of other, positive behaviours. Findings from a meta-analysis of 213 US school-based social and emotional learning (SEL) programmes (most of which include, at least, some moral-character relevant ingredients) showed that, compared to controls, SEL participants demonstrate significantly improved social and emotional skills, attitudes, behaviour and academic performance that reflects an 11-percentile-point gain in achievement (Durlak et al., 2011). Put simply, promoting the development of morally good character traits in schools seems to lead to higher attainment – as a happy side-effect. Notably, however, arguments of this sort – often expounded in character-education literature – should at best be complementary to the

8

Introduction

currency of the goal of the overall flourishing student, as that goal should seek theoretical legitimation in the intrinsic value of a flourishing life, rather than its extrinsic rewards. I have spent more ammunition on critiquing Tough’s KIPP-touting stance on character than I planned at the beginning. It is hard – in an opening section on recent ‘retrievals of character’ – not to give sustained attention to those who have been most ‘successful’ at such retrievals of late; and it is equally hard to resist fastening on the flaws of those retrievals if one believes, as I do, that in order to fashion a feasible paradigm of character education, one needs to emancipate oneself from the thin end of the wedge of essentially amoral and instrumentalist conceptions of character. It is now time, however, to leave Tough behind and focus on more ‘scholarly’ attempts to retrieve character as a moral and educational ideal. Recent years have witnessed a world-wide resurgence of interest in moral education, broadly understood, taking the form of explicit educational aims concerned with the socio-moral, psycho-moral (especially emotional) and political development of students – with student well-being typically being given as the inclusive meta-objective of all those aims (see e.g. Lovat et al., 2009: 17–18). While some of this resurgence is clearly motivated by the recent interest in issues of character, adumbrated above, this does not mean that the programmes themselves necessarily have any theoretical common ground. Here are some of the formal reasons for caution: •

• •

Some of the programmes are geared towards preschool and/or primary education while others are exclusively aimed at students in secondary education. Some have been dressed up as new, discrete school subjects while others function as add-ons to those already in existence. Some are part of the compulsory curriculum while others are optional elements.

These reasons are compounded by apparent substantive differences among the recent programmes, based on the fact that they are rooted in different disciplinary paradigms and are frequently engaged, internally, in a turbulent factional strife: • • • •

Some are explicitly moral, giving rise to programmes such as character education. Some are rooted in psychological theories, giving rise to programmes such as social and emotional aspects of learning (SEAL) and positive education. Some are political, giving rise to programmes such as civic or citizenship education. Some are health-related, giving rise to programmes such as physical, social and health education (PSHE).

Introduction

• •

9

Some are religious, giving rise to programmes of religion-based moral education. Some are of an eclectic disciplinary provenance, such as well-being education and life-skills/life-competence education.

An obvious question to ask, then, is whether moral education is swimming in a sea of hopeless heterogeneity. Is there anything singular to be found in this prodigious plurality of approaches – any putative common point of departure? The eminent American character educationist Marvin Berkowitz (2012) recently stated this problem in stark terms: ‘I have found the language of moral education to be a semantic minefield’, he says. ‘There is no moral GPS to help with such semantic navigation. I have lectured, written, etc. under quite a set of terms. The terminology varies geographically and historically. And there are many overlapping terms used’. Berkowitz’s description can give rise to two contrasting interpretations. One is that the mixed bag of theoretical assumptions underlying different programmes of moral education constitutes a hopeless hotchpotch of illassorted elements, and that its penchant for eclecticism will in the end prove to be the field’s undoing. A compounding difficulty lies in the endless flavour-of-the-month varieties that have continuously been on offer and in turn instilled a dismissive cry-wolf attitude among teachers – alongside simple initiative fatigue – and have no doubt contributed to the lack of sustained uptake. The absence of a common language in which these efforts have been couched has not made life easier either. The alternative interpretation, however, is that moral education offers us a healthy melting-pot of elements that can be made to work, perhaps not simultaneously but at least in conjunction with one another, and that this field demarcates, at a more general level, a conceptual and practical common ground. Some historical perspective may be helpful in illuminating those interpretations (see further in Walker, Roberts and Kristjánsson, 2015). Taking the historical long view makes us aware of the strong pull of intellectual fashion and how conceptions of character coaching are always held hostage – partly at least – to prevailing ideologies and anxieties of the day. (I return to that theme in the second section of Chapter 8). Thus, early twentieth century optimism about schools as workshops in character adjustment started to lose its intellectual capital after the Second World War, partly driven by the general moral despondency in the wake of the war and its subsequent ColdWar pessimism about the possibility of a genuine moral dialogue and moral consensus. The emergence of Lawrence Kohlberg’s ground-breaking thesis in the late 1950s on children’s rigidly stage-bound moral development filled a void in the field and continued to be a major influence throughout the 1960s and 1970s (see Kohlberg, 1981). Such a theory was in great intellectual demand, with the egregious acts of Second World War still fresh in the collective psyche, and Kohlberg’s thesis provided a latent rationalistic

10

Introduction

solution both to the widespread concern of history repeating itself and to the threat of irredeemable moral relativism (Sanderse, 2012, chap. 2). It may seem odd to depict Kohlberg’s theory of the cognitively developing child as a stage in the recent trajectory of character education, given the fact that he poured scorn on the traditional conception of moral character as made up of a ‘bag of virtues’ (Kohlberg, 1981: 184), and that his hard rationalism ran athwart ‘softer’ and more emotion-imbued moral theories, such as Aristotle’s. Indeed, the increasing hegemony of the Kohlbergian cognitive developmental model meant that the explicit focus on character education significantly diminished throughout UK schools, for example (Arthur 2010, chap. 2). Nevertheless, Kohlberg’s model can be construed as being about moral character, though he did redefine it radically in terms of pure rational processes of stage-bound cognitive development, ideally enacted within ‘just communities’ of discourse. The core rationale of ‘character education’, on this radically new understanding, was one of the need for the school to guide students through the thinking processes required to understand the moral good, and thus (inevitably, as Kohlberg saw it) to become morally good. Then, around the turn of the twenty first century, there emerged the paradigm of the emotionally vulnerable child. The unremitting rationalism of Kohlberg’s model had proven to be its undoing, especially after Blasi’s (1980) meta-analysis revealed scant correlations between Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning and actual moral behaviour. As the predominant Kohlbergian paradigm started to lose its intellectual capital, renewed attention was paid to pre-World War II conceptions – manifesting in the United States as a rise in the back-to-basics form of character education (Lickona, 1991) and in the UK, the Crick Report, promoting the need for virtue-based citizenship as well as in the 2001 publication of the White and Green papers concerning character-relevant aspects of education (Arthur 2010, chap. 2). Soon enough, new discursive themes started to emerge, focusing on the pedagogical significance of emotional literacy; the idea being that it is ultimately emotion rather than pure reason which motivates moral action. Stemming from the popularity of Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence (1995), remedying the child’s essentially vulnerable character became a key part of educational policy, through initiatives such as PSHE and SEAL. The core rationale here turned on the need for schools to mend children’s fragile emotional selves and boost their self-esteem – under the banners of efficiency and adaptability – thereby furnishing them with the requisite motivation and self-efficacy to behave pro-socially. The legitimating principles of the emotionally vulnerable child – where ‘character’ was essentially psychologised and therapeutised (Furedi, 2004; Ecclestone, 2011; Neophytou, 2013) – gradually met their Waterloo. One problem was that the concept of emotional intelligence (although allegedly derived from Aristotle’s ethics) does not in the end place any substantive

Introduction

11

moral constraint on the content of emotionally intelligent emotions; a clever but unscrupulous drug baron may, for instance, satisfy the conditions of emotional intelligence admirably (see Kristjánsson 2007, chap. 6) – a problem later replicated in Tough’s amoral view of character, as criticised above. Another problem was, of course, the demise of the self-esteem industry, after it transpired that excessive self-esteem is actually a greater psycho-social hazard than low self-esteem (Baumeister et al., 2003). So where are we now? I think it is fair to say, in order to catch the spirit of what is now afoot in the intellectual fashion industry, that we are entering the era of the flourishing child. This ideal has many historical and intellectual roots: the upsurge of virtue ethics in moral philosophy; the new positive psychology movement; disillusionment with mere subjective criteria of wellbeing in economics/public policy and the search for more objective measures – to suggest a few. The rise of intellectual ‘eras’ and ‘paradigms’ rarely has a single cause. Yet a conspicuous common feature of the current state of play in moral education is how many prominent approaches invoke Aristotle as their theoretical progenitor (see Curren, 2010) – motivated in turn by philosophical (e.g. Kristjánsson, 2007), educational (e.g. Arthur, 2003) or psychological (e.g. Peterson and Seligman, 2004) considerations. Approaches such as USstyle character education, social and emotional learning (in so far as it still has not given up the ghost), citizenship education, and positive psychology’s recent virtue theory are thus all brimming with references to Aristotle. To be sure, Aristotelian aficionados – the author included – have criticised all these approaches for departures from Aristotle’s own programme of moral education: US-style character education for its lapses into a philosophically crude and overly behaviouristic stance (Kristjánsson, 2006, chap. 5), social and emotional learning for its above-noted failure to place moral constraints on ‘intelligent’ emotions (Kristjánsson, 2007, chap. 6), citizenship education for putting the cart before the horse by trying to specify the politically right prior to the morally good (Kristjánsson, 2006, chap. 5) and positive psychology’s virtue theory for its lack of a moral integrator and adjudicator, as phronesis or good sense (Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 7). Although I have argued that these are unfortunate departures from Aristotle – not just because they are departures but because they are substantively unfortunate – it would be unfair to question the genuine intentions of many contemporary moral educators to draw constructively on Aristotelian insights. Moreover, despite the departures in question, there remains something quintessentially Aristotelian about seeing moral development as a process of learning to exhibit virtues in action (in the manner of US-style character education) rather than just sitting pretty on them; considering proper emotional regulation an intrinsic part of the good life (in the manner of social and emotional learning); considering the creation of certain socio-political mechanisms a necessary precondition for the sustenance of moral education (in the manner of citizenship education); and

12

Introduction

highlighting un-self-conscious pleasure in unimpeded activity (or what is nowadays known as ‘flow’) as the supervening culmination of a virtuous life (in the manner of positive psychology). It would, in other words, be uncharitable to reject the claim that all these approaches have some salient Aristotelian credentials; what they are promulgating cannot be written off wholesale as vulgarised Aristotelianism. Let it be known, therefore, that the approach I want to adopt in this book is not the grumpy, acrimonious one of Statler and Waldorf (of Muppet-Show fame), telling off all the performers from the balcony; I see myself rather as a helpful copy-editor trying the improve current scripts by paying attention to what Aristotle would have (or should have) said about them, especially when I consider their writers to have ‘gone off the scent’, as it were. Here is a preliminary puzzle, however. To anyone outside the charmed circle of moral education, and indeed to a number of insiders as well, it must be a mystery why all these theories take pride in being informed by and seeking inspiration from the thoughts of a philosopher who lived 2300 years ago! The mystery is obviously not that many great minds think alike. After all, there is a clear overlap between Aristotelian moral theory and that of various other major historical players, such as Confucius and John Stuart Mill (whom I have already mentioned in passing), and it would be more of a mystery if their views on moral education were completely at odds. The ‘mystery’ has to do, rather, with (a) the extent to which Aristotle has been singled out recently as an authority on moral education over and above a number of other possible historical candidates – for example, Plato, Comenius, Locke, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Wollenstonecraft, Kant or Dewey – and (b) the extent to which current programmes of moral education are now routinely couched in terms such as ‘character’, ‘hexis’, ‘praxis’, ‘phronesis’, ‘eudaimonia’, ‘virtuous emotion’ and ‘flow’ – technical terms with a distinct Aristotelian ancestry. At the same time, only a moment’s thought makes us realise that if we could time-travel back to Aristotle’s Greece, we would find ourselves in cultural situations so different from ours that we would be all at sea. The surge of interest in Aristotle as a progenitor of contemporary approaches to moral education (recorded e.g. in Lee and Taylor’s helpful content analysis of 40 volumes of the Journal of Moral Education, 2014) is, incidentally, not as old as we might think. Before the 1980s, the prevailing view in educational circles was that, regarding creative originality and modern topicality, Aristotle’s ideas lagged behind those of, for instance, Plato (see Tachibana, 2012). Although the revival of Aristotelian or quasiAristotelian virtue ethics as a leading moral theory was always bound to redirect attention, sooner or later, to Aristotle’s views on moral education, it was not until a seminal article by Myles Burnyeat appeared in 1980 that Aristotle’s reputation as a major educational thinker was re-established. Since then, of course, we have hardly looked back. In the third section of this chapter, I propose to pinpoint the distinctiveness and appeal of Aristotle’s

Introduction

13

approach to character and character education. Prior to that, however, it will be instructive to try to unpack some of the terms that float around in today’s character-education discourse, many of which are of Aristotelian provenance but have taken on lives of their own and assumed new layers of meaning and nuance through history (and some also by being ‘operationalised’ via academic research).

The conceptual terrain of character and character education In many subject-matters, to think correctly is to think like Aristotle; and we are his disciples whether we will or not, even though we may not know it. (Newman, 1982 [1873]: 83) In this section, I introduce a number of concepts relevant to the ideal of the flourishing student/child. I discuss human flourishing, virtues and vices, the relationship between virtue and flourishing, the relevance of virtue ethics, the notions of personality and character, and conclude with a few remarks about character education. I do not pretend to write this in an academically impartial or uncontroversial way. The very choice of concepts taken to stand in need of illumination and how I subsequently illuminate them is inevitably motivated by my Aristotelian predilections. Yet what I offer is a pretty mainstream overview of the conceptual terrain, seen from the vantage point of general character educational approaches forming a significantly broader church than the congregation of either orthodox or self-styled Aristotelians. Human flourishing is a widely accepted goal of life. To flourish is to fulfil one’s potential as a human individual, just as to flourish as an apple tree is to blossom and bear fruit. Some theorists claim that flourishing is so widely accepted not only as ‘a goal’ but ‘the goal’ of life because it unpicks the real meaning of ‘happiness’, and it would seem bizarre to reject the claim that all people seek – as a matter of fact and rightly so – to make their lives happy. This view has backing in the common translation of the Greek term ‘eudaimonia’ (‘flourishing’) into English as simply ‘happiness’. Other theorists disagree and consider human life incomparable to that of a tree. We cannot ask a tree if it is happy, but we need to know if people feel happy before we can claim that they have led potential-fulfilling lives. On a common understanding then, ‘happiness’ for humans means or at least necessarily includes subjective feelings of pleasure and/or a subjective sense of life satisfaction. Advocates of human flourishing – espousing what is sometimes called a eudaimonic view of happiness – maintain that a flourishing life will, in most cases, also be blessed with positive feelings, as the icing on the cake. However, they also find both pleasure and life satisfaction too fleeting, superficial and malleable to constitute the true essence of flourishing. They also

14

Introduction

point out the inherent difficulties in measuring these factors, except through self-reports which tend to be inherently unstable and potentially self-deceitful, and suggest instead some more objective measures. Those disputes linger on, without an end in sight (for a critical overview, see Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 2). What matters for present purposes is simply that most, if not all current forms of character education – including the sort of Aristotelian character education proposed in this book – assume that the ultimate goal of character education is the flourishing of the moral learner (and I say more about the specific Aristotelian take on flourishing in the third section of this chapter). Flourishing constitutes an ongoing activity, and such an activity comprises, most crucially, the realisation of specifically human excellences. We call those excellences virtues, and they are typically considered necessary conditions of flourishing. (That they are not sufficient conditions can be gleaned from the observation that our flourishing is also partly dependent on external luck.) How are the virtues best categorised in psychological language? Unfortunately, most of the terms that have been used to describe them carry infelicitous connotations. The closest answer is perhaps ‘traits’, but in psychology the term ‘trait’ is typically used about attributes that are (at least partly) inherited. The virtues, however – or so the story goes – are acquired first through upbringing, and later one’s own repeated choices, coalescing into stable patterns. ‘Habits’ is another possible answer, but ‘habit’ carries the connotation of mere behavioural traits, which virtues are not. ‘Dispositions’ is a more neutral term and perhaps apt here, although the idea of self-cultivated dispositions is not common in psychology, and the word ‘disposition’ often conjures up the image of a single if-x-obtains-thenA-is-disposed-to-respond-with-y mechanism. The virtues, however, form complex dispositional clusters. It is no wonder that many theorists have given up on technical psychological language and simply refer to them by the Greek term ‘hexeis’, namely ‘states of character’, which sounds pretty bland but can at least be fortified with meaning. So let us say, then, that the virtues constitute settled hexeis, or dispositional clusters, concerned with praiseworthy functioning in a number of significant and distinguishable spheres of human life. Each virtue is typically seen to comprise a unique set of perception/recognition, emotion, desire, motivation, behaviour and comportment or style, applicable in the relevant sphere, where none of the factors (not even ‘correct’ behaviour) can be evaluated in isolation from the others. The person possessing the virtue of compassion, for example, notices easily and attends to situations in which the lot of others have been undeservedly compromised, feels for the needs of those who have suffered this undeserved misfortune, desires that their misfortune be reversed, acts (if humanly possible) for the relevant (ethical) reasons in ways conducive to that goal and exudes an outward aura of empathy and care (see further in Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 1). Diametrically opposed to the virtues

Introduction

15

are the vices: consistent states of wanting and doing evil, albeit typically under some euphemistic description like ‘taking care of one’s own interests’. Vice can be characterised as deep alienation from virtue (cf. Annas, 2011a, chap. 7), rather than simply the absence of virtue. Unfortunately, character educationists have been shy to address the topic of vicious states of character; there is a strong case for arguing, however, that in order to learn to orientate oneself – and help others orientate themselves – in moral space, it pays to have a clear image of vice as well as virtue (Gilead, 2011). Some theorists have questioned whether human beings really possess stable and consistent dispositional clusters of the sort describable as virtues or vices. Recent empirical research indicates that most people do, in fact, possess stable dispositional clusters of the sort under present discussion (Jayawickreme et al., 2014) but that, with the exception of the most and the least perfect among us, those clusters rarely coincide completely with standard designations of, say, honesty or dishonesty per se. Rather, most people possess what Miller (2014) helpfully calls ‘mixed traits’: clusters that, to a smaller or larger degree, resemble the idealised form but incorporate various person-specific and interrelated mental-state dispositions pertaining to the relevant domains (say, the domain of honesty). Most importantly, each mixed trait embodies certain ‘enhancers and inhibitors’ (2014: 52) which influence motivation in trait-relevant ways. Each person thus possesses, so to speak, a different cluster of dispositions, relevant to a moral domain (such as truth-telling), and presents herself to the outside world with a unique individual character profile of psycho-moral preferences and saliences, under whose sway her behaviour oscillates. This theory explains both the apparent unpredictability of behaviour with respect to standard virtues, such as honesty, often found in psychological experiments, and the common-sense intuition that our reactions are almost tediously predictable for those who know us well. Consider person A, who can be almost invariably counted on to tell the truth in a paradigmatic situation such as in the witness box. One day, when filing a loan application at a local bank, A sees the bank employee who gave her such bad investment advice in the past that she lost her life savings in the banking crash. Triggered by her strong anger-enhancer, A decides to be less than truthful about her income in filling out the loan form, in order to wreak revenge on the employee and the bank. Moreover, she can be expected to react similarly in other situations as long as a similar mix of enhancers and inhibitors is triggered. Understood in this way, becoming more virtuous in a given sphere does not mean taking on a virtue wholesale but, rather, gradually moving closer to an ideal. Conversely, becoming less virtuous does not mean dropping virtue like a mantle but rather growing baser by degrees. For those who want to improve their virtues, a major hindrance is constituted by the fact that we do not have any direct introspective access to the real makeup of our virtue-relevant dispositional clusters. Indeed, research indicates that self-deceptions in this area are common – namely discordances between

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Introduction

actual virtue clusters and virtue-tracking self-concepts. This makes the search for objective virtue measures so urgent (see further in Chapter 3 and the third section of Chapter 8). The standard historical image of moral conflict is the Manichaean one between full-blown virtue and vice. The mixed-trait view and recent empirical research suggest a more mundane and complex picture. Internal moral struggles are thus more commonly between, say: •

•

•

•

An overall virtuous cluster and a certain inhibitor or blind spot within it. For example, although I consider myself generally temperate, I know I am terribly weak-willed when it comes to ice cream. Two generally virtuous clusters. For example, shall I display the virtue of honesty or the virtue of considerateness when my friend asks my opinion about the ugly dress she has just bought for the ball? A virtuous cluster applied to a new, out-of-the-ordinary situation. For example, knowing nothing about hospital procedures, I am suddenly asked by a doctor for my opinion about end-of-life decisions relating to a dying parent. A virtuous cluster tested in a situation involving strong social norms of compliance. For example, I am ordered, as a callow army recruit, by an army sergeant to do something that I consider immoral.

The above examples have been chosen from the lives of adult persons who have considerable life experiences to draw upon. One can only begin to imagine how much more difficult such struggles are for young moral learners: namely, the people who are normally being targeted in the discourse on character education (although such education should ideally be seen as a lifelong process). If we understand the virtues as (ideal) excellences that people need in order to live well – individually and together in ways that are peaceful, neighbourly and morally justifiable – then yet another level of complexity needs to be added: The necessary virtues will to a certain extent be relative to individuals, developmental stages and social circumstances. For example, temperance in eating will be different for an Olympic athlete and an office worker; what counts as virtuous behaviour for a teenager may not do so for a mature adult; and the virtues needed to survive in a war zone may not be the same as those in a peaceful rural community. There are a great many virtues, each concerned with potential spheres of human experience. Moreover, in the context of education, particular schools may want to decide to prioritise certain virtues over others in light of the school’s history, ethos or specific student population. Nevertheless, a list of prototypical virtues – that will be recognised and embraced by representatives of all cultures and religions – can be suggested and drawn upon in character education. The list below (derived from the Jubilee Centre’s Framework for Character

Introduction

17

Education in Schools, 2014b) contains examples of such virtues that have been foregrounded in some of the most influential philosophical and religious systems of morality – and that also resonate well with current efforts at school-based character education: Virtue Courage Justice Honesty Compassion Gratitude Humility/modesty

Definition Acting with bravery in fearful situations Acting with fairness towards others by honouring rights and responsibilities Being truthful and sincere Exhibiting care and concern for others Feeling and expressing thanks for benefits received Estimating oneself within reasonable limits

I have so far confined my attention to the so-called moral virtues. That is reasonable for present purposes as we are exploring the virtues in the context of an education aimed at promoting good character (see below). A subset of the moral virtues is formed by the so-called civic virtues, such as citizenship and volunteering, which focus on the moral effects on society at large. However, other virtues are also necessary to achieve the highest potential in life. For example, all developing human beings will need to possess a host of intellectual virtues, such as curiosity and critical thinking, which guide their quest for knowledge and information. We shall see in the following section how one of those intellectual virtues, namely phronesis or good sense, occupies a special position in Aristotle’s system and builds a bridge between the moral and the intellectual. Finally, there are the performance virtues, such as co-operative skills and resilience, which enable us to manage our lives effectively and achieve our goals, whatever they are. As stressed in the first section of this chapter, all good programmes of character education will include the cultivation of performance virtues, but they will also explain to students that those virtues derive their ultimate value from serving morally acceptable ends, in particular from being enablers and vehicles of the moral virtues. Generally speaking, the internal cohesion of one’s virtue system is of crucial importance – more so than the exclusive nourishing of individual virtues. This is why there is good reason to be sceptical of virtue developmental programmes that emphasise the further strengthening of the virtues that one already possesses – so-called ‘signature strengths’ – rather than the overall strengthening of the whole system (Kristjánsson, 2013). A chain is never stronger than its weakest links. Theories of character education, be they Aristotelian or not, tend to assume a constitutive link between virtues and human flourishing, whereas a life of insufficient virtue – not to mention vice – is considered to be ‘the royal road to rack and ruin’ (Carr, 2012: 230). This link can be backed up by considerable empirical evidence of correlations between virtue and well-being, whether

18

Introduction

the latter is understood subjectively (as pleasure or life satisfaction), objectively (as flourishing) or both (see further in Walker, Roberts and Kristjánsson, 2015). Weber and Ruch’s (2012) research with Swiss schoolchildren shows how specific virtues, such as hope, gratitude and zest, are relevant for satisfaction with school experience and can be predictive of global life satisfaction. This finding supports earlier work done by positive psychologists which suggests that the links in question can be explained by the mediating effect of the virtues in building physical and psychological resilience (Peterson, Park and Seligman, 2006) and reducing the risk of substance abuse, alcohol abuse, smoking and violence (Park, 2004). Shoshani and Slone (2013) found that emotional school engagement improved when virtues of gratitude, hope, future-mindedness and purpose were present. In general, the authors associate character strengths in adolescents with various desirable outcomes (subjective and objective), such as subjective well-being, leadership, tolerance, ability to delay gratification, kindness and altruism (cf. Scales et al., 2000) as well as with fewer symptoms of depression and suicidal ideation (cf. Park and Peterson, 2006). In a two-wave longitudinal study that followed 995 15-year-old adolescents in Switzerland for three years, subjects were asked about their decisions and emotions following hypothetical dilemmas involving moral obligations versus self-interest (Malti, Keller and Buchmann, 2013). The adolescents tended towards moral decisions and reported feeling good for following them. With age, participants reported more positive emotions following morally admirable decisions. On the other hand, many people seem to systematically under-estimate the actual strength of such resulting emotions: that is, to make inaccurate affective forecasts about how good they will feel after doing good; such forecasting errors then seem to drive people from the exercise of virtue (Sandstrom and Dunn, 2011). While this empirical research is highly relevant for the present discussion, too much emphasis on the ‘feel-good factor’ accompanying virtue may run the risk of instrumentalising it and obliterating the distinction between moral and performance virtues. Next on the conceptual agenda are a few observations to clarify the notion of virtue ethics. It is beyond controversy that most recent inroads into character education have been directly or indirectly inspired by this type of moral theory, with firm roots in antiquity, which has lately re-emerged as a serious contender to Kantianism and utilitarianism. According to virtue ethics, an action is right not because it can be universalised in light of a rational principle (Kantianism) or because it makes the greatest number of people happy (utilitarianism), but because it enhances virtue and contributes to a flourishing life – as opposed to a languishing or floundering one. Indeed, the focus is no longer on the correctness of individual actions, but rather on their role in a well-rounded life and their roots in the ‘inner world’ of the agent – in stable states of character that incorporate motivational and emotional elements (as already explained). What matters in the end for moral evaluation is not merely observable behaviour, but the emotions with which an action

Introduction

19

is performed, the motivation behind it and the manner in which it is performed. Moreover, the virtues are not understood primarily as complexes of duties and obligations but rather as goals of personal/moral aspiration (see e.g. Carr, 2012: 228, 253). It is difficult to be more precise about the contours of virtue ethics without becoming too technical and alienating non-philosophical readers. I want to flag here, however, the fact that subscribing to (Aristotle-inspired) virtue, ethics involves a number of distinct assumptions, some of which will be explained in more detail in the following section, such as: • •

•

• •

An objective, cosmopolitan view of flourishing as eudaimonia. Moral realism, more specifically moral naturalism, according to which moral facts exist outside of the human mind and are grounded in our nature and the environment in which we live. Self/character realism, according to which who we are deep down is not the same as the set of beliefs we may hold about who we are deep down (that is, self is not the same as self-concept) – although those beliefs are also a part of who we are. Evidential naturalism, according to which all moral theorising is in the end answerable to evidence from social scientific research. Irreducibility of the moral to the expedient, and the idea of the intrinsic (i.e. non-instrumentalist) value of certain states of character (the moral virtues).

Two core terms still await elucidation, ‘character’ and ‘character education’. To start with character, Gordon Allport provided it with a concise and transparent specification in the 1930s as ‘personality evaluated’ – and personality, in turn, as ‘character devaluated’ (Allport, 1937: 52). Since then, in personality psychology, ‘character’ has been used to refer to a certain subset of personality that is morally evaluable and considered to provide persons with moral worth. Most philosophers and educationists will take that to mean that those traits are reason-responsive and educable. So, to give an example, conscientiousness as a personality trait (as one of the famous Big-Five traits in personality psychology about which I say more in the section of Chapter 2) refers to the state of being generally disciplined, reliable and predictable. None of these descriptions is meant to carry moral connotations. A crook can be conscientious as such, and reliable in dealings with fellow crooks. Moreover, conscientiousness as a personality trait is partly inherited and may be hard to educate into or out of people. In contrast, conscientiousness as a character trait (or moral conscientiousness) is a learnt quality, a virtue, of channelling the general conscientiousness into practical contexts of daily life, so even if it turned out that 50 per cent of the personality trait of conscientiousness could be explained genetically, this would not mean that the same applied to the virtuous subset.

20

Introduction

Notice that the virtues are typically seen as the main positive vehicles of the subset of personality that we call ‘character’, and that ascriptions of good and bad character predate (historically) ascriptions of what we today call, loosely and more ‘thinly’, morality or immorality. The ancient Greeks, for instance, had no term translatable as ‘moral’, but they had a complex vocabulary of character (virtue-and-vice) concepts. Psychologists were highly interested in character in the early part of the twentieth century, but then character fell into disrepute because they – entering the heyday of so-called ‘value-free’ social science – became concerned that by studying and promoting character, they would stop being scientists and turn into moralists. This trend may now be changing again, especially within so-called positive psychology which argues for the resuscitation of character constructs (Peterson and Seligman, 2004; cf. Kristjánsson, 2013, for a constructive critique). Yet it would be premature to celebrate the reintroduction of character into mainstream psychological discourse; as I explain in the third section of Chapter 8, it is still something of an orphan there. If we accept the foundational role of the virtues in human flourishing through the creation of good character, the need for character education seems to follow. In other words, schools will naturally be seen to have a responsibility to cultivate the virtues, to define and list the virtues to be prioritised, and then subsequently integrate them into teaching and learning. In this book, ‘character education’ will be used as an umbrella term for any approach to moral education that foregrounds the cultivation of good character in this broad sense. Notably, I avoid applying the term in the narrow sense in which it has frequently been used in educational discourse to designate a certain US-based approach to moral education (see e.g. Lickona, 1991) that some commentators have written off as overly nostalgic and conservative (Nash, 1997). From my Aristotelian perspective, I find some of the critique to which US-style character education has been subjected over the top and unfair (Kristjánsson, 2006, chap. 5) and I do consider some of its most prominent spokespeople, such as Kevin Ryan, Tom Lickona and Marvin Berkowitz, to have their hearts in the right (Aristotelian!) places. Moreover, the term ‘US-style character education’ may be too crude to capture the significant difference between theorists within the camp. That said, my aim in this book is to fashion a form of character education that is, inter alia, sensitive to the animadversions typically directed at mainstream US variants. Character education is no novelty. If we look at the history of schooling from ancient to modern times, the cultivation of character was typically given pride of place, with the exception of a few decades towards the end of the twentieth century when this aim disappeared for a variety of reasons from curricula in many Western democracies. Speaking from a practical UK-based context, James Arthur laments that Britain has ‘a long history of ill-conceived and ineffective efforts at character education’ (2003: 24). There is reason to believe, however, that contemporary character education can be better

Introduction

21

grounded academically than some of its predecessors, with firm support both from the currently prominent virtue ethics in moral philosophy and recent trends in empirically grounded social science that have begun reviving the concepts of character and virtue. Character educationists do not see eye to eye on everything. However, they will tend to agree on a number of significant points (see further in Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, 2014b), such as that: • • •

• • • • •

Character is educable and its progress can, in principle, be measured holistically. Character is important by contributing to individual and societal flourishing. Character is largely caught through role-modelling and emotional contagion; school culture and ethos are therefore essential, although character should also be taught. Character lays the foundation for better behaviour and increased employability. Character results in academic gains, such as higher grades, as a happy byproduct. Character education is about fairness and each child has a right to character development. Character empowers students and is liberating. Character promotes democratic citizenship.

To sum up, in this section I have provided a brief overview of some of the most crucial concepts and assumptions of those accounts that can, in any useful sense, be termed ‘character educational’. It is now time to turn to the particular sort of character education that I am advocating in this book, namely Aristotelian character education, and to explain some of its distinctiveness and attraction.

The distinctiveness and appeal of Aristotelian character education Whatever intellectual progress men have achieved rests on [Aristotle’s] achievements. (Rand, 1963: 18) The simplest answer to the question of why I favour Aristotelian character education over other variants is that I believe Aristotle bequeaths to us a uniquely powerful approach for today’s world, an approach that incorporates a number of essential assumptions which are either non-existent or not as fully developed in any other currently available approach. Before I address these assumptions one by one, let me return briefly to the aforementioned

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Introduction

‘mystery’ of why so many modern educators consider it useful to wring guidance from the assumptions of a thinker who lived more than two millennia ago. Here is a brainstorming sample of some possible explanations. The geniality explanation. According to this explanation, Aristotle was a true genius to whom we have now, fortunately, turned back for guidance. An early advocate of this explanation was Ayn Rand who – never shy of superlatives – described Aristotle as the ‘philosophical Atlas who carries the whole of Western civilization on his shoulders’ (Rand, 1963: 19). The problem with this explanation is that the idea of academic – as opposed to artistic – geniuses is troublesome. For instance, it is generally acknowledged nowadays that whereas no one else other than da Vinci could have painted Mona Lisa, if Newton had not written the Principia Mathematica, someone else would have within a century or so. Moreover, the geniality explanation does not sit well with the fact that the best way to describe Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is that of a work by a ‘safe pair of hands’ rather than as a luminous, epigrammatic and startling piece written by a genius. The common-sense explanation. Famously, Bertrand Russell claimed that there is ‘not a word [in Aristotle] that rises above common sense’ (1946: 191) – although he obviously did not intend that as a compliment as he also said that Aristotle was ‘Plato diluted by common sense’ (1946: 159)! One way to explain why so many contemporary accounts are studded with references to Aristotle will be to point out that the field of character education is so simple and well specified that it was likely that the first decent thinkers who put their heads to it in a rigorous way would uncover most of its truths. Two observations speak against this explanation, however. One is that if moral education is so common-sensical, why have so many theorists got it all wrong (ex hypothesi by not heeding Aristotle’s message)? And why are shelves in bookstores stacked with biographies of people who suffered bad moral education at the hands of apparently bright parents? The other observation is that even if a lot of moral education is simply about common sense, that common sense is presumably better grounded empirically now than it was in Aristotle’s time. Why should we trust Aristotle’s anecdotal evidence when we have over a century of social scientific evidence to draw upon? The relativistic explanation. The idea here is that educational discourse tends to lurch aimlessly from one fad to the other. It is simply an historical coincidence that we have now reached a nostalgic fin-de-siècle where it has become fashionable – conducive to one’s symbolic capital as a scholar – to root for Aristotle. This explanation highlights the transitoriness of ideas and assumes that no objectively grounded argument can be given for one’s adherence to Aristotelianism. As I try to show later in this section, however, this is not the case at all. Aristotelianism presents us with a number of distinct features that provide good reasons for being attracted to it (although some of its features are less appealing, witness the fourth section of this chapter). I

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hope to demonstrate how the recent interest in ‘Aristotle the educator’ transcends such enthusiasm for the latest educational fad. The analogy explanation. According to this explanation, there are striking analogies between aspects of Greek society in Aristotle’s time and our own. After all, the Athenians had experimented with democracy and were faced with many of the same challenges that we encounter in modern Western democracies, including demagoguery and public disaffection or apathy. The obvious counter-argument here is that while these similarities should not be overlooked, there are sufficiently entrenched differences between our conceptions of democracy, religion and childhood (to mention only three) to offset the explanation that Aristotelianism is so appealing to us today because of unique similarities in societal conditions and conceptions. The ventriloquist’s-dummy explanation. On this explanation, the purported Aristotelian renaissance in character education is all smoke and mirrors. What is actually being touted has very little, if anything, to do with the true views of the old master; rather people use him as a ventriloquist’s dummy to air their own – often thoroughly modern – conceptions. There is a grain of truth in this explanation. First, one does not need to dig deep to find accounts that fail to comply with the basics of Aristotle’s philosophy and are, indeed, only nominally Aristotelian (some of those being exposed in Kristjánsson, 2007). Second, while there is nothing wrong, from Aristotle’s own naturalistic perspective, with updating his views in light of new empirical evidence, there are obviously limits to how far one can depart from the original source and still claim that one’s account is ‘Aristotelian’. Yet this explanation fails to tell the whole story, for considerable efforts are being made by contemporary Aristotelians to distance themselves from those who only use Aristotle as a convenient mouthpiece. To use another metaphor, it seems to be possible to separate the Aristotelian wheat from the Aristotelian chaff. (I return to this issue at the beginning of the fourth section of this chapter.) To sum up, none of these five sweeping explanations appears adequate to make sense of the recent appeal of Aristotelianism in educational circles. I believe the crunch question about the cause of its attractiveness admits a more mundane answer, as suggested at the beginning of this section. There are simply various distinct features of the Aristotelian position that commend themselves collectively to contemporary educators, and they do so in that way because they accommodate – better than other candidates in the field – certain powerful and prevailing assumptions in current moral philosophy and moral psychology. Furthermore, while no straight and uninterrupted historical road leads from ancient Greece to the present age, many of the evils with which Aristotle grappled – such as those of unbridled hedonism, subjectivism, instrumentalism and materialism – bear an immediate resemblance to some of the greatest problems of our own age. So what are these ‘powerful’ assumptions that underpin Aristotelian character education and set it apart? I single out ten for scrutiny below:

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First, whereas most forms of character education have only a tenuous or oblique grounding in any underlying moral theory, Aristotelianism imbues morality and (by implication) character with a solid realist (more specifically, naturalist) ontological basis – a basis explaining the grounding of moral facts which inspires confidence in those who, like me, enter the field of character education from a philosophical side-path. Current moral psychologists of an empirical bent – and indeed most, if not all of them, are of such a bent – also typically applaud the realist-naturalist (namely, down-to-earth and non-transcendental) features of Aristotle’s account of ethics and education (see e.g. Lapsley and Narvaez, 2008). Like all naturalisms, Aristotle’s is based on the assumption that we live in a single unified world of human experience where so-called moral properties are exclusively natural properties and hence, in principle at least, are empirically defeasible. According to this approach, moral notions cannot be comprehended in abstraction from human ethology and the natural environment in which we live, and we need considerable fence-crossing between philosophy and social science to understand what really makes people flourish. The same applies, obviously, to the content of moral education aimed at engendering a flourishing life. Although vexing questions remain about the exact division of labour between philosophy and social science at the borderline in question (witness the debate about ‘moralised psychology’ versus ‘psychologised morality’: Kristjánsson, 2010a, chap. 3), the general ontological assumptions of Aristotelian virtue ethics – what Cordner calls its ‘distinctive worldliness’ (1994: 296) – will be music to the ears of most psychologists, not to mention philosophers who subscribe to recent forms of virtue ethics. Representatives from either academic camp can then, ideally, gather around a variant of character education which is forthrightly interdisciplinary: integrating insights from philosophy, psychology and education. In short, Aristotelian character education assumes that there cannot be a serviceable social scientific theory of virtue or of its constitutive elements without significant input from philosophical virtue ethics, any more than there can be a reasonably developed philosophical theory of virtue without grounding in the empirical knowledge of how people actually think about virtues and the way they inform their character. The downside to this assumption, however, is that character education cannot be seen to reside conveniently in a cloistered realm of its own, and its success will be dependent upon both moral philosophy and psychology delivering the goods. (I do have misgivings about the latter, however, at the present point in time, see further in the second and third sections of Chapter 8; cf. Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 4.) Second, whereas most accounts of character education pay homage to an underlying ideal of objective human flourishing, to which the cultivation of character is meant to contribute (recall the second section above), none of them is as specific and nuanced on this point as the Aristotelian prototype. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle proposes and explicates in detail a theory

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of flourishing (eudaimonia) as not only intrinsically desirable in itself, but as the ultimate good and unconditional end (telos) of human beings for the sake of which they do all instrumentally desirable things. An action or a reaction is morally right if and only if it enables human flourishing. According to Aristotle, by analysing empirically the proper ‘function’ of human beings (just as we analyse the proper function of a good knife or a good field of wheat), we can ascertain that human flourishing consists of the realisation of virtues of thought and character and the fulfilment of other specifically human physical and mental potentialities over a whole course of life. This ‘whole-course’ view means that eudaimonia can only be conclusively attributed in retrospect, about a life that has come to an end. A term such as ‘the flourishing child’ must thus not be understood as referring to a child who has achieved flourishing but to a child who is successfully on the way to leading a good life. Eudaimonia is not a passive end-state, however; rather it is an activity of our psyche that embodies reason through the medium of reason-infused virtues. In a nutshell, it is ‘a certain sort of activity of the soul expressing virtue’ (Aristotle, 1985: 23 [1099b25–27]). Moreover, as the virtues are both conducive to and constitutive of eudaimonia, it is an explicitly moral notion. It is impossible to achieve eudaimonia without being morally good – without actualising the moral virtues. However, while necessary for flourishing, they are not sufficient; we also need good friends, family, health, basic material provisions, satisfactory education and substantial supplies of ‘moral luck’ to thrive. Despite these practical considerations, Besser-Jones (2014: 22) deems Aristotelian eudaimonia to be a rarefied and somewhat remote ideal, having little in common with the best informed psychological accounts of flourishing, such as Ryan and Deci’s self-determination theory, which understand proper human functioning in terms of the satisfaction of innate psychological needs rather than the exercise of virtues. Besser-Jones overlooks two things here: the fact that Aristotle’s substantive account of what constitutes flourishing is defeasible by empirical evidence (should that go against it) and the fact that Ryan and Deci now consider their account fully compatible with Aristotle’s, although theirs happens to foreground motivational aspects more than his (Ryan, Curren and Deci, 2013). In summation, all endeavours at character education and virtuous living are, in the Aristotelian model, justified with respect to a rich substantive and empirically grounded account of (universal) human flourishing. The two key attractions here for educationists will, I suggest, be the notions of ‘flourishing’ and ‘universality’. Ideas of the good life and the educated life that ground them somehow in well-being have always resonated well with educationists (see e.g. White, 2011). The special advantage of Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia is that it captures both the objective features of well-being that typically go missing in prevailing hedonic or life-satisfaction accounts, and the assumption that a certain kind of fecund, flow-like pleasure

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does, in fact, supervene upon the objectively flourishing life (Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 2). Understanding well-being in this way, in terms of eudaimonia, is arguably not a mere philosophical stipulation of meaning but corresponds closely to a well-entrenched lay concept that will not grate on the ears of teachers and parents. Third, current accounts of character education often highlight the extrinsic benefits of virtuous living or, at best, make fleeting and cryptic references to the final end of the good life not lying beyond the good life itself, since virtue is its own reward. Aristotelianism has the distinct advantage of upholding a clearer view of the intrinsic value of virtuous character traits: that those are constitutive of the good life rather than simply conducive to it. This neatly contradicts the currently dominant technicism and instrumentalism in education. Instead, it ushers into character education an idea that has been dormant in social science since the days of Max Weber or even longer: the idea of intrinsic value. The modus operandi of instrumentalism is that all means are conducive to rather than constitutive of their ends – hence not intrinsically valuable – and that the ultimate ends/values at which all human endeavour aims are self-chosen and subjective. (I shall not dwell here on rehearsing how instrumentalism of this kind has blighted the field of aimsbased education for decades and is the main ingredient in misguided what-works approaches, see e.g. Harðarson, 2012). When Aristotelians explain the argument behind the claim that not only are ultimate aims of (moral) education objective rather than subjective, but that some of the means to them are intrinsically rather than instrumentally valuable, it comes as a revelation to a number of contemporary moral psychologists and seems to be blazing a trail (see e.g. at least partially, the positive-psychology virtue theory of Peterson and Seligman, 2004; cf. Fowers, 2010). Despite this new ‘trail’, the idea of intrinsic value remains controversial in social science in general and education in particular. Would it be advisable to jettison this hardy perennial of Aristotelianism for the sake of theoretical parsimony and for getting more people on board? Lorraine Besser-Jones has recently made a spirited case for a version of eudaimonic ethics (and, by implication, character education) that is unapologetically instrumentalist. She understands ‘virtue’ simply as a state of character that reliably and predictably enables us to act well in the sense of satisfying innate human needs, especially the need for relatedness to other human beings (see especially Besser-Jones, 2014: 98). She rejects the notion of an intrinsic motivation to engage in virtuous activity as ‘psychologically implausible’, and she does not think that even highly developed moral agents can be expected to derive flow-like enjoyment from virtuous activity, any more than from eating broccoli, although they will be strongly extrinsically (and even autonomously) motivated to engage in it (2014: 132–135). Notice that although Besser-Jones thinks it advisable to ‘scale back’ the traditional ambitions of Aristotelian virtue ethics (2014: 27), her account is far removed from

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that of Tough (2013) who thinks that character education can succeed by focusing solely on performance virtues. She still considers the moral virtues invaluable – albeit, pace Aristotle, only instrumentally so. It would take me too far from the remit of this book to enter into a philosophical debate with Besser-Jones here. Let it suffice to say that her reading of the current empirical evidence on virtues and character is much more pessimistic than mine (Kristjánsson, 2013), and even considerably more pessimistic than that of Miller (2014). Given that the psychologists Ryan and Deci, upon whom she draws most extensively, now offer a much more Aristotle-accommodating take on their research (Ryan, Curren and Deci, 2013), I deem it seriously premature to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as Besser-Jones does, in her otherwise eminently readable and engaging book. That said, if everything else fails, Aristotelians do also have an instrumentalist argument up their sleeves! Recent empirical evidence thus indicates that, in addition to its presumed intrinsic value, Aristotelian character education has instrumental benefits, for instance in the form of higher grades in traditional school subjects (recall the first section of this chapter). Reluctantly or not, Aristotelian moral educators may need to continue to play this card, from time to time, in their dealings with politicians and policy makers. Fourth, another benefit of the firm grounding of Aristotelian character education in a particular moral theory – namely virtue ethics – is that it inherits one of that theory’s main advantages – its respect for ordinary language. In Elizabeth Anscombe’s (1958) diatribe on the state of modern moral philosophy (in particular utilitarianism and Kantianism), which paved the way for the re-launch of virtue ethics in the English-speaking world, there was one slight comfort. Ordinary language about morality, the language commonly employed at the kitchen table or in the classroom about morality, is alright as it is: focusing as it always has on people’s everyday virtues and vices. To be sure, whatever one’s ultimate view may be on utilitarianism and Kantianism, ordinary people have never judged moral worth in terms of a utilitarian ‘maximisation of pleasure’ or a Kantian ‘obeisance of practical reason as dictated by the categorical imperative’. As MacIntyre correctly observes, ‘plain persons are in fact generally and to a significant degree proto-Aristotelians’ (1998: 138). Aristotelian character education provides teachers and pupils with a nonartificial language to talk about moral conduct in the classroom, language that may have partly gone astray in recent decades (as I discuss in the second section of Chapter 2) but still bears retrieval. For example, a recent, successful programme of character education in the UK, the Knightly Virtues programme, gained plaudits from parents for its brushing up of the nuances of moral language. In interviews, parents thus explained that while the concepts of ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’ were often ‘covered’ or ‘done’ at home, the introduction of more complex vocabulary helped their children verbalise their ideas in more robust terms (Arthur et al., 2014; cf. Carr and Harrison,

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2015). This advantage may also explain why virtue ethics has been welcomed by a number of social scientists (see e.g. Lapsley and Narvaez, 2008), as they tend to be more sensitive to popular lay conceptions than philosophers. Fifth, according to Aristotle, it is empirically true that the flourishing of human beings consists of the realisation of moral and intellectual virtues and the fulfilment of their other, specifically human physical and mental capabilities. This is the central magnet of Aristotelian character education without which its individual elements would fall into random heaps. However, is this not the central magnet of all character education? Indeed, it is, but the Aristotelian variant offers the additional benefit of an attractive account of virtue architectonics: the golden-mean structure. Each moral virtue thus constitutes, in Aristotle’s schema, a specific medial character state (e.g. courage), flanked by the extremes of deficiency (e.g. cowardice) and excess (e.g. foolhardiness). There is only one way – the medial way – to be ‘correct’: to be inclined to act in the right way, towards the right people, at the right time. But there is a plethora of ways in which to be ‘bad’ (Aristotle, 1985: 44 [1106b29–35]). From my experience, the aspect of Aristotelian virtue theory that ordinary people find most appealing is precisely this golden-mean structure. As a very similar architectonic can also be found in Confucian virtue ethics (Yu, 2007), one may wonder whether this aspect taps into deeply entrenched public conceptions. More generally speaking, in Aristotelian character education there is nothing other-worldly or uppercase-abstract-like about the concept of moral virtue. The virtues simply constitute a subset – albeit a unique subset – of the skills that people need to live well (Annas, 1993; 2011a; notice, however, some elaborations on this theme in Chapter 4). In some of these spheres, acting well for the right reason matters most (Aristotle, 1985); in others, the emotional component is the crucial one (Aristotle, 2007). The list of virtues remains open-ended and essentially corrigible. As long as one can argue satisfactorily that a distinct sphere of human existence can be carved out where a given state of character constitutes living well within it, that state of character is a moral virtue. This is a model that parents, teachers and children understand quickly and can identify with. David Carr seems, therefore, to be on target when he writes: ‘I am inclined to the view that Aristotle’s approach to understanding virtue and the moral life is in general sufficiently finegrained, exhibits the appropriate degree of complexity, to provide the right sort of model upon which a reasonable picture of moral experience – and hence of the right direction of moral education – might be constructed’ (2012: 193). That granted, however, some contemporary virtue ethicists are sceptical of attempts to flog the Aristotelian horse and suggest other theoretical avenues, ranging from Confucius all the way to Nietzsche (Aristotle’s very own nemesis in MacIntyre’s famous 1981 book, After Virtue). Especially in light of the rising interest in non-Aristotelian forms of virtue education in Asia, Aristotelian character educationists need to make up their minds as to

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how ready they are to embrace ecumenism in this area and whether they can allow themselves to be flexible enough to accept non-Aristotelian forms of virtue ethics as legitimate. Sixth is the unique role of emotions in Aristotelian character education, in contrast to many other forms of character education which concentrate on behavioural modification. Although nowhere does Aristotle produce a definitive list of all the character states that can pass as moral virtues, it is crucial that not only proper actions but also proper reactions are conducive to and constitutive of eudaimonia. Emotions are central to who we are (cf. Kristjánsson, 2010a), and they can, no less than actions, have an ‘intermediate and best condition’ when they are felt ‘at the right times, about the right things, towards the right people, for the right end and in the right way’ (Aristotle, 1985: 44 [1106b17–35]). If the relevant emotion is ‘too intense or slack’, we are badly off in relation to it, but if it is intermediate, we are ‘well off’ (1985: 41 [1105b26–28]); and persons can be fully virtuous only if they are disposed to experience emotions in this medial way on a regular basis. Some virtues are simply emotions, full stop, such as compassion (pain at another’s undeserved plight) that can constitute a full-blown virtue although one may not have the ability to do anything about the plight in question. Emotional traits are seen as reason-responsive and educable; the individual is not simply prey to ungovernable passions. Accordingly, character education – in its early stages at least – will more than anything involve sensitisation to appropriate emotions which, in turn, start to function as moral barometers and motivators by developing into automatic response routines (cf. Russell, 2014c; Besser-Jones, 2014: 156). By assuming that emotions are essentially implicated in the good life at all levels of engagement, Aristotelianism distinguishes itself sharply from Kantian and Kohlbergian ‘hard rationalism’. It also differs from contemporary care ethics in foregrounding a much wider array of morally essential emotions, including self-directed ones (such as pride). Education of the emotions has, of course, become a buzzword in many recent approaches to moral emotion. Aristotelianism, however, offers the bonus of supplying these approaches with an ontology of what I call ‘soft rationalism’ that makes full sense of the role and salience of emotions, without buying into unsavoury forms of hard ‘emotional-dog-wags-the-rational-tail’ sentimentalism about arational emotions as exclusive creators of moral value (explained later in the third section of Chapter 8; critiqued in Kristjánsson, 2010b; Kristjánsson, 2015). Seventh, US-style character education has often been criticised for offering a laundry list of virtues but failing to provide students with any reflective, critical, holistic mechanism to adjudicate between virtues in cases of conflict. Unfortunately, the most recent form of character education – ‘positive education’ (see Peterson and Seligman, 2004) that ameliorates various shortcomings in previous accounts – fails for a number of reasons to make amends

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in this crucial area (Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 7). Aristotle’s demand for reflective holism is, in contrast, stringent and clear. For adults at least, their conduct does not count as virtuous unless it is chosen for the right reasons from ‘a firm and unchanging state’ of character, is motivated by the right emotions and has been overseen and adjudicated by the intellectual metavirtue of phronesis (good sense) which acts as a moral integrator when two virtues, such as considerateness and honesty, clash (Aristotle, 1985: 40 [1105a30–34]). In the Aristotelian model of moral education, education towards reflective competence (namely, becoming a phronimos) must thus ex hypothesi be the ultimate goal, as I explain in Chapter 4. Aristotle is quite unwavering on this point. We cannot be ‘fully good’ without phronesis, nor can we possess phronesis without virtue of character (1985: 171 [1144b30–32]). In order to take the step from merely externally taught (‘habituated’) virtue to full virtue, we must learn to choose the right actions and emotions from a phronesis-guided reflection – which eventually becomes routine. This process takes time, as those who have learnt a virtue through habituation ‘do not yet know it, though they string the [correct] words together; for it must grow into them’ (1985: 180 [1147a20–22]). Stripped of its link to the moral virtues, phronesis degenerates into a cunning capacity – a mere performance virtue – that Aristotle calls ‘cleverness’. Cleverness involves the capacity to act or react in such a way as to ‘promote whatever goal is assumed and to achieve it’; hence, both the phronimoi (persons exhibiting phronesis) and the unscrupulous can be called clever (1985: 154, 168–169 [1140b4–11, 1144a14–1144b1]). To live with the good sense of phronesis is to be open-minded and to recognise the true variety of things and situations to be experienced (cf. Schwartz and Sharpe, 2010). To live without ‘good sense’ is to live thoughtlessly and indecisively. ‘Bad sense’ shows itself in irresoluteness, remissions in carrying out decisions and/or in negligence and blindness to our circumstances. To live without ‘good sense’ is thus to be close-minded; it can reveal itself in a ‘cock-sure’, ‘know-it-all’ attitude that resists reality (cf. Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, 2014b). Good sense gradually matures, if all is well, and explaining how it develops in the individual psyche provides Aristotelian character education with another, but related, advantage. It suggests the inklings of a full theory of qualitative-cum-developmental levels of moral functioning. This theory may not only explain the difference between habituated and phronetic virtue, but also how young people can be reasonably developed morally, at least for their age, without having reached the highest level(s). Being self-controlled (‘continent’), for example, involves taking the right moral decisions, albeit reluctantly and with effort, even possibly resentment or boredom! As well explained by Sanderse (2012, chap. 3.4), while this is not a stage-theory – in the Kohlbergian sense of positing strict stages through which all individuals need to pass in the same order – it provides character educators with a useful analytic tool (and possibly a

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measurement device) to categorise certain reactions as fitting into a certain, well-defined level of moral development. Eighth, one more common lament about standard forms of character education that does not hit at Aristotelianism is that it is unduly individualist: all about ‘fixing the kids’. In order to understand what Aristotelian character education is all about, one must not only study Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics but also his Politics. Proper character education is, according to that work, simply unthinkable outside of well-governed moral communities, offering systematic public education and providing citizens with the basic necessities they need to function well (MacIntyre, 1981; Nussbaum, 1990; Curren, 2000). Moreover, the ideal breeding ground for character is a community in which a vision of the good life is at least broadly shared. Neither is Aristotelian character education individualistic vis-à-vis an excessive focus on how to make oneself a better person. For Aristotle, there is simply no way that one can exercise one’s personal virtues without benefiting others at the same time; in the case of friends, the very distinction between one’s ‘self’ and the ‘selves’ of significant others even becomes blurred, as a true friend acts as one’s ‘second self’, a point upon which I expand in Chapter 6 (cf. also Sanderse, 2012: 205). Given Aristotle’s unambiguously non-individualist stance regarding ethics and education, it is difficult to understand recurrent hues and cries about all character education being essentially individualistic (see further in the third section of Chapter 2). True, the development of individual character traits is, for Aristotle, developmentally and logically prior to the development of broader social concerns, but this does not mean that the latter are in the end any less important; indeed, they are if anything more so! Ninth, standard forms of character education – which assume that young people can acquire global, stable and consistent traits of behaving correctly through moral coaching – are under threat from the much-discussed situationist literature that casts doubt on their existence (see esp. Doris, 2002). Such situationist findings need to be taken seriously by character educationists precisely because naturalist-realists – supportive as they are of academic trespassing – must take empirical evidence seriously; and there is only so much that philosophy can settle on its own. It so happens, however, that Aristotelianism is better equipped than other theories undergirding character education to counter situationism. First, Aristotelianism assumes that robust global character traits only appear at the highest level of moral development (that of ‘full virtue’), to which most people can only aspire, but that various lower levels (for example those of ‘incontinence’ and ‘continence’) still have considerable moral worth compared to the baseline of the morally undeveloped. Second, Aristotelians will want to measure the exercise of character traits not through mere behaviour (as typically done in situationist experiments) but through the combination of reason, emotion and action. A person who seems to act well may not do so for the right reason,

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and hence not possess the respective virtue. Conversely, a person who seems to act badly in a psychological experiment may have been temporarily misled by panic or unfamiliarity. If she feels strong remorse afterwards, she may still possess the character virtue that failed to be exhibited in the experiment. The real strength of these counter-arguments lies in the fact that they are not contrived as ad hoc evasive strategies to parry attacks by situationists, but rather they have been part and parcel of the Aristotelian arsenal from the beginning. (Ultimately, I need to say something more on the situationist challenge, and I do so in the fourth section of Chapter 2.) Tenth, Aristotelian character education neatly straddles the dichotomy of moral education between so-called ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ forms, where standard character education is typically seen to belong to the former. Thus, some early advocates of US-style character education called for ‘direct’ forms of character inculcation, most notably behaviour modification, to replace more ‘indirect’ and wishy-washy forms of moral nurturance. The briefest of looks at the proposed direct–indirect dichotomy (see e.g. Solomon and Watson, 2008) shows, however, that it is impossible to situate Aristotelian character education within one of the two categories. Aristotelian character education would clearly emphasise the different learning styles of children and adults (which is supposed to be an indirect-approach criterion) but at the same time highlight the role of early-age reinforcements (in the manner of the direct approach). Aristotle’s method is all about nurturance and tacit modelling (indirect approach) but it also foregrounds the salience of external guidance (direct approach). Moreover, one need not be an Aristotle geek to know that for him, the cultivation of virtues as hexeis is not tantamount to the modification of mere behavioural habits. Another related advantage here is the essential educational emphasis of the moral theory underlying Aristotelian character education. Obviously, all forms of character education are, by definition, about education. In Aristotelianism, however, character education is not an extraneous addition to an understanding of morality or the study of moral philosophy; it is, rather, what such understanding and study are all about! We progress towards moral excellence only if we are educated from an early age – indeed from birth – to do so. A study of morality would, by Aristotle’s light, be an entirely fruitless enterprise if it did not gauge the educational implications of its findings. Contemporary moral philosophy is commonly lambasted – by moral psychologists for example – for its lack of attention to developmental issues and its almost complete neglect of childhood. Aristotle’s stance is so radically different here that he could almost be accused of the opposite error: of reducing moral philosophy to character education. For him, it is more precious to know how virtue arises than to know what it is (see Tachibana, 2012: 51–52). More specifically, regarding moral inquiry as such, its purpose ‘is not to know what virtue is, but to become good, since otherwise the inquiry would be of no benefit to us’ (Aristotle, 1985: 35 [1103b27–29]). I

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cannot think of a more suitable platform from which to launch a programme of character education.

The problems of Aristotelian character education – and the plan of this book I reject the [...] domesticating of Aristotle’s thought [...] We live in a different world and cannot will ourselves back [...] When interpretative charity makes Aristotle speak the truth by saying what we say, charity becomes condescension. (Garver, 2006: 3) After surveying the pros of Aristotelian character education in the preceding section, I now turn to what I consider to be genuine problems in applying Aristotelianism to contemporary character education. It is here that contemporary Aristotelians need to engage in some serious reconstruction work, or simply decide to depart from the historical Aristotle, to avoid running the risk of being led down academic rabbit holes. It would, in my view, be an illusion to think that simply by staying closer to Aristotle’s own voice, all the fragments of character educational theory will necessarily fall into place. To be sure, avoiding misbegotten Aristotelianism is a good starting point, but the field of character education does not gain anything from Aristotelian idolatry – and there are clearly areas where Aristotle needs to be complemented or even seriously updated. The great empirical scientist that he was, in addition to being a philosopher (in fact, he saw no essential distinction between the two), I am sure that he would be fascinated by the evidence that contemporary science can provide and the advances that have been made in the study of the human condition in the past 2300 years. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that given Aristotle’s own method of evidential naturalism, according to which all moral theorising needs to be empirically informed, the best way to remain faithful to the spirit of his works is to engage in Aristotelian reconstructions that are sensitive to latter-day findings from the natural and social sciences (Kristjánsson, 2007). While I personally find myself in broad agreement with the features of Aristotelianism that I have labelled as ‘pros’ above, I worry that contemporary Aristotelians have tended to underplay the ‘cons’ to be explored in this section, even to the point of sweeping them under the rug. There is nothing gained, however, in trying to achieve Aristotelianism on the cheap! As noted repeatedly already, recent times have seen a number of moral educators and philosophers making a case for the retrieval of less diluted forms of Aristotelianism in contemporary character education (e.g. Sherman, 1989; Carr, 2012 [originally 1991]; Steutel, 1997; Curren, 2000, 2010; Kristjánsson, 2007; Sanderse, 2012). Tachibana (2012) helpfully divides these scholars into three discrete camps: the interpreters whose main aim is

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to make sense of Aristotle’s own educational thought and remain deferential to him; the applicators who – not considering themselves to be classics scholars – are exclusively concerned with repackaging Aristotle’s ideas as food for contemporary educational thought, so remaining respectful without being deferential; and the mediators who want to combine Aristotelian exegesis with a contemporary update and resuscitation. The clearest distinction to be drawn here is obviously between the interpreters who confine themselves mostly to an exegesis of Aristotle’s texts (e.g. Curzer, 2012) and the applicators who try to reconstruct a coherent Aristotelian position on issues where Aristotle’s own discussion is incomplete or inconsistent (e.g. Sherman, 1989). As I belong to the latter, I now propose to list some of the potential shortcomings of an Aristotelian approach to character education and to explain how subsequent chapters aim to offer reprieves. First on the list is what I would call the PR problem – not so much one of Aristotelian character education itself as of its often lukewarm reception. In trying to get the Aristotelian message across to policy makers, politicians and teacher-training institutions, Aristotelians seems to be facing a crisis of public relations. Although various ‘myths’ about the assumptions and implications of Aristotle-based character education may have been defused in the charmed circles of academic character education itself, they persist as an uncomfortable residue in other sectors, where purely academic arguments do not seem to make much difference (Walker, Roberts and Kristjánsson, 2015). Politicians, in particular, seem scared of being accused of prescriptive (‘paternalistic’) interventions in the life-decisions of autonomic citizens; this may explain why they tend to take more readily to Tough’s (2013) amoral message on character than the Aristotelian, moralised one. Indeed, engaging politicians in dialogue sometimes feels like entering shark-infested waters! Aristotelians need to couch their views in a language that is less off-putting than some of the current academic vocabulary seems to be for those who take the eventual decisions on what is included in teacher-training and school curricula. The PR problem is not only, however, confined to non-academic audiences. Initiatives to cultivate character and virtue in moral education at school continue to provoke sceptical responses from academics also. Most of these echo familiar misgivings about the notions of character, virtue and education in virtue – as unclear, redundant, old-fashioned, religious, paternalistic, anti-democratic, conservative, individualistic, relative and situation-dependent. While most of these misgivings are not directed specifically at Aristotelian character education, but rather at all forms of character education, they merit some serious responses in this book, which I try to provide in Chapter 2. The second problem concerns the lack of instruments to measure moral virtue for and within character education. Aristotelian virtue ethics is, as already explained, a type of moral naturalism. Moral naturalists are realists about morality; they believe that such moral properties as honesty or

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wickedness really are features of the natural world. For naturalists, statements about ‘moral facts’ are true if they correspond to this natural reality, but false if they do not. The great majority of existing instruments to measure moral character – for instance the positive psychological VIA-instruments for youth and adults (Peterson and Seligman, 2004) – are, however, simple self-report questionnaires. Moral realists complain about possible response biases in such measures caused by self-deceptions, self-confirmation tendencies and social desirability norms. In response, anti-realists ask what sorts of measures the realists have then devised to measure, say, objective moral virtue (rather than simply people’s own conceptions of how virtuous they are), and the answer is not readily forthcoming. No tried-and-tested instruments to concretise and measure moral virtue – on an Aristotelian naturalist-realist conception – seem to exist. But this lacuna calls the very idea of Aristotelian character educational projects into question, since they will need, in order to establish their scientific credibility, pre-and-post tests of their impact on moral virtue. It could be asked why Aristotle himself did not address this problem. There are two obvious reasons for this. One is that the Nicomachean Ethics is written for people already ‘brought up in fine habits’ (1985: 6 [1095b4–b6]): namely, people who have, so to speak, experienced the benefits of education in good character and need no further convincing of its salience. The second reason is that Aristotle’s age was not as obsessed as ours with measurements and audits, and he was not forced to compete – as today’s character educationists need to – with advocates of various other programmes that are also meant to enhance the pro-social functioning of the young but without foregrounding their moral virtues. That said, contemporary moral educators cannot avoid addressing this measurement problem head-on, preferably through Aristotle-inspired (if not Aristotle’s own) insights. Not to put too fine a point on it, one might have been excused for thinking, until recently at least, that serious scholarship was automatically on holiday when it came to evaluations of programmes of character education. In the last few years, meta-analyses of impact have started to appear – some presenting positive results and helpful recommendations about what works in character education (Berkowitz and Bier, 2006; Lovat et al., 2009; Durlak et al., 2011). Hampering such studies, however, is the methodological issue explained in the previous paragraph. Thus, in referring to effectiveness, this is generally measured via self-reports or other-reports rather than objective criteria. When objective criteria are invoked – for example, the number of violent incidents in the school yard or the number of students found carrying knives – questions remain about how to interpret positive findings. Do they really mean that there has been an improvement in character, or only that students have devised better ways of not being found out? On the other hand, we could decide to be more charitable and say that if a programme of character education has had a marked positive effect on school ethos, we should simply be thankful for that and not worry too much about the

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underlying mechanisms! Not being content with this approach, however, on behalf of Aristotelian character education, I have given considerable thought to the issue of how we can design instruments that: • • • • • •

Track objective moral features, such as moral virtues in students and school ethos, and do not rely on mere self-reporting. Are faithful to the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Aristotelian character education. Have transformative as well as research-based aims, i.e. can measure and monitor progress. Are simple and easy to use and satisfy demand from schools for a preand-post test of implementing character-education initiatives. Fit, conceptually and linguistically, into the culture of UK schooling. Provide information of use to headteachers, teachers and parents about the moral landscape of their school.

Chapter 3 presents the results of my reflections on this thorny methodological issue. Given the current state of play, the main conclusion of the chapter is that a proper instrument to measure (Aristotelian) virtue needs to be an eclectic patchwork and offer the possibility of triangulation. It is further suggested that a mixed-method instrument combining self-reports, otherreports and more objective measures – more specifically, dilemma tests – may be our best bet at the moment. The third problem – and perhaps the best documented of the ones discussed in this section – concerns the development of critical, reason-infused or phronesis-guided virtue. So much in Aristotle’s corpus itself, and later forms of Aristotelian character education, is about the early stages of moral life as the development of habituated virtue. The same attention has not been showered upon the supposed prequel to the story: namely, about how the inculcation of habituated virtue may prepare the moral learner for the critical reassessments that phronesis requires. If we simply rely on textual exegesis here – unrelenting fidelity to what Aristotle actually says about pre-phronesisinfused virtue – we seem obliged to acquiesce in an account, albeit a brief and truncated one, of habituation as a process of painful, mindless conditioning (see e.g. Curzer, 2012, chap. 15). This has led many theorists to conclude that Aristotle’s theory of moral development and character education is saddled with a disabling paradox: the much-discussed ‘paradox of moral education’. How can it be simultaneously true that it is the aim of character education to develop persons who conduct themselves by their intellects (intelligently and critically) and that this goal can be best achieved by inculcating in them from an early age certain ready-made habits of action and feeling (Kristjánsson, 2007, chap. 3)? How can ‘the palace of Reason’ simply be entered uncritically ‘through the courtyard of Habit and Tradition’ (Peters, 1981: 52)?

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The reasonable manoeuvre for the contemporary Aristotelian seems to be to throw off all deference to Aristotle here and engage in some pretty ferocious reconstructions. After all, Aristotle’s moral developmental psychology in the Nicomachean Ethics is so incomplete that it seems natural to suggest that he must have said something more about it elsewhere, in some of the works that we know to be lost. Nancy Sherman has undertaken this task, and a mammoth one at that, while remaining somewhat understated and unforthcoming about the extent to which it departs from the textual evidence, admitting only that her reconstruction is true to the ‘spirit’ of Aristotle’s account although it does not ‘fully elaborate’ upon the text (1989: 171). Her overall claim is, however, that ‘if full virtue is to meet certain conditions, then this must be reflected in the educational process’ (1989: 159). In other words, Sherman is politely implying that, as it stands, Aristotle’s account is not coherent (logically, psychologically, morally, educationally). It needs to be revisited, rethought and revised. The aim of Chapter 4 is precisely to repair the dearth of attention given to phronesis in character-education circles and to bring considerations from other, but related, discourses (such as general Aristotelian scholarship and wisdom studies in psychology) to bear on it. I pay special attention to the socalled skill analogy, which considers virtue acquisition on a par with the acquisition of ordinary practical skills, but argue that current articulations of it fail to account fully for the integrative, as distinct from the constitutive, function of phronesis. I argue that the skill analogy needs to be extended to account for the fact that in order to develop fully, phronesis requires direct teaching about the nature of the well-rounded life, in turn providing the learner with a theoretical blueprint for eudaimonia. It must be admitted here, however, that invoking the idea of an Aristotelian ‘blueprint for eudaimonia’ does rather open up a can of worms in Aristotelian scholarship. Reigning supreme in a substantial part of that scholarship, not least the part concerned with Aristotle’s views on character education, is a ‘particularist’ interpretation of phronesis, according to which moral wisdom is about the intuitive, situational appreciation of individual noble things – non-generalisable across situations – without the need for any general moral theory or grand-end arithmetic. I have criticised this interpretation sternly before (Kristjánsson, 2007, chap. 11). From an exegetical point of view, I believe it is wrong; it overlooks Aristotle’s insistence that fully virtuous agents have not only gained insight and sensitivity from repeated experiences but also have an understanding of the general ‘first principles’ of morality, acquired for instance by digesting the Nicomachean Ethics. That said, the exact contours of a putative Aristotelian grand-end moral theory are not beyond controversy, apart from cryptic remarks he makes about the most important virtues being those that benefit most people. There is considerable rescue work to be done here. In any case, I argue in Chapter 4 that the particularist interpretation has disabling ramifications for moral learners, and

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that the case against it needs to be re-prosecuted if Aristotelianism is to work as a sound basis for character education. Let me now turn to the fourth and fifth problems, collectively, as I propose to address them in the same chapter. The fourth problem haunting Aristotelian character education concerns the ‘best life’ of contemplation. Ordinary readers of the Nicomachean Ethics (and most of the current secondary literature on it) may be forgiven for thinking that it is a treatise about the good life for human beings constituted predominantly by virtuous, phronesisguided conduct. It, therefore, comes as a bolt from the blue when Aristotle suddenly announces in Book 10 that phronesis is actually not the supreme activity in eudaimonia but rather contemplation, meaning the self-sufficient, god-like and leisurely theoretical study of unchanging things: the supreme objects of knowledge! This bold claim has received scant attention outside of the hermetically sealed hothouse of Aristotelian studies. Even within it, scholars have been busy trying to write it off as a later addition by one of Aristotle’s disciples, or providing fanciful reinterpretations of contemplation as the amplification of knowledge already presupposed by the virtuous life (see e.g. Garver, 2006: 199). It seems to me, however, that far from constituting a ‘bug’ in Aristotle’s philosophy, Book 10 is an ingrained, ineliminable part of it. If that is the case, Aristotelian character educationists cannot, with impunity, pretend that this part of Aristotelianism does not exist – unless, that is, they are happy to adopt recognisably un-Aristotelian positions. The fifth problem is about the hopelessness of bad education. I mentioned the unremitting educational emphasis as an Aristotelian pro in the third section of this chapter. The downside of that emphasis is, however, Aristotle’s radical pessimism about the possibility of people who have received bad moral education in their early years ever being able to see the light and develop morally. Notably, Aristotle does not claim that people who have received good education will necessarily turn out good; moral virtue still requires considerable personal effort. But he is quite adamant – to take a modern analogy – that a person who is given an inferior racing car will never win a Formula 1 race. The problem with this view is the fact that most of us will claim to know examples of individuals who, despite debilitating circumstances in their upbringing, have nevertheless succeeded in transcending those conditions and acquiring a moral character. Once again, contemporary Aristotelians may be well advised to relax the rigidity of Aristotle’s position. The aim of Chapter 5 is to reconstruct these two counter-intuitive Aristotelian theses – about contemplation as the culmination of the good life and about the impossibility of undoing bad upbringing – to bring them into line with current empirical research, as well as with the essentials of an overall Aristotelian approach to character education. I illustrate the two theses and their counter-intuitive ramifications by dint of three life stories of imaginary persons. Subsequently, I offer a reconstruction of Aristotle’s theses which, while going beyond the textual evidence, remains faithful to core

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elements of his moral and educational theory. I finally bring some considerations from the current literature on self-change to bear on this Aristotelian reconstruction, arguing that the effects of bad upbringing can be undone through contemplative activity. I also elicit some implications of the proposed argument for contemporary education and schooling. The sixth problem of Aristotelian character education is its lack of a systematic methodology of teaching. Now, it is not as if contemporary Aristotelian character educators are devoid of methods to cultivate virtue in moral learners. Aristotle’s corpus is teeming with ideas on how to achieve that end via habituation and service learning (learning to be just by doing just acts, etc.), emulation of moral exemplars, use of relevant literary sources, and the administering of the proper music to arouse appropriate emotions and pleasures. The problem is rather that these staples are not co-ordinated or synchronised into a systematic age-and-development-adjusted teaching methodology. It is incumbent, therefore, on contemporary Aristotelians to design such a methodology almost from scratch. Not many of them have so far risen to that challenge (see Sanderse, 2012, however, for a notable stab at this task, to which I unhesitatingly guide readers). As already noted, the aim of the present book is not to offer a detailed teaching manual operationalising the Aristotelian staples (see further in the fourth section of Chapter 8); that will remain a project for another day. What I can do, however, and propose to take on in Chapter 6, is to address a common methodological complaint against Aristotelian character education: that it fails to utilise the resources of the sort of method that through the centuries seems to have been the most serviceable one for character coaching. I am talking of the method of moral discussion or dialogue – as foregrounded, for instance, by Aristotle’s predecessor Socrates. The aim of Chapter 6 is to bury the old saw that dialogue is exclusively a Socratic and not an Aristotelian method of character education. Considerable enlightenment can be gleaned here by studying Aristotle’s account of friendship, especially his account of how character friends reciprocally construct each other’s selfhoods through sustained, dialectical engagement. It is clear from this description that ideal character building essentially involves dialogue. If that is correct, in the case of character friendship, then new light can be shed on other Aristotelian staples of character education, such as role modelling and the use of literature and music, as those will then also, by parity of reasoning, involve sustained use of a dialogical method. The seventh and final problem that I consider to hamper contemporary Aristotelian character education is its lack of attention to psycho-moral personal and professional issues affecting not the student, this time, but the character educator. This lacuna is perhaps understandable in Aristotle’s own writings as character education in his time was mostly undertaken by parents rather than professional teachers, but it does not excuse current Aristotelians for not grappling with it. Some have; David Carr (see e.g. 2000, 2012) has,

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for instance, probably written more about this topic than any other living educationist, and another Aristotelian, Sanderse, has also chipped in recently (2012). My proposed contribution, in Chapter 7, is to say something about the relationship between teachers’ personal and professional characters and self-identities. In recent years, studies of teachers’ professional identities and the emotional dimension of teaching have proliferated. I argue that the literature on both issues has become saddled with a domineering paradigm that I consider at once theoretically dodgy and practically unwholesome. I call it the constructivist-cognitive paradigm, and take it to task here. According to this paradigm, people have multiple identities but no actual selves, and emotions are understood either as non-cognitive thrusts or as exercises of social power. By exposing the weaknesses of this paradigm, I pave the way for an Aristotle-inspired alternative view of teachers as character educators and offer some suggestions as to its outcome. In the final chapter of the book, Chapter 8, I bring the argument to a conclusion by drawing together some of the main threads of the preceding discussion and weighing in on a number of remaining, unresolved issues. I argue that even if the reader concurs with my ‘solutions’ to the problems of contemporary Aristotelian character education, the battle for its symbolic capital among academics, educators, policy makers, politicians and the general public is not won. Deeper concerns remain about the very idea of the moral education of young people and what contemporary research – especially psychological research – can tell us about the viability of that goal. Further questions also linger on about the academic (especially social scientific) ‘spirit of the times’ – as compared with that of some previous heydays of moral education – and how conducive it is to the sort of efforts at character education promoted in this book. I bring some of those deeper issues to the fore in the final chapter, which constitutes something of an everything-I-have-ever-learntabout-moral-education-but-never-articulated-before sort of personal odyssey. I have tried to illustrate in the third and fourth sections of this chapter how contemporary Aristotelian character education is tied by innumerable threads both to Aristotle’s achievements and limitations. While there is no reason for present-day Aristotelians to kneel to Aristotle and accept all he says as gospel, vexing questions remain as to how far they can allow themselves to depart from his insights and still claim their Aristotelian heritage. Each generation must appropriate those insights anew. Idolatry that forms too solid a crust may stop the inlets of fresh findings, something which Aristotle himself would have taken strong exception to. There is, to be sure, no substitute for clear thinking – which is why, when thinking clearly about character education, there is no substitute for Aristotle’s sharp and sober eye. But even if we stand, by necessity, in a master-apprentice relationship to him, apprentices are often justified in upstaging their masters. I hope the present section has persuaded readers of the need to engage critically with his corpus in order to move today’s character education forward.

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Waxing personal While we are men, we cannot help, to a great extent, being Aristotelians. (Newman, 1982 [1852]: 83) I hope I may be excused for waxing personal in this final section by saying something to explain the sense of urgency which the remit of this book carries for me: how grappling with it constitutes a personal crusade as much as an academic pursuit, and how it holds the very key to the research focus of the research centre where I am currently employed. It is instructive to begin by saying something about the relevant motivational and practical context. A group of educationists and educational philosophers have, over the years, tried to import Aristotelian ideas about human flourishing, character and virtue into moral-education discourse. Many of those academics, including the present author, are now working in the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues: a multi-million pound institution, mostly funded by the John Templeton Foundation and based at the School of Education, University of Birmingham. Launched in May 2012, it currently employs almost 30 full-time members of staff, the majority of whom are exclusively engaged in research. The professed remit of the new Centre is to make it into a major international hub of interdisciplinary research into character, virtue and character education. The research team is currently (at the time of writing in late 2014) coming towards the end of a number of large research projects – instigated as part of the first phase of work in the Centre – of which two are most relevant for present purposes: one on the professional virtues of teachers, medical doctors and lawyers, and how such virtues develop from entry into professional studies to the vicissitudes of professional practice (see Kotzee et al., 2014); the other on moral development and character education in UK schools (see Walker, 2014). It is worth stressing that beyond the obvious academic aims of producing high-quality research work for dissemination in scholarly journals, the vision for the Jubilee Centre is not merely exploratory, with regard to current attitudes to character and values, but also transformative: to ‘shape the future attitudes and behaviours of the British people’ and ‘if required transform them’ (Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, 2014a). Although the transformative aim will occupy a larger role in later phases of work in the Centre, the recent production of a ‘Framework for Character Education in Schools’ (Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, 2014b) – a sort of theoretical and practical manifesto for the education of character – already highlights the practical orientation of its work. It can be said without exaggeration that given its grandiose aims, sweeping compass and sheer scale of funding and manpower, the Jubilee Centre constitutes the largest research exercise in character and character education ever undertaken in the UK context. I am personally excited about the

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prospect of working with this enthusiastic group of people and grateful for the opportunity afforded us to pursue wide-ranging research in an area of practical ethics. Given that the language of the Jubilee Centre has a distinctively Aristotelian, virtue-ethical flavour, it may seem that my Chair there with dual foci on ‘character education and virtue ethics’ is tailor-made for a practically minded Aristotelian. After all, ‘Aristotle is the father of virtue ethics, and virtue ethics is hot’ (Curzer, 2012: 1)! Against that could be pitted the fact, however, that I have been fairly consistent in the past in baulking at various attempts to revive Aristotelian or quasi-Aristotelian character education for contemporary consumption (Kristjánsson, 2006, chap. 5; 2007, chap. 6; 2013). As the Jubilee Centre clearly wishes to close ranks with some of those earlier attempts at what I have previously been inclined to characterise as vulgarised Aristotelianism, such as by holding joint seminars with positive psychologists and forging bonds with US-style character education, is my involvement in this work not a classic case of a poacher cynically turning gamekeeper? I would respond by pointing out that there has never, in my view, been anything wrong with wanting to bring Aristotle up-to-date for use in contemporary classrooms – that is, as long as we do not simply use him as a dummy to pursue our own un-Aristotelian agendas. I am also tempted to point out here that my criticisms in the past have typically taken the form of friendly amendments rather than wholesale rejections. I have systematically avoided dipping my pen in gall! That approach is clearest in my recent exploration of positive psychology’s virtue theory (Kristjánsson, 2013), an exploration which tries to steer a middle course between the uncritical celebration by some of its admirers and the curmudgeonly attitude represented by some of its critics. Although I have raised various objections to elements of positive psychological theory, as to the older Aristotelian retrievals – both from a theoretical (philosophical) and practical (educational) standpoint – many of these protests have been less objections to the underlying rationales of their retrieval than invitations to articulate them in greater detail and make better use of available conceptual and empirical sources. In that sense, I have been a gamekeeper all along, not a poacher – although I have at times allowed myself to metamorphose into a Socratic stingray. As the following chapters of this book illustrate, I am not giving up that habit despite being now formally admitted into the gamekeepers’ legion! The classic question that any author must ask before writing a book is: Is there any need for it? Much as I admire earlier book-length attempts at grounding Aristotelian character education in a philosophical-cum-educational theory, such as those of Curren (2000), Sanderse (2012) and Carr (2012), I do believe in the potential value-addedness of the present work. Carr’s 2012 book (originally issued in 1991) is a true classic of the field and prepares the ground admirably for a sophisticated form of character-education theory. However, it does not focus attention in any great detail on the

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Aristotelian roots of character education, and Carr positively prides himself in being exclusively theoretical and eschewing any ‘discussion of the practical apparatus of pedagogy and curriculum’ (2012: 7). Moreover, he is pretty dismissive of the contribution of social scientific findings to the endeavour of making sense of character education. My approach is more ecumenical and encompassing in that respect. Curren (2000) offers an unparalleled account of the socio-historical and political assumptions undergirding an Aristotelian programme of character education, but he gives the nuts and bolts of such education short shrift (though he has added considerably to that discussion in various subsequent papers, see e.g. Curren, 2010; 2013; 2014a). Sanderse’s 2012 work is possibly the closest contender to the present one, as Sanderse combines philosophical reflection, based on Aristotle, with an account of social scientific evidence and practical applications. However, Sanderse’s ‘Aristotle’ is much more MacIntyrean/communitarian and socially constructivist than my ‘Aristotle’; and Sanderse thinks that he needs to be supplemented by Socrates in order to make sense of the use of dialogue/discussion in character education, whereas I consider dialogue to be a quintessentially Aristotelian method (see Chapter 6). Ideally, all these works should be read together in tandem to form a coherent, holistic picture of the contours of Aristotelian character education and to gauge its applicability for current-day, practical use.

Chapter 2

Some persistent myths about Aristotelian character education

The PR problem When I first started to talk about Aristotelian character education at academic conferences, I used to confront the same standard set of objections, to which I gradually developed an arsenal of instant responses. This has changed over the years, as the suspicion that character education constitutes either a conspiracy from the right (of blaming individual kids rather than social structures for moral ills) or the left (of inserting a therapeutic Trojan horse of touchy-feeliness into educational discourse to undermine traditional standards) has been fading away. Yet various negative conceptions about the notions of character, virtue and character education do remain in some academic circles, especially outside the specific fields of moral education and moral psychology, and even more so among the ‘chattering classes’ of bloggers, media pundits and politicians, who still cling fiercely to some of the old misconceptions. This is why I suggested in the fourth section of Chapter 1 that Aristotelian character education still has a PR problem; it simply has got pretty bad press over the years. The negative conceptions are best represented by what I would call ten proverbial and persistent ‘myths’ about character education. I argue in this chapter that those myths are based on conceptual (Myths 1 and 2), historical (3 and 4), moral (5 and 6), political (7 and 8), epistemological (9) and psychological (10) misunderstandings or misinterpretations of character and virtue. Although some of my deconstructions will need to be quick and rely on references to background literatures rather than knock-down arguments, I hope to show that the objections underlying the ten myths are not serious stumbling blocks to the aim of character education, at least not of the Aristotelian kind. That qualification is apt, for most of the myths in question are indiscriminately aimed at all forms of character education and do not take into account the subtle differences between them.

Conceptual and historical myths In this section, I spell out and dissect Myths 1–4.

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Myth 1: ‘Character and virtue are unclear notions’ An initial sceptical question about character education is: What do the concepts of character and virtue really mean? Are these essentially unclear and ambiguous notions? In comparison with the ‘closed’ concepts of mathematics and natural kinds, one could say they are. There is no platinum bar of good character preserved in a French museum. However, in comparison with other standard concepts in philosophy and social science, there is nothing unusual about them. Most concepts in those disciplines are either open-textured natural concepts (such as ‘freedom’) or clustered familyresemblance concepts (such as ‘game’). Philosophers have developed ways of trimming the ragged edges of such concepts through critical revisions, and social scientists use methods such as prototype analyses to gauge nuances of public usage (see e.g. Morgan, Gulliford and Kristjánsson, 2014). Yet troublesome borderline cases will always remain. Even such a common everyday concept as that of ‘teacher’ is an open-textured one. Was Confucius really the ‘first teacher’? I suppose that depends on the definition! As far as open-textured concepts go, ‘character’ and ‘virtue’ have a comparatively stable meaning in mainstream academic discourse. I already tried to convey the general contours of that meaning in the second section of Chapter 1, then adding some Aristotelian specifics in the third section. I hope those sections sufficed to show that there need not be anything essentially unclear or ambiguous about the notions in question, and that the Aristotelian specifications provide a convenient way of making oneself understood both to academic colleagues and the general public. However, not all virtue ethics is Aristotelian, and although the present book is promoting a conception of character education grounded in that particular moral theory, it can scarcely be the aim of any broad-minded character educationist to reduce the polyphony of voices on virtue ethical issues to one. This is also the reason why I proposed in Chapter 1 that we understand ‘character education’ as an umbrella term for any form of moral education that foregrounds the role of virtuous character in the good life, but then use modifiers such as ‘Aristotelian’ to specify in more detail the theoretical provenance and leanings of the approach under discussion. Myth 2: ‘Character and virtue are redundant notions’ Even if the notions of character and virtue are clear and do have a distinguished pedigree, they might be deemed to have been overtaken by more recent notions that capture better what we aim to say by such language. In support of this thesis, critics might cite the findings of a recent study of the use of general and specific virtue words in 5.2 million books published between 1901 and 2000, which shows a steady decline in the use of traditional virtue terms (Kesebir and Kesebir, 2012). What could such terms then have been replaced by?

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Two possibilities present themselves. One is the Big-Five Model of personality, according to which the traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism are alleged to capture what is most significant about individual differences. Against the earlier observation from the second section of Chapter 1 that these traits are explicitly defined so as to exclude moral content, Big-Five theorists could respond that conscientiousness and agreeableness nonetheless suffice in practice to describe the specific characteristics of so-called virtuous people. As I have argued elsewhere (Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 3), however, despite advantages of the Big-Five Model for some purposes, it suffers from arbitrariness regarding the traits that make us ‘who we are’ in an everyday sense. The quest for the signature traits that set each individual apart from any other can be traced all the way back to Gordon Allport (1937). Spurred on unapologetically by the positivism that was sweeping through social science at the time, Allport decided that personality psychology – in its search for core traits – would have to banish all moral constructs from the reckoning, as unscientific, and to focus not on character as commonly understood (or what he called ‘personality evaluated’), but rather on non-moral personality qua ‘character devaluated’ (Allport, 1937: 52). Even nowadays, personality psychologists are quick to remind us that the above-mentioned Big-Five traits – in the model that they gradually developed and that still holds sway – are to be understood amorally as broad profile dispositions, essentially unchannelled to specific situations. However, the Big-Five Model has been criticised theoretically by fellow personality psychologists for its arbitrariness: for failing to distinguish between within-person patterns that are stable, on the one hand, and psychologically meaningful, on the other (Funder, 2009). From a practical perspective, the Big-Five Model does not seem to cut the mustard either, as it does not even help us find ideal partners in a dating agency. Research shows that people regard moral virtues such as honesty higher than Big-Five traits when looking for a potential spouse (Baumeister and Exline, 1999). If the Big-Five Model suffers from theoretical and practical arbitrariness, it is, I suggest, because it overlooks the fact that for our everyday understanding of selfhood – of who we are deep down as individuals – moral characteristics matter irreducibly (Kristjánsson, 2010a, chap. 2). As Hofstee observed a long time ago, ‘the science of individual differences is deeply rooted in morality’ (1990: 82; for recent empirical evidence to this effect, see De Raad and Van Oudenhoven, 2011; Goodwin, Piazza and Rozin, 2014). Notably, positive psychologists, who have recently launched their much-touted empirically informed theory of virtue, agree on this point. They also complain that the Big-Five traits are too broad to distinguish individuals from one another in a meaningful way – to portray what is truly unique about us as persons among persons (Peterson and Seligman, 2004: 68). When comparing their list of allegedly universal moral virtues with the Big-Five traits, they conclude

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that after controlling for the Big-Five indices, distinctive features remain, suggesting that their list reflects ‘something more than the Big Five measure – specifically, the moral flavor of the character strengths’ (Park and Peterson, 2006: 903). The basic problem is that by excluding moral properties from their potential list of traits that comprise our everyday self, personality psychologists risk obscuring and diluting what is central to us. For instance, if we think of conscientiousness as a trait that defines us in a way that is relevant to our everyday engagements with other people, this notion seems to be exhausted by its moral import. The same would apply, mutatis mutandis, to agreeableness. To take a parallel example from the field of education, considerable emphasis used to be placed on the difference between a teacher’s classroom style (that was supposed to reflect non-moral personality traits) and a teacher’s manner (meant to capture what was moral in relation to the teacher’s conduct). A closer look revealed, however, that the two could not be separated for any relevant purposes. In so far as a teacher’s ‘style’ matters in the classroom, it is because of its moral implications: namely, its impact on student well-being (see Kristjánsson, 2007: 152–155). The second candidate for a vocabulary that might have made the notions of character and virtue redundant is that of such self-concepts (such as selfesteem, self-regulation and self-efficacy) which were almost non-existent in public discourse before 1990 but proliferated in educational discourse after that. As I have previously argued, however (Kristjánsson, 2010a), self-concepts derive from a narrowly understood cognitive, constructivist and amoral paradigm of human selfhood which equates people’s true selves with the beliefs they entertain about themselves. Bluntly, this paradigm has wound up in a linguistic (Smith, 2006), educational (Cigman, 2004), psychological (Baumeister et al., 2003) and moral (Kristjánsson, 2010a) quagmire. We cannot do without a paradigm of selfhood that understands it as nonconstructed, emotion-infused, morally engaged and often hidden from our own view: a paradigm of what I have called ‘our actual full selves’ (Kristjánsson, 2010a, chap. 2). The only self-concept that aspires to capture this underlying sense of self is that of self-respect. Indeed, it may well be the case that a lot of old-style virtue-talk has been translated in recent years into talk of self-respect (Kristjánsson, 2010a, chap. 7). Yet, although ‘self-respectful’ may be a helpful umbrella term for a person who is overall virtuous (and conscious of the need to preserve that virtuousness), it is lacking in the necessary specificity to designate virtue variances: for instance the character state of a person who is relatively strong on one virtue but weak on another. Replacing designations of specific virtues with the term ‘self-respect’ can thus be done only at the cost of considerable (linguistic and moral) impoverishment. A closer look at Kesebir and Kesebir’s (2012) findings shows that while it is true that many specific virtue terms – in addition to the generic terms ‘character’ and ‘virtue’ – have declined in use, a few have had a significant

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positive correlation with time (‘compassion’, ‘integrity’, ‘fairness’, ‘tolerance’, ‘selflessness’, ‘discipline’, ‘dependability’, ‘reliability’) and others have remained stable over time (‘loyality’, ‘trustworthiness’, ‘forgiveness’, ‘respect’, ‘determination’). There is, therefore, no compelling evidence for the redundancy of the virtue vocabulary as such. What seems to have happened, rather, is that its focus has shifted to fewer and more general virtue terms, although the overall rationale provided by the genus-terms ‘(good) character’ and ‘virtue’ seems to have gone astray at the same time. As it is unlikely that ordinary language has lost its flexibility to collocate the common elements in specific virtues, we might have to look for new synonyms for ‘character’ and ‘virtue’ that the researchers have missed: say ‘pro-social’ (persons, qualities). It will fall squarely within the remit of UK character educationists, for example, to record the ways in which the virtues are referred to in contemporary discourse in the UK – for otherwise any future recommendations might fall on deaf ears (or, more specifically, on ears that do not understand the employed terminology). In some cases a mere review may not be enough; the need may arise to try to resuscitate some old but invaluable ways of speaking (see Arthur et al., 2014). Still, since no recent academic findings indicate that the whole virtue vocabulary is falling out of use – or has systematically been replaced by something else – the redundancy thesis can be written off as a myth. Myth 3: ‘Character and virtue are old-fashioned notions’ This claim is closely related to the last one, about redundancy. The focus here is not so much, however, on a vocabulary of character/virtue having been replaced wholesale by a newer cutting-edge one, but rather on the impression that the enterprise of preserving old virtue expressions has a quaint Victorian or even medieval feel to it. Have we not moved on from the time when we were obsessed with chivalrous knights and stiff-upper-lipped Mr Darcys bestriding the cultural landscape? Is it not time to sweep out the stables and finally get rid of such noxious historical residue? However, far from it being the case that virtue concepts are considered old-fashioned in contemporary moral theory, the exact opposite seems to be true. Virtue ethics is the newest kid on the block in these quarters; and in some sub-areas of research, such as medical ethics, nursing ethics and – arguably also – the ethics of education, it is now widely considered the moral theory of choice. If Aristotle is ‘hot’ in moral and educational circles (Curzer, 2012: 1), contemporary virtue ethics is even hotter. Still, academic ivory towers are one thing and ordinary morality another, and I did admit at the end of the discussion of Myth 2 that some older moral concepts might have to be ‘retrieved’ for contemporary use. Is that not old-fashioned? To answer that question, consider one notable finding from the Learning for Life project, the largest empirical study of character education to date in the UK,

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with over 70,000 respondents. The finding that I am concerned with here is not the heartening one that young people are ‘interested in their own character and are concerned with enhancing the good aspects’ of it (Arthur, 2010: 21), but rather that they are aware themselves of their lack of vocabulary to talk meaningfully about those issues. What is more, when they were provided with such a vocabulary, they cherished it and enjoyed the opportunity of using it, rather than finding it archaic, dull or bookish (Arthur, 2010: 79–84). Similar findings have emerged from the later Knightly Virtues project (Arthur et al., 2014). This is not surprising; many of us will have experienced the eureka-feeling of coming across phrases, previously unfamiliar to us, that enable us to say exactly what we mean. Sophia Vasalou (2012) has recently argued persuasively that learning or, if necessary, recovering an apt moral terminology is a task that each of us needs to pursue in our efforts at character-self-education – and the education of others – and in that endeavour traditional ‘thick’ virtue terms may turn out to carry the greatest moral force. Thus, the idea that aspirations to breathe new life into concepts that have been forgotten, by an individual or a culture, counts as old-fashioned must be considered just another myth. Myth 4: ‘Character and virtue are essentially religious notions’ There is no denying the fact that notions of moral character and virtue are a mainstay of all the world’s great religions. However, the idea that ‘character’ and ‘virtue’ do not make sense or cannot be justified outside of a religious context is an historical non-starter. In her famous paper (1958), launching contemporary virtue ethics, Anscombe presented moral theorists with a dilemma. To give modern moral theory the mooring it requires, theorists either have to return to a religionbased divine-command moral outlook or to reinstate an Aristotelian teleology of virtue as constitutive of the ultimate end of human life – eudaimonia – but one grounded in state-of-the-art moral psychology. Virtue ethics in our day and age has been, more than anything else, an attempt to flesh out a plausible and feasible account of moral virtue in post-religious terms (see e.g. Arthur, 2010: 3). In this regard, while psychology may not yet have provided us with the empirical ammunition we need to underpin a satisfactory form of virtue ethics (Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 4), the alternative of giving up on that project altogether and opting for the other prong of Anscombe’s fork is, in our present-day multicultural contexts, one that seems hardly to have occurred to any major contemporary virtue ethicists – irrespective of their own personal religious commitments.

Moral and political myths In this section, I spell out and dissect Myths 5–8.

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Myth 5: ‘Character and virtue are paternalistic notions’ Paternalism is one of philosophy’s trickiest concepts. I assume here an everyday understanding according to which an intervention x is paternalistic if it involves A’s forcing x upon B against – or at least without regard for – B’s own will, under the pretext that x is in B’s best interests. Is teaching young students about good character at school paternalistic in this sense? If so, is that a task that should be left to the discretion of their parents, or left undone until they have become mature enough to decide for themselves? The first issue to be determined here is whether character education at school is against the will of parents (who typically act as proxies for younger children) or the students themselves. The evidence suggests that the first is not the case. Parents are typically happy if character issues are addressed at school (Seligman et al., 2009; Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, 2013). Moreover, students themselves, in the extensive Learning for Life and Knightly Virtues studies, showed great eagerness to learn more about the virtues at school (Arthur, 2010; Arthur et al., 2014). None of this should perhaps surprise us, for as Carr puts it, it is in a way ‘much clearer why it is important to encourage children to be honest, tolerant and fair than it is why they should be taught mathematics or science, for although not all children will develop an interest in or a need for science, all human beings require an interest in honesty or fairness’ (2012: 262). Let us suppose, however, for the sake of argument that evidence showed the opposite, namely that parents and students would prefer schools not to address issues of good character at all. The idea that the school could then unproblematically leave such issues aside betrays a peculiar conceptual and psychological misconception: namely, that the character of children can simply be held in abeyance at school until they reach the age where they have become wise or autonomous enough to decide for themselves. This is a misconception both about the meaning of the terms ‘character’ and ‘education’ and about the psychology of character development. Character is gradually formed from birth through the interactions of children with others; they become just or unjust, as Aristotle reminded us, by engaging in just or unjust acts and from the example of role models (parents, siblings, peers, teachers). When formal education in character does not occur, virtues and vices will still be caught even if they are not directly taught. There is no alternative type of moral education that children can be exposed to at school than character education. Character education will always take place there, and although it can obviously be done either well or badly, concerns about character education being paternalistic per se are simply red herrings in this context. To sum up, no teachers can either logically or psychologically dissociate themselves from the practice of character education (cf. Carr, 2012: 243–258). The sensible question that can be asked about a school’s or an

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individual teacher’s character-education strategy is not whether such education does occur, but whether it is ‘intentional, conscious, planned, pro-active, organized and reflective’ or ‘assumed, unconscious, reactive, subliminal or random’ (Wiley, 1998: 18). It does not require deep knowledge of curriculum theory to know which of those two strategies is more propitious for moral learning. However, it might be objected here that I have understood the charge of paternalism in a narrow educational sense. What is wrong about character education at school, it could be argued, is that it is – at least when it is made into a formal curricular requirement or a core subject of study – morally and politically paternalistic. It is not the role of schools to prescribe how people should act and it is, more generally speaking, not the role of government to interfere in individual development of character (cf. Evans, 2012). The first response to this objection is that education in virtues is not about prescribing, but about teaching students what a morally good life consists in. The claim ‘It is better to be compassionate than cold-hearted’ does not imply ‘Be compassionate!’, any more than the claim that ‘This is a good knife’ implies the order ‘Cut!’ A common failure to acknowledge this distinction rests on a particular misapprehension of moral language as uniquely categorical – as necessarily implying motivation and hence prescription – called ‘motivational internalism’ (see Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 5). Second, the charge of political paternalism follows from assuming that the ultimate role of government is only to maximise individuals’ capacity for choice, not what that choice should be about. Apart from the controversial nature of this assumption, an irony lurks here. If what citizens really crave – as all the empirical evidence seems to indicate – is for government to maximise their well-being rather than simply their range of options (cf. Haybron and Alexandrova, 2013), then ‘forcing them to be free to choose’ is paternalistic, whereas intervening (apparently paternalistically) in their lives in order to enhance their well-being is the essence of anti-paternalism in action! Myth 6: ‘Education in character and virtue is anti-democratic and anti-intellectual’ It is frequently charged that there is a psycho-moral paradox at the centre of character education. On the one hand, the professed aim of most charactereducation programmes is to produce critical and independent moral choosers; on the other hand, the dominant method prescribed by character educationists from Aristotle onwards is ‘habituation’, which can best be defined as an intentional process of inculcation of character by means of repeated action under outside guidance (see Lawrence, 2011: 249). It is here that we encounter Peters’s famous ‘paradox of moral education’ (Peters, 1981: 52), already referred to in the fourth section of Chapter 1 and to be further discussed in Chapter 4.

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I do concede that orthodox Aristotelianism (based only on actual textual evidence) does not have a very strong developmental story to tell about the gradual cultivation of critical, intellectual faculties in the student. That is the reason why I consider the story in question to stand in need of some serious reconstructive work, as I propose to offer in Chapter 4. However, it is blatantly unfair to overlook the fact that Aristotle the character educationist was beholden to a powerful and uncompromising idea: that without the eventual development of the integrative and adjudicative faculty of phronesis – good critical sense of autonomous decision-making – virtue remains but a charade! Aristotle’s stringent condition about the eventual moral worth of virtuous activity as grounded in autonomous reasoning serves to defuse the myth that character education is essentially anti-intellectual and anti-democratic. For if it is, it is not really character education on the Aristotelian understanding at all, but rather character conditioning. If the complaint is, rather, that some particular programmes of character education – for instance as practised in the United States in the 1990s – were delivered in an antiintellectual and anti-democratic way, then this may well be the case. But so much the worse for those programmes and the students who were at the receiving end of them rather than for character education as such. Regarding the ‘anti-democratic’ part of the myth, I have only the following to say. Obviously, if an approach does not count as ‘democratic’ unless it champions the subjective choice of subjective values from a buffet of qualitatively undifferentiated options, then character education will not count as democratic. However, in my view such a conception of democracy is not only coarse and naïve but dangerously wrong. Myth 7: ‘The emphasis on character and virtue is conservative’ Like the term ‘paternalistic’, ‘conservative’ is also contested and multilayered. I refer to two of its possible meanings in this section but leave one (‘conservative’ as ‘individualistic’) until Myth 8. The first and most obvious meaning of ‘conservative’ is ‘supportive of the status quo’. Is the emphasis on character, virtue and character education conservative in that sense? From a political perspective, that seems not to be the case at all. Martha Nussbaum (1990) has, for instance, argued convincingly that Aristotelian virtue-andwell-being theory, if transposed to the modern world, would have radically reformative and progressive implications, and that its practical policies would most likely resemble those of Scandinavian social democracies. From an educational perspective, it seems equally far-fetched to saddle virtue-theories of an Aristotelian bent with service to the status quo. There is little doubt that the status quo in today’s education is a technicist, instrumentalist approach (critiqued by Oancea and Pring, 2008; Arthur, 2003: 114). An Aristotelian character-based approach would, in contrast, highlight the role of normativity and values – not only within character education but in all

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educational efforts – and prompt us to understand education itself noninstrumentally as a teleological praxis (cf. Biesta, 2010). It would also call for a radical overhaul of the training of prospective teachers towards more explicit immersion in moral and cultural values: philosophy, art and literature (Carr, 2012; 2014). An approach can hardly be more anti-status-quo than that. Another meaning of ‘conservative’ is simply ‘inspired by, or in line with, the agenda of conservative political parties’. To be sure, when US-style character education was first introduced in the late 1980s, one of its torchbearers was William Bennett, Education Secretary in the Reagan government, and it cannot be denied that he and many of his colleagues put their own ideological spin on the movement’s agenda. However, such connection to the political right seems to have been entirely contingent. If we look at the history of character-education initiatives in the UK, for instance, these have primarily been advocated by liberals and progressives, harking back to the Scottish Enlightenment, the radicalism of Robert Owen and the secular humanists in the late Victorian era. In recent times, it was New Labour who first suggested that education had to take a moral turn (witness Tony Blair, influenced by people like Geoff Mulgan and Richard Layard) – although Conservatives (especially Steve Hilton, Oliver Letwin and Prime Minister David Cameron) have recently jumped on that same bandwagon. In any event, in UK political circles the order of the day seems to be that we are ‘all Aristotelians now’ (Arthur, 2003, chap. 11; Evans, 2011; O’Shaughnessy, 2012). Myth 8: ‘Character, virtue and virtue education are individualistic notions’ It may seem odd to fault an Aristotelian paradigm for individualism. Aristotle himself was anything but an individualist, as I noted in the fourth section of Chapter 1, claiming instead that the good life could only be realised in a certain kind of society with a certain kind of moral upbringing, public education and political arrangements. Nevertheless, contemporary efforts at character education commonly find themselves under attack for their inherently individualist bias. The idea of virtue is seen as focusing excessively or exclusively on the capacities of individual students in isolation from their socio-cultural contexts or habitus, thus neglecting issues of gender, class, ethnicity and power relations. Conversely, vice is allegedly located in individual failings rather than in social, economic and political structures – and improvement is sought through personal change (or ‘kid-fixing’) rather than political reform. Notably, those objections are rarely aimed directly at Aristotelian character education but rather at the (perhaps) more vulnerable targets of, first, US-style character education of the 1990s and, second, current positive

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psychological virtue theory. Yet even in the case of those ‘softer’ targets, the objections are largely misplaced. The reason for the apparent foregounding of an inward gaze and individual development in both movements seems to be the same, at least if its advocates are to be taken at their word. They all insist that the question of individual versus societal reform is a chicken-andegg one. We need to start somewhere, and for developmental and pragmatic reasons, it is more feasible to start with the individual child, student or classroom than the whole school system or society at large: developmentally, because the emotional underpinnings of the virtues are first activated in close personal encounters and only later extended to societal concern, and pragmatically because individual manoeuvres are simply easier to administer in the first place than large-scale institutional transformations. Both in USstyle character education and positive psychology, the eventual goal is, however, said to be ‘social change’ or the ‘creation of positive institutions’ (see citations and discussions in Kristjánsson, 2006: 188–189; 2013, chap. 2.5). Once again, the charge in question turns out to be a myth.

Epistemological and psychological myths In this section, I spell out and dissect Myths 9 and 10. Myth 9: ‘Character and virtue are essentially relative notions’ The obvious question to ask here is what those notions are supposed to be relative to? One initially plausible answer might be: to a particular moral theory – a theory which, in turn, we cannot take for granted that everyone shares. Fashionable as virtue ethics is in many quarters, it has also been much frowned upon in its recent incarnation for its alleged self-centredness and failure to give precise action-guidance in dilemmatic situations. So if the current attention to character, virtue and character education were conditional upon the acceptance of virtue ethics in this narrow sense – as designating a particular, contestable moral theory of late – one could indeed argue that such attention was unduly theory-relative. Notably, the selfcentredness and non-action-guidance objections do not hit at Aristotelian virtue ethics, which lays the foundation for the sort of character education promoted in this book (Kristjánsson, 2002, chap. 2.2). Yet the worry that character education is narrowly theory-depend remains. There is, however, another and more inclusive understanding of the term ‘virtue ethics’ where it refers simply to the thesis that a person cannot live a well-rounded and overall satisfactory life without practising moral virtue. In this permissive sense, one could say that almost all historical moral theories – in addition to contemporary virtue ethics in the narrow sense – are virtue ethical to a certain extent, for if any creed can be said to have stood the test

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of time in moral theory, it is the judgement of wise and competent judges, wherever you go, that virtues are constitutive of the good life. Clearly, Confucianism is virtue ethical in this sense (Yu, 2007), as are utilitarianism (at least on John Stuart Mill’s understanding), and even arguably Kantianism (which has its own constrictive virtue theory) to a certain extent – although the last two do not ground ultimate moral rightness in virtuous character. It is precisely because of this broad, if uneasy, consensus that Martha Nussbaum (1999) demurs at the term ‘virtue ethics’, as reserved for a special moral theory, and believes that it designates a ‘misleading category’. So while it is possible to identify some fundamentalist divine-command theories of morality or versions of Kantianism – entailing extreme emotional disengagement from morality – as genuinely non-virtue-ethical, we need not generally worry that a focus on character, virtue and character education must remain relative to, and contingent upon, the acceptance of a particular moral theory, narrowly specified. Less easy to deflect is the challenge posed by cultural relativism. That should not be surprising, since relativism is the proverbial spectre haunting all moral theorising ever since the time of the Greek sophists. Some virtue ethicists have not so much tried to lay it to rest as to take it on board, most notably Alasdair MacIntyre (1981). According to his social constructivist interpretation, virtues (and vices) differ over times and societies or, more specifically, among the prevailing social practices of different cultures. Nevertheless, a more common tack taken in contemporary virtue ethics is to follow Aristotle’s empirical universalism/cosmopolitanism about human nature, captured in his much-quoted observation that ‘in our travels we can see how every human being is akin […] to a human being’ (1985: 208 [1155a20–22]). The case for such anti-relativism has recently been bolstered considerably by extensive empirical work in positive psychology on conceptions of virtues in different societies, religions and moral systems. In light of this work, positive psychologists claim that people are more or less the same wherever they go, and that the spheres of human life wherein our virtues and vices play out have remained essentially constant throughout history (Peterson and Seligman, 2004; McGrath, 2014b). Perhaps little more than a thought-experiment would have sufficed to elicit that same conclusion, for it is surely impossible to envisage human societies where character strengths such as conscientiousness or courage are not needed, recognised or held to be of value. This does not mean that there cannot be varying interpretations or instantiations of a virtue, given different circumstances in different societies. But then again, in some countries people drive or the right side of the road, in some on the left; yet clearly it would be a myth to claim that there is no such thing as the general skill of a good driver (cf. Carr, 1996: 359). Aristotelianism is particularly well suited to meet the relativist challenge. It couches its account of flourishing, character and virtue in terms that are both non-religious and essentially universal or cosmopolitan. ‘Essentially’ is a

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crucial modifier here, because Aristotle’s ‘thick but vague’ theory of the human good (Nussbaum, 1990) leaves sufficient space for cultural relativity to satisfy all but the most radical relativists. In David Carr’s (2012) wellchosen words, in the Aristotelian model of moral virtue we do not actually have to know what another person (whether Muslim, communist or atheist) actually values or believes in order to judge whether she is honest, just, courageous, temperate or compassionate; we only need to know that she is inclined to tell the truth, deal with others fairly, stand up for her principles under threat, control her appetites or care for others. The Aristotelian language of virtue thus provides an effective cross-cultural currency of moral evaluation. That said, there is no denying the fact that some features of Aristotle’s own psycho-moral theory are clearly ‘socially relative’ in the negative sense of now being outdated and anachronistic. For example, his views on the intellectual and/or motivational natural inferiority of slaves, manual workers and women are embarrassingly erroneous, full stop. In any case, just as with his biology, no one takes those arguments seriously nowadays; and there is something quintessentially Aristotelian about ignoring arguments that have been refuted by empirical evidence. Notice also that these arguments came about originally as the downsides of Aristotle’s unrelenting empiricism, in wanting to accommodate the best available evidence in his day as expressed through the ideas of the ‘many and the wise’. This fidelity to prevailing ‘best evidence’ prevented Aristotle from taking some of the bold imaginative leaps that his teacher Plato was able to take, guided by pure speculation, for example about the nature of women. I am less certain what to say about Aristotle’s assumption of moral inequality: namely, whether that assumption should also be written off as culturally outdated. Aristotle takes it for granted that people are of unequal moral worth, depending on their demonstrated level of moral attainment. This assumption, however, flies in the face of a contrary assumption which is not only ingrained in Kantianism and utilitarianism but is part of a larger modern moral outlook: that people are of equal moral worth qua persons (see e.g. Cordner, 1994). Heeding the message from Williams’s (1993) masterful assimilation of ancient and modern moralities, however, we must be wary of people conflating what they think they think with what they really think. For instance, when Christians think they are objecting to Aristotelian pride, they may simply be objecting to what Aristotle would call ‘conceit’. Regarding moral equality, whatever lip service moderns may pay to it, would anyone have compunction about choosing to save one Mother Teresa rather than two Adolf Hitlers from a burning house? Furthermore, accepting the unequal moral worth of persons is not necessarily tantamount to assuming, across the line, the unequal worth of moral persons (cf. Hare, 1996). For instance, there are undoubtedly sound Aristotelian reasons for giving all people, as potential moral agents, a chance to prove their mettle (by providing equal opportunities of education, giving strangers the benefit of the

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doubt in human relations, etc.). Logically, there is thus nothing wrong with the idea of people, who happen to be of unequal moral worth as persons, being treated equally, for moral reasons, in various spheres of life (cf. Kristjánsson, 2002, chap. 4) – a consideration which holds as much in our times as it did in Aristotle’s. It continues to be commonly argued (see e.g. Cordner, 1994; Konstan, 2006, chap. 1), however, that the socio-moral world of the Greeks was unlike our own in key respects, and that transposing a conception of character education from their world to ours violates reasonable constraints of cultural relativity. The ancient Greeks were purportedly preoccupied with concerns about pride, honour, rivalry, social standing and face-saving. The emotions elicited in that context, such as shame, were typically responses to situations that resulted from actions entailing consequences for one’s social position rather than for one’s personal ideals. Indeed, we are told that private sanctions (experienced through what we moderns refer to as guilt) did not really motivate the Greeks – only social sanctions did – as their self-concept was essentially heteronomous, with no relevant distinction being made there between doing the good and being seen to do the good. A close study of Greek sources, however, reveals that the ancient Greeks were as capable as we are of experiencing self-focused, autonomous guilt as distinct from other-focused, heteronomous shame. Indeed, the very distinction between so-called ‘shame societies’ and ‘guilt societies’ does not seem to bear scrutiny (Williams, 1993; Kristjánsson, 2014). Moreover, a certain obsession with one’s social standing is hardly a condition specific to the ancients. Judging from the media buzz surrounding the fashionable concept of ‘status anxiety’, it seems to be an equally familiar obsession to moderns and, indeed, a universal phenomenon (see further in Kristjánsson, 2002, chap. 4; 2007, chap. 1; cf. Putman, 1995). To conclude this discussion of Myth 9 with considerations about political relativity, John Wallach (1992) argues that the political particularities of Aristotle’s claims, as rooted in the Greek polis, make it impossible to shear from his system any script from which we moderns might take our cues, without eliminating its coherence and emptying it of substance. In Wallach’s view, such a transcultural undertaking violates Aristotle’s own insistence on the unity of form and content. More specifically, it disregards the way in which Aristotle’s historical context (such as prevailing conditions of political power) constitutes the meaning and scope of his views. If we concentrate on Aristotle’s political writings, narrowly construed, Wallach may have a point. Even though Wallach’s analysis belies the inherent radicalism of some of Aristotle’s political ideas – for his time as well as for ours – it is true that many of those ideas transcend their time and place in the Greek polis poorly, if at all. As against that, however, it must be noted that the recent renaissance of Aristotelianism in character education has never aimed at a reconstruction of political conditions in ancient Greece; what

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interests current character educationists is, rather, Aristotle’s conception of universal human functioning (recall the third section in Chapter 1). Myth 10: ‘Character and virtue are entirely situation-specific’ It is currently fashionable to claim that moral situationism, more than moral relativism, is where theories of virtue and character education come unstuck. Situationists say that there is no such thing as stable and consistent states of virtues and vices, making up character; rather, all human behaviour (‘moral’ or otherwise) has now been shown in psychological experiments, such as the famous Milgram-experiments, to be completely situation-dependent (Doris, 2002). While I have elsewhere criticised situationism (Kristjánsson, 2010a, chap. 6; 2013, chap. 6), let me give it here the credit that it deserves. First, all personality psychologists seem to agree nowadays that behaviour is a function both of character and situations. Since situations are the arena where character plays out, it would be a conceptual no less than an empirical error to maintain that character is completely situation-independent. Second, it seems undeniable that the point of good character education is not only to help students develop virtuous traits; it is also to teach them to learn to steer clear of perilous situations with which they have no previous familiarity and which might land them in trouble, given the common-sense insight that the more extraordinary features a situation presents, the more extraordinary and ‘out of character’ our reactions are likely to be. These moderate concessions aside, virtue ethicists have sufficient weaponry in their arsenal to rebut the situationist challenge. When I invoked that arsenal as a unique Aristotelian resource in the third section of Chapter 1 (cf. also Russell, 2014c), I noted that the virtue ethical response typically culminates in an anti-behaviouristic objection, observing that the mere fact that an agent is seen to do x or not-x in an experiment says nothing about whether that person possesses a robust character state of virtue or vice. In light of the characterisations of ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’ from the second section in Chapter 1, we need to know about the spirit in which the action was performed or not performed, its emotional concomitants and the manner in which the action or non-action was conducted. However, there is an even more fundamental problem of which the situationist challenge falls foul that has to do with the very concept of a ‘situation’. Situations can range from the narrowest (‘picking up papers that someone else has dropped in front of a phone booth after you have found a coin in the booth’) to the broadest (‘being a citizen in Nazi Germany’). Typically, situationists deliberately choose to focus on situations that are not only broad but also passive (the agent is a victim rather than a creator of the situation), extraordinary (the situations present features that the agent has never experienced before and is never even likely to experience in real life) and/or involve strong social expectations of compliance (for instance, being

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subjected to orders from an acknowledged authority-figure). After tilting the evidence in their favour in this way, it is no surprise that the situationist experiments yield the findings that they do. This is scarcely even a matter which requires empirical corroboration; rather, it is what the very terms ‘broad’, ‘passive’, ‘extraordinary’ and ‘strong’ seem to mean when applied to situations. They are used in our language precisely to denote classes of situations where people’s reactions are less easily predictable than they normally are (Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 6)! We should not labour under the illusion that evidence gathered in this way poses a serious threat to the ideas of character, virtue and character education as such. Indeed, I would tend to agree with Russell (2014c) that, as far as Aristotelian character education is concerned, the so-called situationist challenge has generated considerably more heat than light.

Only the bare beginning In this chapter, I have explored various well-known and often-repeated antivirtue catechisms, stating that the notions of character, virtue and character education are unclear, redundant, old-fashioned, religious, paternalistic, antidemocratic, conservative, individualistic, relative and situation-dependent. I have challenged these misgivings and exposed them as industriously propagated ‘myths’. As some of the myths in question have in recent times, however, lost their academic lustre (while still remaining powerful in the public consciousness and in public debate), I need to be careful not to passionately storm half-abandoned forts while the adversaries have regrouped behind stronger, more defensible lines. This is why what I have said so far is only the bare beginning of a general defence of Aristotelian character education. More needs to be said and will be said in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 3

Measuring virtue for Aristotelian character education

Character education’s profoundest problem When character educationists – be they educators drawing upon philosophical accounts of virtue (e.g. Fallona, 2000), virtue ethicists climbing down from theoretical ivory towers to the rough ground of education (e.g. Annas, 2011a) or academics combining both roles (e.g. Curren, 2010) – start to suggest specific interventions aimed at cultivating character in schools, those have to compete with a host of other suggestions about what schools can do to promote pro-social ends. Nowadays, a common requirement of such suggestions is that they offer pre-tests and post-tests of the success of implementation, ideally conducted via a randomised controlled trial: the platinum bar of school-based research. In the present context, the demand will be to measure students’ virtues before and after the proposed implementation and to demonstrate that the moral character of those who received it has truly improved, compared to a control group. Otherwise, the rationale of the intervention is in danger of being deemed dead in the water. But here we stumble upon the problem that I introduced in the fourth section of Chapter 1 and around which this chapter revolves – what I propose to call character education’s profoundest problem: How do we measure (Aristotelian) virtue in people in general and in young moral learners in particular? As Haldane (2014) correctly observes, initial scepticism in this area may arise from ‘encountering recurrent difficulties in developing methods for measuring the presence of a virtue, or be prompted by the repeated failure of psychological measurement to detect any relevant candidate feature, or be encouraged by the success of psychological methods success in fully identifying patterns of action, and changes in these, without reference to anything like virtue’. It has been suggested that by allowing the problem to be framed in the particular way I have done above, character educationists needlessly succumb to the siren song of the foes of all value-based education. Why concede to the uncompromising scientism of recent educational discourse that virtue can be measured at all (Rodgers, 2012)? Educational philosopher Gert Biesta has argued in a couple of articles (2007; 2010) that the reigning evidencebased ‘what-works approach’ in education – where everything is to be

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instrumentally objectified and operationalised – must be abandoned, and that in its stead should come a value-based approach to educational research and practice. Character educationists will typically share many of Biesta’s concerns about the ‘what-works approach’ and applaud him for having brought them to our attention. If philosophical watchdogs do not bark, no one else will! Nevertheless, he may have misidentified what is wrong with this approach and be barking up the wrong tree. The cause of problem that Biesta identifies lies, I submit, not in the ‘scientising’ of education through the demand for controlled measurements; for if we block out the use of standard scientific research methods in education, we proceed to trivialise its content. There is no reason why we should not focus here, as everywhere else, on evidence and trials. This is especially true in countries where character education forms part of the formal, regulated curriculum and is amenable to the same quality control as other school subjects, for instance in East Asia (see Kamizono, Chen and Morinaga, 2014). The problem with the ‘what-works approach’ is thus, arguably, not that it is evidence-based, but rather that (a) it rules out values as valid evidence and (b) it understands all educational means to be instrumentally related to subjectively chosen ends. This approach does not acknowledge that some human endeavours, such as the actualisation of the virtues, have intrinsic value and are played out in a space of reasons rather than that of mere causes. It also has a hard time explaining learning outcomes that involve secondorder judgements (e.g. judgements about one’s moral judgements) and are context-dependent, as will necessarily be the case for Aristotelian virtues (cf. Kvernbekk, 2014). Contrary to the ‘what-works approach’, values do not infect scientificity, but neither do they transcend it (as Biesta seems to think); they simply add to it. So although Biesta-style observations may help change the specification of the sort of evidence that an evidence-based approach requires, they do not make the demand for evidence itself redundant, nor do they obviate character education’s ‘profoundest problem’. The problem remains that no tried-and-tested instruments to concretise and measure moral virtue – on an Aristotelian naturalist-realist conception – seem to exist. I say ‘concretise’ here rather than ‘operationalise’ in order to avoid the obvious positivist and reductive baggage of the latter term; I simply mean unpacking ‘moral virtue’ in ways that lend themselves to evidential inference. But this lacuna calls the very idea of character educational projects into question, since those projects will need, in order to establish their scientific credibility, pre- and post-tests of their impact on moral virtue (as already acknowledged). In order for such tests to have both face validity and construct validity, the measured impact also needs, notably, to impact on what character education is specifically meant to achieve, namely to enact significant changes in the character make-up of individual students: to refine or reform their traits of characters. As we see in subsequent sections, however, it has not always been clear what ‘impact’ is meant to denote in this

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regard and whether it is perhaps enough if character education can be correlationally linked to some positive individual or institutional variables. It could be argued (Alexander, 2014) that Aristotelian realism is better equipped than many other forms of realism to deal with this profoundest problem. After all, Aristotle embraced the idea that in addition to physical objects and their analogues (such as behaviours), which can be measured in order to understand how they are causally connected to one another, there also exist rational purposes located in the space of reasons that are as much a part of the ontological furniture of the universe as objects and behaviours – and these too can be comprehended by the human mind. In contrast, the empiricist (or positivist) model that supports randomised field testing as a platinum bar of educational research grants ontological status only to the former, not the latter, and so considers any form of knowledge grounded in teleological or purposive explanations inferior to that grounded in causal explanations and generalisations. The upshot of this distinction would be that measurements of Aristotelian virtue do not need to rely on objective measurements of instrumental impact on variables independent of the person whose virtue is being measured, in the spirit of reductive operationalism; what we are after will primarily be changes in agents’ own understandings of the meaning of the normative reasons that inform their moral reactions. Unfortunately, however, a methodological search for ‘meanings, intentions and purposes’ (Alexander, 2014) is no less a tall order than a search for empirical correlations; it neither circumvents the problem of self-reports – as meanings are not simply constructed in a private language immediately accessible to the agent and the researcher (Winch, 1958) – nor makes the need for pre and post-tests of impact redundant, as noted in the above response to Biesta. There is good reason to believe that if Aristotle were alive today, he would be deeply interested in the sort of methodological considerations under discussion in this chapter! I say that because of the general importance that Aristotle ascribes to methodological issues in his corpus, the evidential naturalism that pervades it, and how his writings are interspersed with frequent explanations of what he is doing and why he is doing it. So if the choice in the field of character education is seen to be between the two extreme slogans of ‘Do not try to measure the immeasurable!’ and ‘If you treasure it, measure it!’, Aristotle would most likely come down on the side of the latter. That said, he would also be sensitive to the potential danger that Siegel (2014) sees in the demand for measurements of virtue perhaps leading to the development of the sort of virtue that does not engage students’ intellectual capacities via Aristotelian phronesis (see further in Chapter 4), but rather some impoverished (and non-Aristotelian) form that is only promoted because it is easy to test. In the following sections I offer eight distinct takes on the messy theme of measuring Aristotelian virtue for the purposes of character education.

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(There can also be other purposes for measuring virtue, e.g. purely academic ones, see Curren, 2014b, but those are outside the purview of the present book.) It would perhaps be more felicitous to talk about those forthcoming sections as ‘variations’, because they do not follow logically and progressively upon one another, but rather illuminate the problem from a number of different perspectives, drawing on different literatures and considerations. For illustrative purposes, I draw repeatedly below on the example of a particular ongoing project in the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues where I am working, a survey of character strengths and weaknesses among 14–15 year old pupils in UK schools (Walker, 2014). In January 2014, the Jubilee Centre organised the first international interdisciplinary conference on approaches to measurements of virtue: ‘Can virtue be measured?’, held at Oriel College, University of Oxford. Subsequent sections contain a host of references to papers delivered at this conference (Jubilee Centre, 2014c). The motivation behind the conference – to make sense of attempts to measure virtue for practical (educational) purposes – coincided, after all, substantially with the motivation behind the present chapter. In late 2014, the journal Theory and Research in Education published a selection of revised versions of papers presented at the Oriel conference (volume 12, number 3), edited by my colleagues Randall Curren and Ben Kotzee.

Historical backdrops I mentioned in Chapter 1 how a plethora of recent approaches to moral education – ranging from US-style character education and social and emotional learning to positive psychology) – have wanted to co-opt Aristotle into their camp. Despite brimming with references to the old master, some of those approaches may be accused of propagating misbegotten forms of Aristotelianism. Would the profoundest problem sort itself out if we just reverted to a more purified version? In order to answer that question, some historical perspective is needed. Serving as an inevitable backdrop there is the powerful figure of Lawrence Kohlberg who – while clearly not an Aristotelian – exerted an extraordinary hegemony over the field of moral education for a long time. At least in Kohlberg’s time, we had an instrument of moral development that was thoroughly reliable and universally applied, as well as a blueprint for interventions that was rigorously formalistic, explicit and easy to apply. The unremitting rationalism of Kohlberg’s model proved to be its undoing, however. Fellow psychologists grew weary of his narrowly moralised form of developmentalism, according to which being fully morally developed is basically the same as being a practising Kantian! And his unmitigated motivational internalism, symbolised in the mantra ‘He who knows the good chooses the good’ (1981: 189), fell on evil days after scant correlations were found between

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Kohlbergian stages of moral reasoning and actual moral behaviour (recall the first section of Chapter 1). Unfortunately, an instrument’s reliability – such as that possessed by Kohlberg’s dilemma tests – does not guarantee validity. The character-education movement in the United States from the 1990s onwards was a long-overdue reaction to Kohlbergianism. While claiming to draw partly on an Aristotelian virtue-based view of morality and moral development, it was never going to satisfy die-hard Aristotelians, however. As correctly noted by Lapsley and Narvaez (2006), some of it was not even specifically about moral virtues at all; and even forms of it that were explicitly virtue-based appeared to be lacking in the philosophical depth that one would have hoped for from an Aristotle-inspired approach. Not being well versed in Aristotle is one thing; US-style character education might have other redeeming features. Unfortunately, instrument design is not one of them. This particular approach to moral education suffered for a long time from a lack of systematic evaluations, and although some of those have now been provided (see the second section of Chapter 1), judgements about impact tend to be based on changes in (a) observable classroom behaviour or general school ethos rather than (b) moral virtue in individual students, or, more specifically, based on (a) without providing additional evidence for the claim that (a) is best explained as the result of (b). Thus, paradoxically, the powerful US-movement of education for moral character did not provide any standardised tests to measure moral character itself. When, exactly, a moral virtue appeared or disappeared remained elusive and intangible. In a nutshell, this movement was always as weak on method as it was strong on content, in contradistinction to the Kohlbergian formalism which was strong on method but weak on content (cf. Lapsley and Yeager, 2012). Marvin Berkowitz (2014), a vocal current spokesman for character education in the United States is, for one, well aware of the lack of alignment between expected outcomes, implementation strategies and assessment that often mars interventions in this field. Did the movement of social and emotional learning constitute an advance upon US-style character education? In so far as it directed attention to ‘intelligent’ emotional virtues, and away from an understanding of virtues as mere behavioural tendencies, it certainly did. But none of their instruments comes anywhere close to counting as a measure of emotional virtue on an Aristotelian understanding, and those measures, ultimately, have little to contribute directly to the profoundest problem (Kristjánsson, 2007, chap. 6). Regarding positive psychology, Aristotelians will be heartened by recent moves within that movement towards a closer reliance on a eudaimonic model of well-being (Seligman, 2011). ‘Positive education’ (the educational incarnation of positive psychology) is still in its infancy, however, and its suggested classroom interventions are underdeveloped, not to mention its measurements of impact (Kristjánsson, 2013). Notably, positive psychologists do realise the urgent need for developing instruments to measure moral

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character strengths, and they have been working assiduously on such instruments (Niemiec, 2013). As we see in the fourth section of this chapter, however, those instruments rely on self-reports and thus do not go the full distance towards solving the profoundest problem. This brief historical overview of instruments and approaches should suffice to explain why researchers in the Jubilee Centre, who are working on the project of character education in UK schools, came to the conclusion that a ‘purer’ form of Aristotelian virtue theory would provide a better passkey than any of the approaches canvassed above through the labyrinth of school-based measurements of, and subsequent work on, moral character (Walker, 2014; Walker, Roberts and Kristjánsson, 2015). There is, indeed, reason to believe that Aristotle’s theory offers clearer (and more easily applicable) specifications of the terms ‘character’, ‘virtue’ and ‘character education’ than any of the more recent contenders, as I have argued previously in this book. Reverting to the question with which this section started – if simply adopting a more purified form of Aristotelianism will automatically solve the profoundest problem – there is reason for circumspection, however. For instance, there are some aspects of Aristotle’s virtue theory that problematise any proposed attempts at virtue measurement. Well-known is his insistence on the individualisation of virtue – how temperance in food and drink does not mean the same for the Olympic athlete and for the professor. That surely complicates instrument design. And if we are aiming at measurements of virtue in 14–15 year old individuals, Aristotle’s account of the age-relativity of virtues will also need to be taken into account: how emulousness and shamefulness are, for instance, positive moral qualities for the young but not for adults (see further in Kristjánsson, 2007). Is phronesis really supposed to have kicked in at this age? If not – or at least if we still expect it to be seriously underdeveloped – perhaps we need to focus on the 14–15 year olds’ natural rather than phronesis-adjusted virtues, or even inquire if they are successfully continent (self-controlled) rather than virtuous. Although one may hope that Aristotelian character education can, in due course, provide the sort of passkey that I described earlier, it would be an illusion to think that simply by staying closer to Aristotle’s own voice, all the fragments of a virtue-based approach to moral education will necessarily fall into place – including the all-important question of how the virtues can be measured.

Lessons from personality psychology Surely we can learn something about measurements of virtues as traits of character from the long tradition of measuring general personality traits in personality psychology. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel, is there? I wish one could be more sanguine about the lessons to be learnt from personality psychology in general and its ubiquitous Big-Five Model of

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human personality in particular. However, there are reasons to be sceptical both of that particular construct (as I argued in the second section of Chapter 2) and the methods typically used by personality psychologists to measure it. It may be possible to ameliorate some of the crudeness of the Big-Five Model by stipulating that moral characteristics form subsets of personality traits: subsets that matter for meaningful identifications of persons. Conscientiousness as a character trait (namely, moral conscientiousness) would then be understood as a subcategory of Big-Five conscientiousness, for instance (cf. Russell, 2009: 293, 330). But even with this change of compass, there is reason to doubt that Big-Five research can aid us much in solving the profoundest problem. Note that self-reports played a part in the construction of the Five-Factor Model, during which thousands of original lexical factors were reduced, via factor analysis of their reported distribution, to a mere five. Moreover, selfreports continue to be the fundamental method by which individual personality profiles are generated. When I myself took a Big-Five test online, it struck me how transparently the specific questions tracked the specific personality traits, so that anyone who came to the test with a clear image of her profile would have no trouble securing – consciously or unconsciously – the expected result. The creators of such tests seem blissfully unaware of decades of research findings in social psychology which show how quick people are in rationalising or confabulating their self-attributions in response to subtle environmental primes, so much so that we easily accept bogus (randomly administered) personality profiles as containing accurate and revealing truths about ourselves (Nisbett and Ross, 1980). Although one must remain pessimistic about the potential contribution that the reigning paradigm of Big-Five research – with its blind spot for anything moral – can make to the problem of measuring virtue, there is no reason to rule the whole discipline of personality psychology out of court here (see e.g. Cawley, Martin and Johnson, 2000). Quite a few personality psychologists have broken ranks with the canon, and there is a lot to learn, for instance, from one of the harshest critics of the Big-Five Model, David Funder. His book on personality judgements contains a wealth of sound advice about how the traits that set us apart need to be measured multicriterially, as there is no single and easy pathway to them. One may think here of a mixture, or triangulation, of varied methods that will be explored in subsequent sections in this chapter. But, as Funder reminds us, the accuracy of measurements will ultimately depend upon, among other things, the qualifications of the judge and the ‘judgeability’ of the person whose traits are being gauged. Even at best, the accuracy of such measurements remains a probabilistic matter (Funder, 1999). In light of Funder’s message, researchers in the Jubilee Centre decided that a mixed instrument of measuring virtue is not to be considered only as the unfortunate last resort when a single-based one has failed – but that a

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pluralistic, multicriterial measurement is actually the best bet in the field (Walker, 2014).

Self-report instruments The briefest of Web searches demonstrates that the commonest instruments to measure virtue in students and adults are self-report instruments. The most widely used of these seems to be the set developed by positive psychologists as part of their VIA project to chart and measure universal character strengths and virtues. Let us focus on the VIA project in this section. The (six) general moral virtues and their (24) operationalisable manifestations as ‘character strengths’, identified by positive psychologists, were allegedly derived through a variety of considerations. Some of these were conceptual, such as being measurable, trait-like, distinctive, non-exclusive of others, valued as ends, and some historical: being ubiquitous and morally valued across cultures, being recommended by the world’s most influential religious and philosophical traditions, being embodied in certain identifiable historic moral exemplars (see Peterson and Seligman, 2004: 21–28). As the proposed ‘social science equivalent of virtue ethics’ (2004: 89), the VIA classification is meant to be ‘grounded in a long philosophical tradition’ harking back, inter alia, to Aristotle (2004: 9). The most tangible methods devised by positive psychologists for measurement purposes are self-report surveys: the VIA Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS) and – more relevantly for present concerns – the VIA Inventory of Strengths for Youth (VIA-Youth), developed by Nansook Park and intended for the 10–17 age group. The 198-item assessment is typically administered in a single 45-minute session. As VIA-Youth is already widely used, data on the distribution and relevant correlates of the character strengths of young people are rapidly accumulating. One significant finding is that youth possess (or take themselves to possess) all the same strengths as adults. Nevertheless, some strengths are more common among youth: hope, teamwork and zest (Park and Peterson, 2009) – supporting Aristotle’s insight that young people do possess character strengths of their own. Shorter versions of the instruments have now been developed as the original ones take considerable time to complete. Orthodox Aristotelians might grumble about the absence of some conspicuously Aristotelian virtues from the VIA Inventory, virtues such as self-respect, justified anger, indignation over someone’s undeserved good fortune, pride, and the childhood virtues of shamefulness and emulousness. The VIA Inventory also includes various character strengths not mentioned by Aristotle. There is no reason to be overly bothered by these discrepancies, however, as the list of virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics (1985) need not be understood as exhaustive. After all, Aristotle introduces various additional virtues of a pure emotional nature in his Rhetoric (2007) – and the individuation of virtues is essentially an empirical matter in Aristotle’s schema. The

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salient criterion for him is this: Does the proposed trait constitute an intrinsically valuable, medial state of character that marks out a significant, discrete sphere of human existence? Positive psychologists might give answers to this question that differ slightly from those provided by Aristotle 2300 years ago. More crucial than their not being monogamously wedded to Aristotle’s own listing is the general approach they share with Aristotle of considering moral strengths of character ‘the building blocks of goodness’ in an individual (Niemiec, 2013). The sole reliance of the VIA model on self-evaluated traits is worrisome, however. It is well known that, in addition to standard social desirability and self-confirmation biases, self-reports often involve hefty dollops of selfserving spin. Wilful deceptions of others as well as unwilful self-deceptions pose a constant threat to outcome validity. The fact that I consider myself a duck, even in my most reflective moments, does not make me a duck! Positive psychologists seem to be singularly cavalier about those concerns. That said, they have accumulated a substantial database of self-evaluations concerning moral virtue from all over the world that make for exciting comparisons and correlational studies (Niemiec, 2013; McGrath, 2014b). Furthermore, in defence of self-reports, it could be said that some of their shortcomings will hopefully cancel themselves out over large samples (see e.g. Bok, 2010: 36–42). Notice also that despite his uncompromising selfrealism (about moral characteristics as objective features of selfhood), Aristotle refused to grant any persons the superior moral status of megalopsychoi (great-minded paragons of moral virtue) unless both their true selves (being really worthy of great things) and their self-concepts (thinking themselves worthy of great things) were up to scratch (1985: 97 [1123b2–5]). The self-realism which motivates the profoundest problem is, I would argue, not to be tinkered with, but it need not be tantamount to the sort of naïve realism which refuses to grant self-concept any constitutive role in selfhood. After all, the mirror that reflects the furniture in a room is also part of the furniture (Kristjánsson, 2010a, chap. 2). We may, thus, have good reason to give some credence to self-reports in measurements of virtue, especially if those can be corroborated by other, more objective, types of evidence. There are more specific concerns attached to the current state of VIA research, however. First, the original codification of the data from world religions, philosophies and other historical and geographical sources that was supposed to underlie the 6-virtues-24-strengths taxonomy remains opaque and unavailable for scrutiny. Second and more generally, personality psychologists Noftle, Schnitker and Robins (2011) argue that the taxonomy on offer in positive psychology is under-theorised, under-conceptualised, underresearched and in all likelihood redundant with respect to the Big-Five Model! Existent research has failed to replicate the theoretical structure of VIA’s Big Six. Even positive psychologists themselves have in the past

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produced factor analyses that yield three, four, or five, rather than six, basic factors. Further confirmatory analyses suggest that none of the theoretical models that purport to present the structure of the character strengths provides a good fit to the data. Yet correlations between the Big-Five traits and specific VIA factors are so high (up to 0.71) that one could suppose that what is being measured is the same construct under different descriptions, rather than two distinct constructs. Furthermore, even though the VIA strengths have been shown to be predictive of emotional and physical wellbeing, their predictive power may be redundant with respect to the Big Five; at least the incremental validity of the character strengths above the Big Five has yet to be demonstrated (Noftle, Schnitker and Robins, 2011). These criticisms have not fallen on deaf ears within the positive psychology camp, and psychologist Bob McGrath has now been entrusted with the task of undertaking a major revision of the VIA classificatory system in 2014–2015 (McGrath, 2014c). McGrath himself (2013) has already suggested – after factor analysing almost 500,000 VIA-IS responses from US adults – that a revamped five-factor model is more adequate than the model of the Big Six, with a brand new factor of ‘future orientation’ added. However, McGrath acknowledges that factor analysis only takes the process so far, and that a ‘good deal of conceptual analysis is also needed’. In more recent papers, McGrath (2014a; 2014c) describes the development of a simpler three-factor model (of caring, inquisitiveness and self-control; namely the strengths of ‘heart, head and guts’) from the US adult VIA data, using a series of principal components analyses. He is acutely aware, however, of the fact that ‘the possibility of self-delusional misrepresentation remains’. On a more positive note, McGrath’s (2014b) study of responses by more than 1 million adults worldwide reveals substantial convergence across 75 nations, with the most highly endorsed character strengths across nationalities being honesty, fairness, kindness, judgement and curiosity, but the least endorsed ones spirituality and zest. This finding provides indirect evidence for Aristotle’s moral cosmopolitanism. Researchers in the Jubilee Centre decided not to remain content with taking on the current VIA-Institute’s self-report measures wholesale, as those seem to be in a state of flux. However, they do apply a shorter version of the VIA-Youth as part of a mixed instrument to measure moral virtue in 14–15 year olds (Walker, 2014).

Triangulation ‘Triangulation’ is a term used to indicate that more than a single method is used in a study, with a view to cross-checking data from multiple sources to search for regularities in the research material. Complaints were raised in the previous two sections about the subjectivity of self-reports. It does mend matters somewhat that in triangulation studies of, for instance, the Big-Five

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Model, reports from significant others (peers, parents, friends) have been found to correlate significantly with self-reports (McCrae, 2009: 150). Nevertheless, the fact that not only I, but also my friends and family, consider me to be a duck is not sufficient evidence to prove that I am a duck! That said, there is something quintessentially Aristotelian about crosschecking the validity of self-reports by asking friends – at least if they are ‘character friends’ (as distinct from friends for utility or pleasure: Aristotle, 1985: 209–216 [1155b16–1157b5]). In true character friendship, the only ‘complete’ friendship, A loves B (1) for B’s own sake, (2) for what B really is and (3) because B has a virtuous character, with each of these conditions implying the other two (see Irwin’s commentary in Aristotle, 1985: 359; I discuss this further in Chapter 6). Because moral virtue is an objective merit and, once gained, an enduring one, character friendships tend to be stable and lifelong, come rain or shine. In general, we are able to observe others better than ourselves (Aristotle, 1985: 258 [1169b33–35]); in particular, character friends become our second selves, often knowing us better than we do ourselves. What an excellent potential source for triangulation! The downside is, however, that in order to know if a friend is really a character friend – and can be relied upon to help us solve the profoundest problem – we need to be able to measure her character, but that is precisely what the profoundest problem is all about. We might thus find ourselves caught up in a vicious circle. Moreover, some Aristotelian scholars will read Aristotle such as to exclude the possibility of true character friendships between non-adults – which is then fatal to the sorts of measurements of adolescent virtues under special consideration in this chapter (for an alternative view, see Walker, Curren and Jones, 2015). Researchers in the Jubilee Centre decided to draw upon the method of triangulation in the study of the moral virtues of 14–15 year olds. First, they ask the teachers of those students to tell us what they consider to be their students’ most prominent character strengths and weaknesses (as a group, not individually, which would be difficult for ethical reasons). The researchers then compare those answers to the strengths and weaknesses that the students self-evaluate collectively, in the short version of the VIA-Youth, as their top and bottom assets. Third, they compare those scores to more objective findings, derived from another (moral-dilemma based) part of the mixed-method instrument (Walker, 2014) – to which I will turn in the next section. Jubilee Centre researchers have recently learnt that the experienced Taiwanese character educationist Angela Chi-Ming Lee has opted for a similar triangulation method when designing a pilot study of the moral competence of Taiwanese students. Her instrument combines self-reports, responses to moral dilemmas, interviews and ratings by teachers (Lee, 2013). Unsurprisingly, Lee’s pilot study found self-report scores to be higher than dilemma scores and, arguably, overestimating students’ competence. Lee’s

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findings are in line with the assumptions that underwrite the current research work in the Jubilee Centre.

For something more objective: moral-dilemma tests Rather than remaining satisfied with eliciting self-evaluations of virtue, an Aristotelian approach would ideally explore how people in fact react – attitudinally, emotionally, behaviourally – to morally charged situations. Could this perhaps be done by exposing them to scenarios involving moral dilemmas and recording their responses? We do not have to look far for the mother of all dilemma testing: Kohlberg’s famous approach. I assume that readers have a basic familiarity with Kohlberg’s stage-theory-driven methodology (or can Google it!) and will not spend time rehearsing its pros and cons here. Clearly, Kohlberg’s dilemmas (e.g. the most famous one about Heinz and the miserly chemist) are not meant to elicit the respondents’ possession of Aristotelian virtue, but rather how developed they are cognitively as Piagetian-cum-Kantian agents. It seems, however, not so far-fetched to conceive of dilemma tests that would attempt to home in on the virtues and, in fact, one such test is in the making by Aristotelian philosopher Howard Curzer and his colleagues (2014). Curzer kindly provided a taster of his test (2013), the so-called SphereSpecific Moral Reasoning and Theory Survey (SMARTS). In one of the sample scenarios given, a person called Mike has to decide whether to accept a request for a personal favour from a colleague at work and thereby miss out on a long-awaited holiday. Respondents are asked if it would be morally acceptable for Mike to refuse the colleague’s request. If the answer is ‘no’, seven options are given for why it would be wrong to say ‘no’ and respondents are asked to rank the two best choices. For a person reasonably well versed in Aristotelian moral philosophy, it is evident that the option ‘A good person is a generous person, and generous people do favours for others when the trouble and risk are not extreme’ is the ideal Aristotelian answer. (Notably, however, SMARTS also accepts sophisticated utilitarian and deontological, e.g. Kantian, reasoning as adequate.) Concerns about self-transparency obviously remain. How do we know if the answer to a question like this, given in an online test, accurately reflects how the respondent would truly react in such a situation – in other words, if the answer reveals the possession or lack of a praiseworthy hexis? Nevertheless, dilemma tests – especially those done under relative time constraints – seem prima facie to offer the sort of critical distance from mere navel-gazing that self-reports about perceived virtue do not. The samples received from Curzer (2013) bear all the hallmarks of a potentially promising test of Aristotelian moral virtue. However, concerns about lack of rigorous psychometric evaluations, coupled with the fact that the test is geared towards university students, not 14–15 year olds, made researchers in

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the Jubilee Centre decide not to use it for the character-education-in-schools survey. While it is premature to count Curzer’s approach out, they did not feel they knew enough about it yet to count it in. Jubilee Centre researchers have, however, found themselves drawn to tests devised by self-described ‘neo-Kohlbergian’ moral psychologists who, by adopting that label, want both to highlight their indebtedness to Kohlberg and their substantial departure from his assumptions and methods. Although neo-Kohlbergianism may frustrate and fascinate Aristotelians in equal measure, for reasons that will become apparent below, and although Curzer and colleagues (2014) claim to have surpassed its dilemma-testing method already, instrument design conducted along its well-established lines is worthy of serious consideration for Aristotelians. Here is a quick background: Kohlberg’s student, James Rest, started to work on a so-called Defining Issue Test (hereafter: DIT) in the early 1970s as a paper-and-pencil alternative to Kohlberg’s semi-structured interview measure. Notably, Kohlberg himself remained deeply sceptical of this alternative, as it was ‘too quick and dirty’ (see Rest et al., 1999: 295). The test was gradually developed further by Rest and his colleagues and is now in substantial use. Similar to Kohlberg’s test, the DIT presents respondents with moral dilemmas. They then have to decide what the protagonist ought to do in the story (on a 3point scale) and why (12 possibilities on a 5-point scale from ‘very important’ consideration to ‘not very important’). Finally, respondents are asked to rank the four items that best reflect their view about how the protagonist ought to solve the dilemma (Thoma, 2006: 68). An analogue of general DIT-testing in the field of professional decision-making is the socalled Situational Judgement Test (SJT) which gauges professionals’ likely performance on representative tasks, contrived and evaluated by an expert panel in a given professional field. SJTs are increasingly being used as selection and training tools, especially in medical education (Patterson and Ashworth, 2011; cf. Kotzee et al., 2014). As before, however, I choose examples from character education in schools and focus, therefore, in what follows on the DIT rather than SJTs. Pace Kohlberg, (a) the DIT does not assume a strong stage model of moral development but is rather meant to activate and measure the default ‘schema’ (see below) by which individuals interpret moral issues, (b) the DIT assumes that eliciting tacit/implicit understandings of moral situations in this way may result in more accurate representations of moral functioning than teasing out self-reported explanations in interviews and (c) the DIT is not tied to a particular ethical theory such as Kantianism (Thoma, 2006). Thoma’s suggested validity criteria for the DIT – of differentiating between age and education groups, showing longitudinal gains, correlating with cognitive-capacity measures, being sensitive to moral education interventions, correlating with behaviour and decision-making and predicting political choice and attitude – seem to have been met reasonably well (Thoma, 2006).

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In order to get a better grip on the theory behind the DIT, two main assumptions need to be made explicit. The first assumption is the so-called Four Component Model of moral functioning, according to which (successful) moral functioning is the result of (at least) four relatively independent processes: moral sensitivity, moral judgement, moral motivation and moral character. Originally at least – and here is the clear Kohlbergian rationalist heritage – the DIT was supposed to measure only one of those components, namely moral judgement. Moral judgement is supposed to operate at different levels, however, from more or less context-independent ‘bedrock schemas’ activating tacit understandings of moral rightness (onto which the DIT is meant to latch), through thicker ‘intermediate concepts’ (such as the cognitive content of moral virtues), to ultra-thick surface-level ‘codes of conduct’ (cf. Thoma, 2006: 72–73; Bebeau, 2001). For a measure that is meant to be as free as possible of Kohlberg-style moralised psychology, there are surprisingly many philosophical conceptions smuggled in at the outset; but let us take those provisionally at face value. The second main assumption is that of schema theory: a more recent addition to DIT-theorising. While difficult to summarise briefly, schemas are understood as tightly woven networks of tacit knowledge residing in longterm memory, organised around particular life events, helping individuals to facilitate and react to new information (Narvaez, 2005; Thoma, 2006). Based upon large-sample analyses, neo-Kohlbergians argue that the DIT measures three developmentally ordered schemas: personal interest (corresponding to Kohlberg’s stages 2 and 3), norm-maintenance (corresponding to stage 4) and a post-conventional schema (corresponding to stages 5 and 6: Thoma, Derryberry and Crowson, 2013). The DIT has thus basically been recast – in the light of recent schema theory – as a schema-activation measure, the idea being that the sentence fragments provided as options in the DIT give sufficient information to trigger a moral schema, but not too much (by over-determining the response). An adolescent version of the DIT has recently been developed: the Adolescent Intermediate Concepts Measure (hereafter: AD-icm, see Thoma, Derryberry and Crowson, 2013). This measure appeals to researchers in the Jubilee Centre for two reasons. One is that it is designed for the age group on which their character-education-in-schools project focuses; the other that it is virtue-based. The second of those reasons may sound odd, given where DIT-research is coming from, but the idea here is that the AD-icm does not activate bedrock schemas like the DIT, but rather intermediate concepts. To search for such concepts, the neo-Kohlbergians in question canvassed the recent character-education literature and came up with seven prototypical virtues around which the seven dilemmas in the AD-icm revolve (fairness, responsibility, loyalty, self-discipline, honesty, courage and respect). After each story, respondents are asked to rate a set of action choices on a 5-point scale from ‘a very good choice’ to ‘a very bad choice’. They are then asked

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to rate the three best and the two worst choices. Finally, respondents are asked to rate the justification items on a 5-point scale from ‘strongly believing this is a good reason’ to ‘strongly believing this is a bad reason’. The authors of the AD-icm recognise the historic tension between virtue-based and cognitive developmental models of moral education. However, they believe that by focusing not on bedrock schemas, as in the adult population, but on intermediate concepts, they can, as it were, capture the best of both worlds: creating a measure of adolescent moral thinking that is congruent with adult thinking measured via the DIT, but also one which captures the development of virtues in aspiring moral learners. More specifically, they believe that ‘the virtues as used in contemporary character education are similar to established intermediate concepts in the professions (e.g. due process and informed consent), in that these character concepts can be viewed as being understood by the individual based on his/her moral judgement interacting with contextual factors’ (Thoma, Derryberry and Crowson, 2013). The new assumptions behind DIT and AD-icm theory – especially the idea of schema activation – have imported a new edge and added force to neo-Kohlbergian dilemma testing which makes it, in many ways, appealing for Aristotelians. But here is the frustrating bit. At its inception, the notion of ‘schema’ was clearly defined within cognitive psychology and conceptually limited. The original idea in neo-Kohlbergianism was thus that the DIT only measures moral judgement schemas, and that moral judgement is conceptually as well as empirically independent of the other three components of moral judgement (Bebeau, 2001: 185). This assumption still holds sway among neo-Kohlbergians such as Thoma (2006) who represent more the ‘Kohlbergian’ rationalist part of the label than the ‘neo’ part. As schema theory, however, moved on and gained traction, it gradually became more inclusive, incorporating aspects of social cognitive psychology – such that, for instance, the construction of the moral personality as a whole became understood as one of schema construction and accoutrement. Moral functioning, on this broad view, is basically a question of what kind of general moral schemas are ‘chronically accessible’ for the agent, awaiting activation (Lapsley and Narvaez, 2006: 268), and moral upbringing is all about filling students’ memories with the desirable moral schemas through proper mentoring, feedback and practice (Narvaez, 2005). To cut a long story short, whereas Narvaez’s broad interpretation of schema theory will resonate well with Aristotelians, Thoma’s narrow one will less so. Recall that in the AD-icm, as presented by Thoma, Derryberry and Crowson (2013), ‘virtues’ (qua ‘intermediate concepts’) are understood as concepts that (ought to) guide young people’s thinking and action – similar to concepts in professional ethics for adults – at the ‘secondary’ level, sandwiched between thin bedrock schemas of moral rightness on the primary level and customary codes on the tertiary one. The AD-icm is taken to be a

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measure of moral thinking, exclusively. This cognitive understanding of ‘virtue’ is quite un-Aristotelian and makes it, in fact, difficult to distinguish between virtues, on the one hand, and values and mere moral beliefs, on the other. Notably, this understanding would seem to rule out any utilisation of the DIT/AD-icm as a potential solution to the problem of virtue measurement, were it not for the fortuitous happenstance that DIT scores seem empirically correlated to behavioural and decision-making variables (Thoma, 2006: 76; cf. Rest, 1986, which reports 32 out of 47 measures of moral action as being statistically significant). Using the AD-icm could then, at best, be seen as a roundabout way to access some information about moral functioning in general (including the exhibition of virtuous behaviour). Things become considerably more upbeat from an Aristotelian perspective, however, if Narvaez’s broad interpretation of schemas holds water, for on her interpretation the measures in question will be taken to evoke grand moral schemas, covering more or less the whole of moral functioning. What is more, virtues in her view are in no way secondary (with respect to bedrock schemas) or narrow; rather ‘the moral habits of virtue theory are social cognitive schemas whose chronic accessibility favors automatic activation’ (Lapsley and Narvaez, 2006: 268). In other words, moral schemas are then more or less the same as Aristotelian hexeis – or, if you prefer, Bourdieuean habitus – and the DIT and AD-icm begin to look like promising measures of expected moral performance. Lending some support to this broad interpretation is the finding that students who objectively make ‘bad’ choices (as evidenced by their having been placed in in-school suspension) also underperform on the AD-icm measure (Thoma, 2014). One feature of a broad Aristotelian conception of moral schema that dilemma methods will, however, by their very nature fail to elicit is the perception of moral salience, or what Wright (2014) calls ‘sensitivity to the presence of virtue-relevant (external/internal) stimuli, which includes the accurate attribution of virtue-relevant significance to stimuli’. Rather than checking if respondents notice a morally salient issue in their perceptual environment, dilemmas present them with situations that have already been singled out by the researcher and accorded significance, only inquiring what would be a good choice in that pre-defined situation. In other words, dilemmas are externally structured and authored, and they do not allow the same sort of reflective interplay between the reader and the text as more detailed flesh-and-blood stories (Robinson, 2014). Despite this shortcoming and although the jury is still out, more generally, on whether the narrow or broad interpretation of moral schemas is more appropriate in the case of DIT/AD-icm, researchers in the Jubilee Centre decided to use a shortened version of the AD-icm as part of a triangulation process to home in on the virtues of 14–15 year olds. The results of the ADicm are to be compared to results from the short version of the VIA-Youth measure, and also teachers’ assessments of students’ virtues (see Walker, 2014). This will, to the best of my knowledge, be the first time that the

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findings of dilemma tests have been compared systematically to findings from a validated self-report measure. Steve Thoma has advised the Jubilee Centre team on how to reduce the number of dilemmas in the AD-icm from seven to three, and to de-Americanise its language, without destroying its psychometric properties. The eventual decision was to focus on courage, self-discipline and honesty, as those allow for obvious comparisons with constructs from the VIA-Youth (see Walker, 2014, for some initial findings; a report on the whole project is due in 2015).

Observational methods A tree is best known by its fruit; surely virtue must be about ‘doing something with it’ (through actual moral performance) rather than ‘sitting pretty on it’ (through feeling the right feelings or giving good answers in dilemma tests) and thus be best measurable through observable behaviour – must it not? Despite the common Aristotelian refrain that virtue is not just about behaviour – hence the already explained Aristotelian anti-behaviouristic objection to the situationist challenge, and the rejection of crude reductive behavioural operationalism – we should not forget Aristotle’s insistence that ‘Olympic prizes are not for the finest and strongest, but for contestants, since it is only these who win; so also in life [only] the fine and good people who act correctly win the prize’ (1985: 20 [1099a1–7]). The implication of those words seems to be that attempts at virtue development would be futile if they did not issue in some explicit changes in conduct. The eminent Aristotelian scholar Nancy Sherman even wrote that ‘we can’t know another’s virtue except by inference from its expression in various kinds of external activity, choices and conduct’ (1997: 111). There need not be anything reductionist or instrumentalist about such a claim; after all, what the Aristotelian will be focusing on in observations is reason-infused action, not mere behaviour. Consider here one notable systematic attempt to observe Aristotelian virtues in a school context, if not among students but teachers. Catherine Fallona’s (2000) aim was to call attention to the moral virtues that teachers express in their relations with students. She focused on a list of Aristotelian virtues from the Nicomachean Ethics, including bravery, wit, generosity and justice, and – in a middle school in Southern Arizona – used a qualitative interpretative method of ‘focused observations’ (including field notes and videotaping) to ‘identify teacher behaviour that was reflective of virtue’ (2000: 688). Her actual findings are less pertinent for present purposes than the method she used and her reflections on that method, which eventually prompted her to distinguish between more and less ‘visible’ virtues. Identifying the less visible ones ‘requires a high degree of interpretation’ (p. 690), in Fallona’s view, where observations are not sufficient, but input from teachers (through interviews) is also needed. Notice, however, that even for her very choice of virtues to observe, Fallona decided to concentrate on the

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‘action virtues’ from the Nicomachean Ethics rather than the ‘emotion virtues’ listed in the Rhetoric (such as compassion and righteous indignation). That may tell us something about how limiting the method of mere virtue observations will turn out to be, from an Aristotelian perspective. There is no reason to discard completely the option of observing behavioural changes in the wake of the invocation of a character-education programme, for instance the option of simply counting instances of serious bullying or knife crime in the school yard before and after the given intervention. After all, all headteachers will celebrate the reduction of violence in their schools, by whatever mechanism that happens. But the problem is that without being able to penetrate into the minds of the students and eliciting their reasons for acting, we do not know if an Aristotelian virtue ‘schema’ has been activated or not (see e.g. Snow, 2014). Observing emotion virtues presents an even deeper problem. Take anger, which can either be an instantiation of an Aristotelian virtue or a vice, depending on the context and the reasons for it. Suppose we observed fewer instances of student anger being demonstrated in the school in the wake of a character-education intervention. Should we interpret that as an enhancement of the virtue of mildness of temper – or as a proliferation of the deficiency-extreme of insensitivity to committed offences? It could be argued, in response, that if observed behavioural changes follow immediately on the heels of the invocation of a programme of character education – aimed at changing states of character – then an inference to the best possible explanation would ascribe those behavioural changes to changes in character (cf. Curren, 2014b). But, without further evidence, we would still not know if those character changes were stable and consistent across domains, as Aristotelian virtue should ex hypothesi be, or simply domain-specific to the particular school environment. Even if observable moral competency is what we are really after, there is a case for arguing that such competency must arise from mental structures and that those can be best gauged – as suggested in earlier – by testing reasoning strategies and principles of sound moral thinking (cf. Norris, Leighton and Phillips, 2004). Compounding the above-mentioned theoretical issues are more mundane practical concerns. Observations, that typically need to be longitudinal (Ellenwood, 2014), are labour-and-time consuming and difficult to administer (Kwon, 2015). For example, the multifaceted observation methods listed by Lyseight-Jones (1998: 37–38), of examining children’s work and behaviour over extended periods of time in class, assemblies and at play, by taking photographs and using video and audio recordings, may only be feasible in long-term ethnographic studies. Even in such studies, however, researchers – if they are interested in moral character – are faced with the interpretative task of getting under the skin of the children and coding what the recorded behaviour really means in terms of virtue and its development. Perhaps the best hope of success here lies in action research conducted by the

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teachers themselves (cf. Sanderse, 2014), as those will know the children more intimately than any external researcher. Indeed, observational action research of this kind, designed along the lines of so-called ‘pedagogical documentation’, seems to have been carried out with good effect in kindergartens run on the philosophy of Reggio Emilia (Lenz-Taguchi, 2010). For practical reasons – constraints of time and space – researchers in the Jubilee Centre decided not to rely on an observational method, at the present juncture, in their study of the moral virtues of 14–15 year olds, although its use at future stages of work in the Centre has not been ruled out. That caveat is important because there is some indication that the constraints of time and space in observational studies may, indeed, be transcended by applying a technology already widely used by young people, smartphones. Schueller (2014) thus describes a smartphone app called NOVA (Networked Virtue Assessment) which works such that when User 1 observes the virtues of kindness, gratitude or forgiveness in User 2, User 1 records that in her smartphone. That triggers a message in User 2’s phone where she is asked about the intention and emotion behind this virtuous act. Simultaneously, the app takes a ‘snapshot’ of the situation with 38 sensors from both smartphone devices, recording inter alia time, location and any ambient noises. Schueller notes that this method, which is still at the trialling stage, would be ideal for use in school settings. In the present context, NOVA carries promise for Aristotelian character educators not only because it may help overcome some of the practical problems that mar observational studies, but also because it assumes (as highlighted in the fifth section of this chapter) that a realistic assessment of virtue will involve triangulation of data from a number of different sources: here peer reports, self-reports and behavioural data.

For something even more objective: implicit testing and biological measures For Aristotelians, paradigmatic moral virtues either are emotions or incorporate emotions. Given the lack of self-transparency that typically characterises people’s engagement with their emotional lives, would it not be ideal to find a measure of moral virtue that somehow tracked emotional reactions directly without the medium of potentially biased rationalisations? So-called implicit measures, the latest kid on the block in social scientific research, are supposed to do just that. Their aim is to tap into introspectively unidentified, unconscious processes of evaluation, shaped by past experiences, which typically act as automatic triggers of emotional reactions – including moral reactions. Implicit measures are latency-based measures that work on the assumption that cognitive primings can reveal truths about who we really are deep down: truths, however, which remain irredeemably below the waterline of conscious thought. Various ingenious tests have been developed to operationalise this assumption. One of the most famous is the ‘implicit association

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test’ where respondents are asked to match, in rapid succession, sets of words on two sides of a computer screen – where on one side will be words like ‘white’, ‘black’ and ‘coloured’, or proper names such as my own and some other people’s, and on the other side are positive or negative adjectives. Another test, the ‘sequential priming task’, measures how quickly respondents recognise positive and negative connotations of a stimulus adjective. Some of the most interesting findings of implicit measures so far have been in the field of self-esteem research, where significant differences have been recorded between results of explicit and implicit self-esteem measures (see references and discussion in Kristjánsson, 2010a, chap. 5.4), and in research into implicit racial, sexual and ageist attitudes (see further in Payne and Gawronski, 2010). Given how quickly this field is developing, we can expect almost all socio-psychological variables which have previously been studied using explicit measures to come, sooner or later, under the scrutiny of implicit ones. Somewhat surprisingly, I only found one study which directly focuses on moral virtue via an implicit measure designed along the above lines (Perugini and Leone, 2009; cf., however, a related method of free associations via cue words, in Kamizono, Chen and Morinaga, 2014). In this study, the subjects’ implicit moral self-concept was examined through an implicit association test and compared with their explicit (self-reported) self-concept. When the subjects in the study believed it was over, they were rewarded, as promised, with a free lottery ticket. Some, however, received two as if ‘by mistake’. It turned out that the implicit moral self-concept was a better predictor than the self-reported one of which subjects actually handed back the second ticket to the researchers. The caveat that this was a single small study conducted in a single country (Italy) notwithstanding, the implication seems to be that we may be able to know more about the virtue of (actual) honesty by using implicit testing than other more standard methods (Perugini and Leone, 2009). Closely related to the association tests are implicit measures that analyse subjects’ eye movement as they track moral options given to them on a computer screen. Fiedler and colleagues (2013) have, for instance, found differences in social-value orientation being reflected through stable differences in patterns of information search and preferences for specific types of information, as revealed by eye-tracking data. It must be noted that although there is considerable excitement about implicit measures in current social psychology, the method does have its critics. One drawback is that scores in implicit measures seem to be extremely sensitive to minor situational changes (although this has not dammed the steady stream of new research). Men who in previous implicit tests have appeared to be prejudiced against disabled people, for example, show little traces of such prejudice any more after watching a short interview with an attractive disabled woman. Debates rage, therefore, in psychological circles about whether responses on implicit measures reflect stable representations

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in long-term memory or simply fluid constructions that are generated on the spot (Payne and Gawronski, 2010; various other methodological worries abound about the relationship between IAT scores and actual behaviour, see e.g. Blanton et al., 2009). Researchers in the Jubilee Centre did consider designing their own implicit test of virtue in 14–15 year olds, but given the precarious state of the methodological debate on implicit testing, they ultimately gave up on this idea, fearing that more controversy would eventually surround the method they used than the actual findings. Moreover, given the sensitive nature of some of those tests, they might not be ethically applicable for present purposes: namely, as measures of moral virtue in young students before and after a character-education intervention. In the last year or two, a different sort of implicit testing from the association tests described above has attracted considerable attention and is worthy of mention here, although it is still at an early stage of development. This method, which could be called vocabulary analysis, draws on new technologies enabling extensive scanning of online texts and self-expressions. Kern and colleagues (2014) examined Big-Five personality traits and online word expressions using millions of status updates from almost 70,000 Facebook users who had also signed up for the application MyPersonality, which allows access to their Facebook profiles. By systematically analysing the vocabulary (both single words and word groups) used in those updates, the researchers identified the vocabulary features most positively or negatively correlated with each Big-Five factor. Consequently, it became possible to predict a person’s Big-Five profile without any Big-Five measure ever having been completed. Schwartz and colleagues (2013) scanned the language used in Tweets from 1300 US counties and found linguistic differences that corresponded to and predicted differences in subjective well-being that were known to exist (according to established life-satisfaction measures) in those counties. Most significantly, so-called disengagement words, such as ‘bored’, ‘stressed’ and ‘tired’, predicted lower life satisfaction. Given that the lifesatisfaction scores they worked with tracked counties, not individuals, the authors conclude that happiness seems to be contagious! Those two vocabulary analyses both draw upon existing reliable measures as benchmarks, namely of Big Five and life satisfaction (although one may, of course, contest if those are valid in measuring the constructs in question). The problem with applying this method to measurements of virtue is that no such established benchmarks exist in that area; after all the point of the present chapter is to address that very shortcoming. Frimer and colleagues (2012) suggest a way of circumventing the problem by using established paragons of virtue and vice (in this case chosen by a group of 102 social scientists from a list of the world’s most influential people published in Time magazine) as benchmarks, people like Martin Luther King on the upper end of the scale and Hitler at the lower. (What Frimer is interested in is moral motivation, but it is easy to imagine how the method could be extended to

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virtue as a whole.) Frimer works on the assumption that, in subtle ways, people reveal their private thoughts and desires when they speak, and the more they care about x, the more they will use words that describe x. He then uses text-analysis software to count up the number of ‘agency’ versus ‘communion’ words in extant interviews and speeches. This method, when applied to selected texts by the exemplars chosen, seems to distinguish well between the Martin Luther Kings and the Hitlers of this world, with people one would expect to score somewhere in the middle also falling in the middle. Considerable optimism reigns about this new method of linguistic analysis, so much so that I heard Martin Seligman, a famous previous devotee of questionnaires (see e.g. his 2011 book), remarking informally in a 2013 conference that the era of questionnaire research for self-reporting may soon be over (cf. also Snow’s 2014 equally revolutionary speculations about future uses of ‘big data’ to track moral virtue). Given that I am exploring instruments that could be used with young students, and assuming that most 14–15 year olds will already be active on social networking sites, vocabulary analysis may seem to present a promising option. A residual concerns remains, however, about the accuracy of potential texts chosen for analysis. As Kern and colleagues (2014) freely acknowledge, sites such as Facebook and Twitter reflect identity-and-reputation management: one presents the face there that one wants others to see. They seem to be fairly optimistic, however, that relevant expressions in the natural language used in Facebook updates, over a long period of time, are less susceptible to self-report biases than quickly manipulated responses in self-report questionnaires. Further research is needed to test that hypothesis, but what we can say at the moment is that the success of this new implicit method depends on the texts chosen being representative of true selfhood: in this case of really ‘implying’ virtue or lack thereof. Some critics of implicit testing say that it is in the end nothing but a poor substitute of biological, especially neuroscientific, measures and that those will ultimately replace both implicit tests and, indeed, all the other measures of virtue that have been canvassed so far – thus ultimately solving once and for all the profoundest problem. Will hormonal analyses and MRI-scans in due course tell us everything we need to know about a person’s possession or lack of moral virtue? Although it is always difficult to prognosticate about future trends – not least with respect to the hothouse of neuroscience – one can be pretty sure that if Aristotle were alive today, he would be actively following or even pursuing research into the human brain! Some brain research has already produced salutary findings for questions of measuring virtue. More than a decade ago, Greene and colleagues (2001) showed through an fMRI investigation that areas of the brain associated with emotion become significantly more active when respondents are presented with moral dilemmas than non-moral ones, and within the category of moral

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dilemmas those that present a ‘personal’ quandary reveal a reaction-time pattern that differs from the pattern elicited by more ‘impersonal’ moral dilemmas. A more recent finding indicates that although subjects predict that they will be extremely upset by blatant racial acts or comments, they actually exhibit little emotional distress when this occurs, as evidenced by emotional brain activity in an MRI-scan (Kawakami et al., 2009). One of the latest contributions to this burgeoning field shows that brain activity in Korean and American participants differs substantially across different types of moral dilemmas (Han, Glover and Jeong, 2014). Generally speaking, the hope is that neuro-imaging methods can in due course give researchers an insight into the biological substructures that process moral virtue and underlie manifest behaviour (Han, 2014). This will then either be achieved through neural connectivity analysis (by measuring the connectivity between brain regions supposedly associated with moral virtue, on the one hand, and self-related processes, on the other, cf. Immordino-Yang et al., 2009) or structural analysis (measuring the thickness of grey matter in regions of interest; cf. Scholz et al., 2009, for a generic description). The benchmarking problem, mentioned earlier in connection with implicit measures, must obviously be solved first. Again, the most obvious solution will be to use the brain activity of acknowledged paragons of moral virtue (see e.g. Colby and Damon, 1992) as benchmarks and then work backwards developmentally through what has been called ‘backward engineering’ (Han, 2014). As readers will know, however, MRI-scans still offer only a crude measure of brain activity. They may tell us, for example, whether any emotional activity is taking place and what its reaction times are, but not precisely what sort of activity: not, say, which potential emotional virtue has or has not been evoked. Biological measures were never, therefore, a serious option for present purposes, in the Jubilee Centre’s research on moral virtue in young students, although they may well become an option in years to come.

Our best bet Like a mountain, Aristotle rises as he recedes. I have illustrated repeatedly in this book how Aristotle-inspired character education is undergoing a revival. Yet the progress of Aristotelian character education is hampered by what I have called ‘the profoundest problem’ of how to measure moral virtue. In this chapter, I have offered eight distinct variations on this messy theme, illustrated through the example of the Jubilee Centre’s project to survey virtue in a sample of 14–15 year old students in the UK as a prolegomenon to future attempts at character education. Clearly, the variations offered above are not exhaustive of the field. I have not canvassed various other possible methods such as deep qualitative interviews or Socratic dialogues with young people about moral character (see

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e.g. Sanderse, 2014); dialogues using children-friendly gadgets such as puppets (see e.g. Krettenauer, Campbell and Hertz, 2013) or a story-telling method (Tandy, 1998); and textual analysis of workbooks or journals that students could be asked to write about the virtues (Seroczynski, Tong, Grundy and Hull, 2014; cf. Arthur et al., 2014). However, I have (a) looked closely at some of the most popular contenders in this methodological field; (b) attempted to assess judiciously what others have argued and achieved; and (c) given examples of how a distinctive position for research on young students has been developed in the Jubilee Centre. Although I do not claim to have been entirely successful in solving the profoundest problem, I hope to have deepened the discourse on it and laid a foundation for future work in this area: work that – and here I agree with Wright (2014) – ‘will require a tremendous amount of time, energy, resources, and creativity and will only bear fruit through the convergence of different methodological strategies employed in different (but overlapping) ways’. It could be noted as an aside that although many of the methods described in the above sections may fall short as psychometric instruments to measure the impact of programmes in character education, they could have other potential advantages, for example in alerting respondents to the salience of the very issues that they are meant to measure. The dividing line between intervention and evaluation in education can sometimes be thin; and researchers in the Jubilee Centre have, for example, in recent months often been informed by students and teachers that the survey of character (Walker, 2014) has generated interest in character and virtue where it was not found before (cf. also Arthur et al., 2014). Nancy Snow (2014) also makes an important observation by noting that measuring virtue may actually have morally transformative and reformative side effects: We who struggle to be virtuous – who don’t always know how to be kind or generous, who have selfish or foolish tendencies, who act impulsively or without sufficient sensitivity, and whose virtue is imperfect and fragile – need to know how to become virtuous as well as how to sustain and strengthen our virtue. Returning to the issue of future work in this area, it needs, I would argue, to draw both on foundational assumptions in virtue ethics and on state-of-theart psychometrics. In psychology, many tests have arbitrary metrics that are, nonetheless, satisfactory for testing psychological theories. Metric arbitrariness becomes a serious concern, however, in applied educational work – as conducted in the Jubilee Centre – when the aim is to draw inferences about the true (real-world) standing of groups or individuals on the latent dimension being measured (e.g. virtue). In such cases, researchers need to be able to build a strong empirical base that links specific test scores to meaningful and satisfactorily argued-for events/markers, so that we can assert with good

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reason that a given individual or group has passed the threshold of a meaningful level of, say, character development (see Blanton and Jaccard, 2006, especially p. 38). Given the current state of play, my main conclusion is that a proper instrument to measure (Aristotelian) virtue needs to be an eclectic patchwork and needs to offer the possibility of triangulation (cf. Curren, 2014b, for a general defence of triangulation methods to ‘measure goodness’). I have suggested how a mixed-method instrument combining self-reports, otherreports and more objective measures – more specifically, in the example that I have used throughout, dilemma tests – may be our best option at the moment (cf. Johnson and Onwuegbuzie, 2005, for a more general justification of mixed methods; see also Fowers, 2014, for an alternative overview that yet offers conclusions similar to mine). In an ideal research world of unlimited time and resources, I can imagine the possibility of drawing up, step by step, a complex picture of students’ broad moral hexeis/schemas by homing in separately on each of the components of Aristotelian virtue (cf. Snow, 2014; Fowers, 2014), for example gauging perception of moral salience by letting them analyse a novel or a film and identify the moral issues that it elicits, gauging moral emotion and desire through an implicit-measure test, gauging moral self-concept through a selfreport questionnaire, gauging moral understanding/reasoning through a deep interview, gauging moral motivation through dilemma testing, gauging moral behaviour and general character-related school ethos through a longitudinal observational study, and then corroborating the findings of the study through detailed peer reports (parents, friends, teachers) over an extended period of time. As current research resources in the actual world will scarcely allow for such an extensive measurement project, we need to make do with less ambitious – ‘quicker and dirtier’ – instruments, like the one currently being used in the Jubilee Centre (Walker, 2014), instruments that still allow for triangulation and actualise some of the potential of a mixed-method approach. All that said, I am well aware of the hazards of methodological eclecticism. There may be ineliminable tensions between the different methods chosen; energies may be spread too thin by a multicriterial point of view; and the hybrid end-product may simply inherit and reproduce all the specific difficulties of the methods that it combines. All that I can say at the moment is that if the triangulation option I have offered as our current best bet is deemed unsatisfactory, it may be only so because – as with democracy in Churchill’s quip – the detractors have failed to consider the alternatives.

Chapter 4

Phronesis and Aristotelian character education

The problem about phronesis […] whereas young people become accomplished in geometry and mathematics, and wise within these limits, [phronetic] young people do not seem to be found. The reason is that [phronesis] is concerned with particulars as well as universals, and particulars become known from experience, but a young person lacks experience, since some length of time is needed to produce it. (Aristotle, 1985: 160 [1142a12–16]) The third problem about Aristotelian character education that I introduced in the fourth section in Chapter 1 concerned the development of critical, reason-infused or phronesis-guided virtue. Here is the mystery. Whereas most Aristotle-inspired approaches to moral education highlight the early habituation phase of development, they rarely have much to say about the ultimate goal of cultivating fully fledged phronesis. Given Aristotle’s own uncompromising stance, one would expect library shelves to be stacked with books on ‘education for phronesis’. However, I have yet to find a single book, or even a single journal article, written by an Aristotelian character educator, that gives pride of place to phronesis education. It is not as if the topic is simply passed over in silence; most sources on Aristotelian character education record Aristotle’s emphasis on phronesis (see e.g. Carr, 2012; Curren, 2000; Kristjánsson, 2007; Sanderse, 2012). However, the actual cultivation of phronesis is typically given short shrift – by repeating the same Aristotelian truisms – or absorbed into a more general discussion of virtue development. The most sustained discussion of this topic is actually in a work by a nonAristotelian moral educator, Darcia Narvaez (2013), albeit one who has expressed sympathies with the evidential naturalism inherent in a virtue ethical approach. One wonders if this widespread and protracted lack of focus on the essential final end of Aristotelian character education can be seen as an implicit reaction – a covert counterweight – to the Kohlbergian overemphasis on faculties of moral reasoning. In any case, the aim of the present

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chapter is to repair the dearth of attention given to phronesis in charactereducation circles and to bring considerations from other, but related, discourses to bear on it. When I talk about ‘repeating Aristotelian truisms’, I ask for the term ‘truism’ to be understood as non-pejoratively as possible! There is nothing wrong with rehearsing Aristotle’s general remarks about phronesis and its education (as I did in the third section of Chapter 1), scant and inconclusive as they may be, especially to those who are new to the field and want to know in a nutshell what Aristotelian character education is all about. What I mean is simply that the truisms in question offer nothing new or substantive to those reasonably well versed in Aristotelian moral theory. Furthermore, they offer little in the way of nitty-gritty advice on how to design and conduct phronesis education, which could aid practitioners in the field. Thus, although I will need to repeat some of those truisms at the beginning of the second section in this chapter, for the sake of uninitiated readers, I propose to tread beyond the truisms by drawing on other areas of research than the character-education literature. Fortunately, such areas currently exist where academics speak enthusiastically about phronesis. Schwartz and Sharpe seem too downcast here when they complain that phronesis is rarely mentioned in academic debates or public discourse (2010: 11). Their own popular and well-motivated retrieval of this ancient ideal bears witness to how well phronesis can be seen to reverberate and resonate in the modern psyche. The first area of research where phronesis is undergoing a revival is classic Aristotelian scholarship – witness for instance, Dan Russell’s rich and illuminating study (2009). This scholarship can be roughly divided, as always, into two broad categories: exegetical and reconstructive. On the exegetical side, while much work has been done, it remains disappointing from an educational perspective, because looking for guidance in Aristotle’s own texts on how phronesis can be taught is like looking for wool in a goat’s house. Curzer frankly states that because ‘specifics are frustratingly absent’ in Aristotle’s corpus, there is not much that the mere exegete can say: ‘Aristotle leaves the nature of teaching unspecified, as will I’ (2012: 351). On the reconstructive side, the challenge of wringing implicit or indirect guidance from Aristotle has been taken up with considerable force by individual authors, such as Sherman (1989) and Annas (2011a), and I draw on their works in the second and fourth sections in this chapter. Yet, even in reconstructive Aristotelian scholarship – not to mention all the recent virtue ethical literature, which harks back to Aristotle – much less is said about the education of virtue in general and of phronesis in particular, than one might expect, given Aristotle’s own radically educational stance. In the Eudemian Ethics, he says, for example: ‘Although […] it is fine […] to attain knowledge of the various fine things, all the same […] in the case of goodness it is not the knowledge of its essential nature that is most valuable but the ascertainment of the sources that produce it’ (1981: 1216b19–20, my italics). Virtue is, as Annas says – on

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an Aristotelian understanding – an ‘essentially developmental notion’ (2011a: 38). Various writers have pointed out, however, that this insight has failed to register on the radar of much of contemporary virtue ethics (see e.g. Swartwood, 2013a: 6; Russell, 2014a). The second area of research where phronesis has come under the spotlight recently is in psychology, both positive psychology (Peterson and Seligman, 2004) and the psychology of human development (see e.g. Staudinger and Glück, 2011). While these sources typically give a nod back to Aristotelian phronesis, they are not couched in terms of phronesis, but simply ‘wisdom’. The initial question to ask is, therefore, how much overlap there is between ‘wisdom’ on this understanding and Aristotle’s notion – and what lessons, if any, can be elicited from this literature regarding the question of phronesis education. I take on this task in the third section of this chapter. The third area of research where phronesis has become something of a buzzword lately is in professional ethics, especially in relation to professionalism in the so-called ‘people professions’, such as medicine, nursing, social work and teaching. Focusing attention on the phronesis of practitioners is seen by many as a helpful way to rescue professional ethics from the clutches of a stale rule-and-code-fetishising formalism. Unfortunately however, some of the current literature in this area circumvents the essential moral aspect of practical wisdom or good sense; understanding phronesis rather as some sort of mysterious intuitive artistry (for a critique, see Kristjánsson, 2007, chap. 11). On the other hand, quite a few sources do explore professional phronesis correctly – according to an Aristotelian understanding – as practical moral wisdom in professional practice, and even give sound advice on how it can be cultivated and coached in professional education (see e.g. various articles in the edited volume by Bondi, Carr, Clark and Clegg, 2011; also Cooke and Carr, 2014). Nevertheless, I shall leave this expanding area of research mostly out of consideration in what follows. The reason is twofold: first, one must assume that the development of general phronesis is logically and developmentally prior to the development of phronesis in a specific area of professional practice. It would seem outlandish, from an Aristotelian perspective, to assume that anyone can learn to feel and act wisely in a complex, morally loaded area of adult occupation without first having learnt to feel and act wisely as a general moral agent. (I say more about this in Chapter 7.) Second, as is clearly brought out in Kaldjian’s (2010) article on the teaching of practical wisdom in medicine, such teaching requires commitment, on the part of the student, to general and specific moral principles, as well as mastery of clinical practice, which can only be acquired over years of advanced training. These three reasons indicate that trying to derive lessons about the nurturing of phronesis in the young from how it is taught at a sophisticated level to professionals may be getting hold of the wrong end of the stick. What we need to look out for is advice that is both more general and more commonsensical than that which can be administered to students

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in advanced courses in professional ethics. So while the ‘truisms’ that I mentioned earlier are too elementary for present purposes, the message that can be elicited from the professional ethics literature tends to be too elaborate to be of much practical use at less advanced levels. My approach, in what follows, is very much on the reconstructive side. I am not as interested in what Aristotle did actually say as I am in what he could have said – or what might reasonably be added to his account – to augment the topic of phronesis education. I therefore pick up where other scholars in the reconstruction business have left off. Although my motivation here is first and foremost practical (i.e. educational), I cannot avoid weighing in on some theoretical issues, such as whether or not phronesis requires a general blueprint for living a good human life (the fourth section) and to what extent it forces us to adopt consequentialist considerations in negotiating moral conflict (the final section).

Aristotelian truisms – and the first steps beyond Aristotle’s phronesis is an intellectual virtue (virtue of thought) that serves the purpose of living well by monitoring and guiding the moral virtues. Building on emotional dispositions cultivated through early-years habituation, phronesis re-evaluates those dispositions critically, allowing them to truly ‘share in reason’, and provides the agent with proper justifications for them. In addition to latching itself on to every ‘natural’ moral virtue, and infusing it with systematic reason, the function of phronesis is to ‘deliberate finely’ about the relative weight of competing values, actions and emotions in the context of the question of ‘what promotes living well in general’. A person who has acquired phronesis has thus, inter alia, the wisdom to adjudicate the relative weight of different virtues in conflict situations and to reach a measured verdict about best courses of action (Aristotle, 1985: 153, 154, 159, 164, 171 [1140a26–29, 1140b4–6, 1141b30–31, 1143a8–9, 1144b30–32]). This mediating, overseeing and orchestrating role of phronesis gives it a clear status as a higher-order intellectual virtue, perhaps best named as ‘good sense’, although I will be relying mostly on the more standard translation of ‘practical wisdom’ in what follows. Every moral virtue requires both a moral component, concerned with the proper passions, desires and pleasures, and an intellectual component, consisting of the sort of knowledge and intellectual guidance that only phronesis can provide (see e.g. Curzer, 2012: 294–295). Yet, Aristotle decides for some reason to describe the individual moral virtues with respect to the moral component only, and postpones discussion of phronesis until the specific sections in the Nicomachean Ethics on intellectual virtues. It is important to place phronesis correctly in relation to other intellectual virtues (although there is no reason to become too technical here and buy into all the specifics of Aristotle’s complex taxonomy). All the intellectual

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virtues aim at human excellence in the field of knowing, but that field can be divided into the sub-fields of scientific knowledge (episteme), skill in making things (techne) and skill in doing things, or more specifically, in acting/reacting in the moral sphere (phronesis). True wisdom (sophia) in the field of episteme is achieved through an understanding (nous) of first principles; for example, those of mathematics. Phronesis also requires nous (namely about the first principles of ethics), but it combines it with mastery of the correct desire to act or react. Hence, it can help us to think about the content of the good life that we want to live, and to deliberate about plans of action in pursuit of it (Aristotle, 1985: 148–163 [1139a1–1142b31]). The standard developmental story about the trajectory of moral virtue and phronesis which mainstream Aristotle scholars, such as Burnyeat (1980), have gleaned from his writings is that it all starts with habituation: the process that I defined in Chapter 2 (following Lawrence, 2011) as the intentional one of inculcating character through the exercise of action and reaction in a repetitive pattern under outside guidance. Gradually, however, that initial process, which is basically non-rational and achieved via conditioning, is superseded by a rational process, whereby learners continue to be conditioned, but through a conditioning that is accompanied by description and explanation – leading, over time, to the formation of the learners’ own phronesis. Curzer (2012, chaps. 15–16) contends, however, that Burnyeat gives false colour to Aristotle’s texts by invoking a second stage of habituation in which instruction through description and explanation accompanies commands and exhortations. In contrast, Curzer insists, Aristotle is adamant that no argumentative instruction works with learners until the more or less mindless habituation process has been completed. No matter whether Burnyeat’s or Curzer’s interpretation is more textually correct, we seem to be faced with the puzzle that philosopher of education R. S. Peters famously termed ‘the paradox of moral education’ (1981, chap. 3) and which I briefly invoked in the fourth section in Chapter 1: the paradox of how to reach the aspired ‘critical palace’ through a wholly ‘uncritical courtyard’. It must be admitted that Peters himself, while sympathetic to Aristotle’s educational story, had a very lofty (Kantian) view of moral epistemology, according to which mature moral development consists in the autonomous and empirically detached imposition of rationally self-justifying principles. The snag is that the palace of that sort of reason will never be entered through the Aristotelian courtyard – thus making Peters’ paradox as essentially irresolvable as the reconciliation of oil and water! That said, at least a puzzle, if not a paradox, remains about the transition between Burnyeat’s two processes, or from Curzer’s single process to the phronetic ‘palace’. It might seem tempting to try to get a grip on that puzzle by rephrasing it in terms of Aristotle’s level-theory of moral development – about the different developmental levels of ‘many’, the ‘incontinent’, ‘continent’ and ‘fully virtuous’ – but in fact that venture would compound the

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problem, rather than simplify it, because, as I explained briefly in the third section in Chapter 1, Aristotle’s is not a strict stage theory in the Kohlbergian sense, where everyone must traverse all the stages in the same order. Rather, Aristotle’s theory is more about a fluid categorisation of the levels at which people find themselves at any given time. There seems to be reason to believe, for instance, that a person brought up in good habits can jump straight from natural (non-phronesis-infused) virtue to full virtue, without ever having to stop over at any of the ‘intermediary’ levels. The ‘puzzle’ – or, if you still like, the ‘paradox’ – of moral education that remains in Aristotle’s own tersely worded text has prompted many scholars to lay the exegetical spyglass aside and consider rather what Aristotle should have said about the moral developmental and educational process. Thus, on Sherman’s reconstructive account, habituation is never a mindless or passive process, but rather requires the moral learner to actively exercise the cognitive capacities of judgement and reason from the very beginning. As Aristotle himself notes in his analogy of virtue acquisition to the acquisition of a skill, such as that of the harpist: ‘playing the harp makes both good and bad harpists’ (1985: 34 [1103b8–9]); so getting the practice is not enough if it is not accompanied by subtle reflective discriminations. Similarly, the critical nature of full virtue must be reflected in the whole educational process, in Sherman’s view, if there ever is to be full virtue. Through habituation, the child is therefore never manipulated – such manipulations would not lead to full virtue – but rather is gradually brought to more imaginative and critical discriminations and heightened sensitivities with the guidance of an external instructor. The rehearsals required for acquiring the virtues ‘must involve the employment of critical capacities, such as attending to a goal, recognizing mistakes and learning from them, understanding instructions, following tips and cues’. Thus, habituation constitutes a ‘critical practice’: a gradual dynamic process of moral and intellectual sensitisation and integration (Sherman, 1989: 153–199). Broadly, this construal of the proper Aristotelian trajectory of character education has become the mainstream one in recent philosophical writings (see e.g. Annas, 2011a: 84; 2011b; Lawrence, 2011; Curren, 2013; Russell, 2014a). Hand in hand with this construal then also goes an optimistic view of children’s abilities to ‘come to learn not only passively to copy and develop routine, but actively to aspire to understanding, self-direction, and improvement’ from an early age (Annas, 2011a: 24), through a process that is, nonetheless, ‘slow, laborious, and above all piecemeal’ (Russell, 2009: 326). Phronesis is here seen both as a necessary constitutive part of every developed virtue (Russell, 2009: x) and a source of their holistic unity (Curzer, 2012: 295). On Annas’s (2011a, 2011b) construal, from a theoretical point of view, there is nothing particularly puzzling any more about the acquisition of phronetic virtue. We can get a comprehensive handle on it with an analogy to the acquisition of a skill, such as violin playing. According to this analogy, there is nothing mysterious about the way in which a child, who starts out with

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simple finger-and-bow exercises, gradually acquires mastery of the violin repertoire and ends up interpreting it and even improvising upon it in a selfdirected way; no magic ingredient is required to lubricate the slide from earlier to latter phases of that trajectory. Annas has worked out this skill analogy in considerable detail, as I explore later. Sherman’s reconstructive story may thus help lift the theoretical clouds that have haunted the landscape of Aristotelian moral development. One might even want to argue that Sherman has provided a fully adequate account of the cognitive development from habituated virtue to reflective virtue – the only caveat being that there is no textual support for this ‘Aristotelian’ method in Aristotle’s corpus; quite the contrary, in fact (see Curzer, 2012, chap. 15; Tachibana, 2012: 54–55) it is based on a radical reconstruction of Aristotle’s views! Sherman does not, however, explore a motivational side of the paradox to which Curren (2013) has given careful consideration: namely, that the better the moral educator is as a role model, the more likely it is that the moral learner becomes inclined towards the good because of a love towards the educator rather than the content of the education – unless, that is, we posit an intrinsic need in human beings for autonomous self-determination, which seems to go far beyond anything that Aristotle explicitly says on this issue. Once again, contemporary Aristotelian character educationists need to make some urgent decisions about how far they are willing to depart from Aristotle, and what exactly they need to add to his theory. From a practical perspective, it would be overly optimistic to suppose that Sherman’s reconstructive account can be easily translated into a programme of character education at school. The implicit advice from Sherman seems to be to utilise the already standard Aristotelian methods of habituation and rolemodelling but to ‘intellectualise’ them: make them tap deeper into children’s reflective, critical faculties from an early age. That, however, is no mean feat. I do not want to sound too discouraging here, but those methods are already difficult enough to administer within a programme of Burnyeat-defined firstphase Aristotelian character education. If the demand made now, in the manner of Sherman, is that they also engage the learners’ critical faculties from the word go, the task of the character educator has been made even more formidable. Can Annas’s skill analogy perhaps provide the missing element that somehow binds these methods together? I return to that question in the penultimate section, but first some observations need to be made about recent psychological attempts to study wisdom and its education.

Interlude: lessons to be learnt from wisdom research in psychology? Regarding many factual questions, Aristotle believed that we must hear the answer ‘from the natural scientists’ (1985: 181 [1147b5–9]). Or, to put the

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words of this devout empiricist into modern language: moral philosophy qua practical enterprise must eventually be answerable to empirical research in social science. Acting on this advice, let us embark on a short detour into psychological territory, in which wisdom has recently come under scrutiny. One possible point of entry would be via positive psychology’s virtue theory, where wisdom is touted as one of six universal core moral virtues (Peterson and Seligman, 2004). I have decided to leave that theory out of the reckoning here, however, because it clearly does not understand wisdom as a meta-virtue, akin to phronesis, which adjudicates between the others in cases of conflict. Rather, wisdom in positive psychology is – unfortunately in my view – simply considered on a par with the other core virtues (see Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 7). More promising research paradigms exist, however, in current psychology where wisdom has been accorded the sort of meta-status that Aristotle gave to phronesis. Near the end of the twentieth century a number of psychologists studying human development came to the conclusion that adding the concept of wisdom to psychological inquiry would be ‘a worthwhile challenge’ (Baltes and Staudinger, 2000: 132). As is their wont, psychologists began by studying implicit lay conceptions about wisdom: the views of ‘the many’. As is their wont also, they quickly moved on to the views of the ‘wise’, as the lay conceptions were too ‘inflationary’ and did not lend themselves easily to ‘empirical inquiry in terms of quantifiable operationalization’ (Staudinger and Glück, 2011: 217; Baltes and Staudinger, 2000: 124). Consequently, various philosophical notions – including Aristotelian ones – were filtered into the psychological wisdom theories. Robert Sternberg was among the first psychologists to propose an overarching theory of wisdom: his ‘balance theory’ (1998). He characterises wisdom as a meta-skill in applying tacit knowledge, mediated by values, to the integrative task of achieving the common good – balancing intrapersonal, interpersonal and extrapersonal interests and adapting these to environmental contexts. The so-called Berlin model, developed at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, presents another psychological paradigm on wisdom (Baltes and Staudinger, 2000). It defines wisdom as an individual’s overall expert system – a motivational meta-heuristic – on the fundamental pragmatics of life, relating to the individual’s conduct and construction of meaning as she orchestrates her development towards excellence. The expertise in question is then measured with five criteria: the richness of relevant factual knowledge; the richness of relevant procedural knowledge; the extent of life-span contextualism and perspective; relativism of values and life priorities, producing full toleration of difference; and the recognition and management of uncertainty (Staudinger and Glück, 2011: 222–223). An expert is expected to score higher on these criteria than a novice, and thus be overall more wise. To gauge this methodologically, respondents are presented with dilemmas involving difficult life choices and are asked to respond by

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reflecting out loud. Those reflections are then transcribed and evaluated by a select panel of judges in light of the five wisdom criteria (Baltes and Staudinger, 2000: 126). As it turns out, while many adults are ‘on the way towards wisdom’, very few display ‘a high level of wisdom-related knowledge’, as judged by this instrument (Baltes and Smith, 2008: 60). From an Aristotelian perspective, there is not much to choose between those two wisdom paradigms. Both consider wisdom to be a practically focused meta-skill, although Sternberg’s model highlights the tacit nature of this skill more than the Berlin Model. Indeed, if only those two models were on the agenda, one could speak of a relative consensus in the field of psychological wisdom research. That consensus has, however, been unseated by a set of stern criticisms from Monika Ardelt (2004). At the theoretical level, she complains that previous conceptualisations foreground wisdom-related knowledge at the expense of wise persons. At the methodological level, she proposes that wisdom be measured via the actual wisdom of people, rather than the wisdom of their knowledge; tacit or not. She worries that, like Kohlberg’s famous dilemmas, current wisdom measures home in on mere intellectual knowledge and verbal dexterity. As an alternative, she has developed a Likert-scale self-report questionnaire whereby people are asked to agree or disagree with certain statements about themselves. The statements fall into three main categories: cognitive (measuring deep understanding of human life), reflective (measuring insightful perception of events from multiple perspectives) and affective (measuring sympathetic and compassionate love for others). Ardelt considers those categories to make up a ‘relatively parsimonious’ and easily operationalisable model of wisdom (2004: 274). I suggested in the first section in this chapter that the fundamental question to ask about those social scientific conceptualisations of wisdom is whether or not they are close enough to phronesis to be relevant for present purposes. Notwithstanding some obvious overlaps, I consider the wisdom concepts described above to be substantially broader than that of phronesis. The ones proposed by Sternberg and the Berlin group seem to incorporate aspects of what Aristotle would have called sophia, as well as phronesis. It is no coincidence that the opposite of wisdom is here said to be ‘foolishness’, rather than lack of practical moral wisdom (Baltes and Smith, 2008: 56). Ardelt’s model, is also broader than phronesis, but in a different sense, since it incorporates the moral content of particular emotion virtues (sympathy and compassionate love) into the specification of wisdom. One may wonder why these particular virtues were singled out for inclusion. Be that as it may, the definition of wisdom here clearly goes beyond that of a mere intellectual virtue. Returning to the Berlin Model, another feature distinguishes it quite clearly from the Aristotelian one. By invoking acknowledgement of moral relativism – not only pluralism or sensitivity to incidental moral conflicts – as a criterion of wisdom, the Berlin Model goes much further than Aristotelians can accept in the direction of celebrating difference; even to the point of

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fetishising tragic ambiguities of moral life. There is no recognition here of Aristotelian moral cosmopolitanism, or the motivational unity of Aristotle’s practically wise person (Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 7). Despite these conceptual and theoretical differences, there is no reason to rule out the possibility that character educators can extract some salient lessons from current writings on the cultivation of wisdom in the psychology literature. I must admit, however, that a quick survey of those writings does not indicate that they add much to the typical repertoire of Aristotle-inspired methods. There is much talk of the role of ‘wisdom mentors’ and the use of classical literature to stimulate dialectical, self-reflective thinking (Sternberg, Jarvin and Grigorenko, 2009). All that is fine and well, from an Aristotelian perspective, but if we are looking for a significant breakthrough that explains how the particular shortcomings of those methods – and their apparent heterogeneity – can be repaired, it does not seem to be forthcoming in the psychology literature under discussion.

Skills and blueprints This detour into psychological territory did at least attest to the rising interest in phronesis and related concepts in social science, although it failed to provide us with the missing link that could bind together the diffuse efforts reviewed at the end of the second section and explain how those may contribute, in Aristotelian character education, to the development of phronesis-guided virtue, rather than simply natural habituated virtue. Recently a strong case has been made for claiming that the ‘skill analogy’, as explicated by Annas (2011a, 2011b), but extended in a particularist direction by Swartwood (2013a), does hold a key to solving this problem. More specifically, as the argument goes, we can learn all we need to know about the general acquisition of full virtue from empirical studies of the skill acquisition of experts in fields such as firefighting. I explore this argument below and identify three possible objections to it. While the first one can be parried, the other two turn out to be more enduring. The skill analogy may not be a lost cause, however, as those objections suggest other avenues of insight, which I subsequently pursue. Some of the discussion in this section may appear a bit technical and academically nitpicking to general readers. I do assure them, however, that a precise understanding of the skill analogy will have significant practical implications; for instance, concerning the classroom implementation of character educational programmes. Recall first that according to the skill analogy, the development of the phronesis of the moral learner shares important features with that of the expert in a practical skill (Annas, 2011a: 2). There is thus no special explanatory problem attached to phronesis development as part of character education; these processes simply constitute particular instances of something people do all the time: getting gradually better at a practical skill through practice and

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guided training (Russell, 2014a). In his recent doctoral thesis (2013a; see also 2013b), Jason Swartwood illustrates this analogy by relating it to an established social scientific model of expert decision-making; the so-called Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model (2013a: 12). This model explains how expert decision making develops through a combination of a set of gradually evolving abilities: intuitive, deliberative, meta-cognitive, selfregulatory and self-cultivating (2013a: 37). The model, moreover, explains – by drawing on empirical evidence on the development of those abilities in skilled experts – how people can best learn to self-cultivate practical expertise (and by analogy, phronesis): by engaging in deliberate (effortful, motivated, reflective, self-directed) practice towards wisdom; seeking out broad and representative experiences relevant to understanding what matters in the field, and how to achieve it; getting in the habit of trying out new ways of achieving what matters; practising shifting attention between various aspects of situations; practising critical reflection; and consulting and observing the wise for feedback on decisions and guidance in practice (2013a: 76). Although Swartwood focuses on the self-cultivating aspect of skill-and-phronesis education, salient advice about phronesis education at school could be elicited simply by adding ‘helping learners to …’ in front of these main points. The first objection that obtrudes here is that Aristotle himself seems to reject the skill analogy, with his strict distinction between ‘making’ and ‘doing/acting’. For the products of techne ‘determine by their own character whether they have been produced well; and so it suffices that they are in the right state when they have been produced. But for actions expressing virtue to be done […] well, it does not suffice that they are themselves in the right state. Rather, the agent must also be in the right state when he does them’ (1985: 39–40 [1105a26–33]). There are clearly other significant differences between techne and phronesis: A particular practical skill will normally have less scope and depth and be more easily replaceable as a facet of a person’s life than a general moral virtue: for example, compassion. In response to this objection, it could be argued that Aristotle’s distinction between techne and phronesis has been blown out of proportion by many recent interpreters, especially in the education field (as reviewed in Kristjánsson, 2007, chap. 11). After all, Aristotle himself draws a striking analogy between the two when he says that we acquire virtues ‘just as we acquire crafts, by having previously activated them’, thus becoming builders ‘by building and harpists by playing the harp; so also, then, we become just by doing just actions’ (1985: 34 [1103a32–b1]). Moreover, given Aristotle’s various examples of the delicate, non-codifiable skills of medical doctors, navigators and army generals, he clearly thinks that techne and phronesis share the feature of not being teachable via mere formulaic or rule-governed educational methods. So whatever crucial differences exist regarding the moral nature of techne and phronesis, the skill analogy may still hold water educationally as an analogy about skill-and-phronesis acquisition.

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A second objection cuts deeper into the essence of the skill analogy, however. When the phronetic person deliberates about how to actualise a virtue, such as justice, she considers all the nuances of the given situation and determines what would count as justice in that situation. That is what is meant by saying that phronesis latches itself onto each virtue; we could call this the constitutive function of phronesis. But phronesis is not just responsive to the moral good in ‘some restricted area’, but rather the whole of what ‘promotes living well in general’ (Aristotle, 1985: 153 [1140a25–28]). Thus, phronesis can be called upon for adjudication when two different virtues; for example, justice and compassion, collide. We could call this the integrative function of phronesis; it ‘helps us to act virtuously in an overall way’ (Russell, 2014b). Now, here is the thrust of the objection. Whereas the skill analogy, as extended and articulated by Swartwood, may suffice in making sense of the nature and education of constitutive phronesis – as analogous to mastering the internal complexities of a particular skill – it does not account fully for the same in the case of integrative phronesis. Consider the child prodigy who goes on to become a virtuoso violinist, and then suffers what seems to be an inevitable nervous breakdown in her twenties. What such a breakdown is typically about is, I assume, not the skill-internal conflict of deciding whether to play Vivaldi’s Four Seasons slowly or fast! The breakdown is symptomatic of an existential crisis, when the young violinist realises that she may not have been leading a well-rounded life and that she has been deprived of an ordinary teenage life. Nothing in the process of learning to play the violin prepares her for such a crisis; it requires integrative phronesis. A fundamental problem with the skill analogy is that it underplays the scope of the complexities involved in phronesis acquisition. One could say that, in contradistinction to the Berlin Model described in the preceding section, which seems to fetishise the cross-domain disparities and tragic ingredients of wisdom, the skill analogy (at least from Swartwood’s reading) makes the development of phronesis look too domain-confined and smooth. I can envisage two possible responses to this second objection. One response would draw on Aristotle’s own well-known, if much contested, thesis on the unity of the virtues. He seems to claim there that the sort of disanalogy that I drew above between constitutive and integrative phronesis does really apply in the case of the person who has acquired full, phronesisinfused virtue. For ‘as soon as he has [phronesis], which is a single state, he has all the virtues as well’ (1985: 171 [1145a1–2]). To couch this objection in terms of the above distinction between the constitutive and integrative functions of phronesis, Aristotle’s unity-of-virtue thesis can be read as maintaining that this very distinction is unfounded, because phronesis ‘is a single state’. This thesis is a devilishly difficult one, both to interpret and assess (see e.g. Curzer, 2012, chap. 14, on some of the intricacies). Let it suffice to say that Aristotle seems here to be up to his usual trick of defining concepts with respect to their most complete realisations. It may be true that for a fully

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developed phronimos, the distinction between constitutive and integrative phronesis is irrelevant (as the phronimos will, ex hypothesi, have both); however what concerns us, for present purposes as character educators, is phronesis as a developmental notion, where persons are not simply phronetic or not but rather on their way to phronesis. The objection under discussion concerns whether the skill analogy can make full sense of that process, or whether it makes the acquisition of virtue too ideal. The phronimos is, after all, a pretty rarefied ideal – but we do not want phronesis to be the ‘privileged preserve of wizards and sages’ (Schwartz and Sharpe, 2010: 10). A second response has been developed by Annas (2011a); she clearly anticipates this objection, and her response indicates that even for phronesis as a developmental notion, the distinction between constitutive and integrative phronesis does not bear scrutiny, as the two functions will always go hand in hand. We simply cannot teach the moral virtues in isolation, one by one, because ‘they can’t be learnt that way’ (p. 84). A child can, for example, not just learn how to be generous in more and more discriminating ways without also taking account of considerations of fairness and justice. Moral virtues do not develop as ‘independent modules in a person’s character’ (p. 85). It is not as if each virtue has its own little phronesis; rather, phronesis ‘develops over your character as a whole, in a holistic way’ (p. 86). All in all, developing a moral virtue ‘is not a matter of getting even sharper at comparing and assessing different partial claims and then working out an overall decision’, and the ‘unification of the virtues is then no odder or more mysterious than the fact that a pianist does not develop one skill for fingering and another, quite separate skill for tempo, only subsequently wondering how to integrate the results’ (p. 87). Notice, however, that even if we find Annas’s argument (about the necessary ‘package-deal’ of the constitutive and integrative in developing moral virtue) compelling, one may take that argument to undermine, rather than support the skill analogy, or at least to call for an extension of Annas’s analogy in the opposite direction from that suggested by Swartwood. The different skills that a musician has to master at the same time are, nevertheless, skills in instrument playing: a single techne. Phronesis is, however, about the harmonious mastery of one’s whole life. For the skill analogy to work – and for us to be able to draw inferences from skill acquisition to full-virtue acquisition – it has to be shown that adequately learning a single skill also requires an all-round mastery of surrounding life tasks. Swartwood argues that at least certain skills, such as firefighting do; hence, the possibility of learning about phronesis education from the earlier mentioned RPD model: ‘A good firefighter does not just aim at the goal of putting out fires but at various other goals as well: ensuring firefighter safety, ensuring the safety of citizens, protecting property’. Those goals all constitute ‘the supreme end of firefighting’ and some of them can compete with one another; thus the need for expert decision making in this field, which is analogous to phronesis in the

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moral sphere (2011a: 48). Now, while I have no doubt that firefighters often have to make tough decisions as part of their job, I would still question whether any of those decisions could be counted as analogous to the fundamental decisions concerning life in general, upon which phronesis may be called to adjudicate. The crisis of the conflicted firefighter on the job is simply not similar enough to the existential angst of the young crisis-ridden virtuoso violinist, who does not know how to lead a fulfilling life, for the analogy between the two to work. The conflicted firefighter will probably have a decision-making chain of command, not to mention well-tried drills for possible circumstances. It might bolster the skill analogy if examples were taken from more complex and domain-crossing life skills than violin playing or firefighting; for example, the skills of running a household, farm or a business. The successful farmer clearly has to juggle various considerations from diverse areas of life. Yet I continue to see a fundamental difference between the conflicted farmer qua farmer and the conflicted farmer qua human being who is not really sure if this occupation is conducive to her eudaimonia – or who suddenly needs to balance the expertise learnt on her job with new challenges from a different domain, for example, challenges from environmentalists, who question the morality of unsustainable, non-ecofriendly farming. Someone could point out, at this juncture, that my talk of ‘existential crisis’ and ‘existential angst’ is out of place in an Aristotelian developmental story of phronesis. After all, no persons will ever pass through the courtyard of habit to the palace of phronesis unless they have been ‘brought up in fine habits’, and those habits include learning and taking to heart general fundamental truths about eudaimonia (Aristotle, 1985: 6 [1095b4–9]). Why should a person who has been given such a fixed psycho-moral anchor ever need to succumb to existential ponderings about the meaning of life? In response, I would be strongly inclined to question Aristotle’s early-years determinism and argue that there may be an alternative route to the ‘palace’ in question for those brought up in ‘bad habits’, not through the ‘courtyard’, but through existential, contemplative meaning-making. That argument remains a topic for Chapter 5, however. An initial response to be made here is that even within an internalised moral framework that takes the end of eudaimonia as fixed, there will be considerable scope for existential questions about how this end can best be actualised in the face of competing moral demands from diverse domains of life (cf. Russell, 2009: 412). My point is precisely that the skill analogy on current readings does not account fully for the challenging diversity of those existential questions. It needs to be extended, not in Swartwood’s particularist and domain-specific direction, but in the opposite generalist direction, which accounts for the fact that there is no other skill quite as complex and general as the art of living a good life (which attests once again to the inappropriateness of referring to good character as a ‘soft’ skill!).

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This point leads directly on to the third objection against the skill analogy: an objection to which I alluded already in the first section. It seems to be putting the explanatory order upside down to try to learn (as Swartwood for one suggests) about general phronesis education from education in complex professional skills, rather than vice versa, as the former seem to come before the latter – morally, psychologically and logically – in the developmental order. There is something decidedly odd, from an Aristotelian perspective, about the idea of domain-specific phronesis that is not founded on general phronesis (as I illustrate later in Chapter 7). Moreover, in the ‘people professions’, for instance, such as nursing and teaching where proper techne is necessarily intermingled with what could be called professional phronesis, good professionalism is unthinkable without sustained grounding in theoretical knowledge acquired over a long period of induction and training (see e.g. Narvaez, 2013). Nothing analogous can be taken for granted in the case of the young moral learner. This third objection to the skill analogy can, however, be read constructively rather than deconstructively, as a salient reminder of an Aristotelian observation about phronesis education that often seems to slip through the interpretative net. Recall the opening quote from Aristotle about how phronesis is concerned with particulars as well as universals, and how particulars become known from experience; hence, phronesis takes time to grow. In another place he says that phronesis is not ‘about universals only’ (1985: 158 [1141b15]). Contemporary Aristotelians tend to make heavy weather of those reservations – pulled, as I have argued elsewhere (Kristjánsson, 2007, chap. 11), by intellectually fashionable escapades away from all things foundational, generalist and universal. Thus, Schwartz and Sharpe contend bleakly that phronesis ‘is not something that can be taught [directly]’ (2010: 271). What tends to be forgotten is that while Aristotle’s caveats hit at the idea that phronesis is only taught directly, they do not undermine his general remark that intellectual virtue ‘grows mostly from teaching [rather than habituation]’ (1985: 33 [1103a14–16], my italics). As Curzer bluntly puts it, when describing Aristotle’s view: ‘Philosophers discover the nature of the happy life […] and teach the rest of us’ (2012: 351)! Aristotle clearly assumes that in order for phronesis to function in its role as excellence in deliberating about what ‘promotes living well in general’ (1985: 153 [1140a25–28]), we need a general blueprint of the good life that can be conveyed through teaching: a consciously accessible, comprehensive and systematic – if also flexible and open-textured – conception of what makes a human life go well. Not that this should surprise us; Aristotle’s virtue ethics is after all grounded in a teleological theory about eudaimonia as the ultimate good of human beings, for the sake of which we do all other things – a good that is complex and situation-sensitive, but objective and knowable in principle, given our empirical access to the essential nature of human beings. The Aristotelian blueprint thus involves a comprehensive, universal

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‘ethical theory’ (Irwin, 1990: 467), and in order for full virtue to develop in moral agents, it is not only necessary that they have been brought up in good habits, but also that they have been exposed to this universal theory through teaching. ‘Here, too, [as in medicine] there is a ruling [science]’ (Aristotle, 1985: 159 [1141b22–23]). Aristotle does warn us repeatedly against the assumption that the universal theory can be implemented and applied to specific cases in a codified rule-based manner; such an application requires considerable experience of situational nuances that no teenager will have acquired. Nevertheless, phronesis requires access to a systematic understanding of the good life that can indirectly inform and enlighten the young person’s further development and decisions (for this indirect-blueprint view, see Kraut, 1993; cf. Russell, 2009: 29–30). By ‘indirectly informing’ her decisions, I mean that the blueprint is constantly available to her as a background concern, although she does not draw on it consciously and reflectively on each particular occasion. Swartwood argues that the indirect-blueprint view is empirically wrong because research on expertise shows that experts can do without any blueprint; they simply hone their deliberative and meta-cognitive abilities by reflecting on particular situations (2013a: 130–131). The sticking point here is that Swartwood takes for granted the adequacy of his particularist version of the skill analogy to account fully for the development and application of phronesis. I have argued above, however, that a moral decision on how to act with regard to the human good can be immeasurably more complex than any on-the-job-decision of a skilled expert in a specific field. So even if we accept the empirical evidence that Swartwood adduces about experts such as firefighters, it does not tell against Aristotle’s thesis that the phronimos needs a systematic theory of the good life to lend directionality to her juggling act in balancing the demands of conflicting virtues in complex situations. A common worry about the blueprint view is that it is too intellectual and elitist – making the comprehension of the good life only accessible to philosophical experts. But as Annas explains well, this worry is misguided as it fails to take account of the developmental nature of phronesis (2011b: 110). Experts in phronesis do not spring fully formed out of university courses in moral philosophy, like Athena from the head of Zeus, simply because phronesis needs experience as well as teaching to develop. Moreover, no university courses are needed at all, as long as the learners have been properly habituated into virtue and taught well by their character educators. Phronesis is not an elitist sport! Annas accepts the necessity of a blueprint, and once it is accepted, the skill analogy becomes less pertinent; unless it is extended explicitly in the opposite direction from that suggested by Swartwood. Incorporating the idea of an indirect blueprint for living well into the skill analogy enables it to account for the unique complexity and generality of the skill of living well. Teaching turns out to be the element that binds the otherwise diverse methods of character education together, and lends them order;

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not the bits and pieces that experts pick up on the job, although those bits and pieces remain necessary to give the blueprint the required practical traction. As Annas herself acknowledges in her inimitably lucid work, ethical education ‘is not something “merely practical” and so extraneous to theory’ (2011a: 21). To conclude this section, I wish to make it clear that my aim has not been to set the skill analogy up as a competitor to Aristotle’s indirect-blueprint view. Aristotle’s clearly articulated message is that that we need to keep an eye on the universals (taught via the blueprint), the particulars (perceived with the help of both habituation and knowledge of the universals) and how those come together in deliberation about courses of action. The skill analogy remains illuminating in explaining how we learn to ‘deliberate finely’ about the human good and how the development of those deliberative skills follows in many ways the same pattern as that of more mundane skills. I have simply tried to show that although the skill analogy, as articulated by Swartwood, does give us some handle on the development and education of phronesis, it does not give us a comprehensive handle because (a) whereas skills such as firefighting or violin playing (and even farming) can do without a systematic, foundational blueprint, the general skill of living well cannot, and (b) the skill analogy does not account fully for the range, complexity and at times agonising depth of the existential questions with which the budding phronimos may need to grapple from time to time, even if she has been ‘brought up in good habits’. Given that Annas complements her skill analogy with an indirect-blueprint view, there may in the end be little to choose between her account and mine. Yet, I would have liked to see her present the indirect-blueprint view more as a natural extension of (rather than an independent addition to) the skill analogy, to account for the uniqueness of the skill of living well – a skill that requires explicit teaching about the good life. In other words, I would have liked to see her extend and apply the skill analogy explicitly to the development of phronesis as an intellectual meta-virtue, rather than relying exclusively on examples of individual moral virtues. The present section has presented an argument for the extension of the skill analogy in such a generalist direction.

The role of consequences Apart from the fact that the familiarity of Aristotle’s often-cited truisms about phronesis from the Nicomachean Ethics causes weariness in the reader, they offer scant help to Aristotelian character educators who want to craft interventions to cultivate phronesis. In this chapter, I have tried to tread beyond the truisms, and have arrived at a potentially controversial conclusion (from a curricular perspective) about the need for a taught subject which synthesises what Russell calls ‘the array of […] practical capacities’ (2009: 20) that phronesis incorporates, by providing the student with an indirect

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blueprint for the good life. In other words, my answer to the perennial question of whether character education should be taught as a discrete subject at school, or channelled through the already existing subjects, is that we should ideally do both! Let me end with a response to one possible misgiving, and with one salient observation. The possible misgiving is that the idea of a discrete school subject imparting a blueprint for the good life will always be considered too contentious in contemporary liberal democracies. After all, philosophers have offered plenty of theories about the good life, but they are at odds in important respects and often do not seem to have much practical import (see e.g. Swartwood, 2013a: 78). There is no space here to rehearse Aristotle’s own mitigated cosmopolitanism about moral virtue, although I do think it provides a plausible answer to this misgiving (recall the fourth section in Chapter 2). Rather, one can simply invoke in response the abundant empirical evidence gathered by positive psychologists on how universal the basic moral virtues really are (Peterson and Seligman, 2004). If policy-makers have compunction about adding ‘contentious Aristotelianism’ to the curriculum, I would be perfectly happy for a subject on human flourishing to focus specifically on recent empirical findings about what makes people flourish or flounder – especially since that evidence all seems to point in the Aristotelian direction (see e.g. Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 2)! The final observation that I want to make concerns the nature of the overarching theory that the blueprint will represent. Such a theory will need to be called upon to solve some of the most vexing problems of our time, concerning intractable conflicts of interests between individuals’ and nations’ paths to flourishing. Likening phronesis to the autofocus mechanism on a camera is fine (Garver, 2006: 101), but that mechanism is based on a complicated set of general engineering principles, of which the camera designers need to be in full grasp. The ‘autofocus’ metaphor may not even work in the case of large-scale global or international co-ordination problems – for example, the issue of global warming, or the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In such crises, something more substantial than mere situational dexterity of the skilled expert is required. Moreover, it would be unrealistic to think that questions about those large-scale conflicts can be eschewed in classroom character education – although it would be equally unrealistic to think that they can be brought to a conclusion there. But at least children can be trained in how best to think about those conflicts. In his thoughtful piece on what virtue ethics can learn from utilitarianism, Russell (2014b) argues that virtue ethicists cannot simply wash their hands clean of thinking about and weighing up consequences in large-scale moral quandaries. More specifically, phronesis has to reckon with consequences in a number of ways, because good consequences ‘are the point sometimes – most of the time, in fact’. Russell modifies this argument with the stern declaration, both at the beginning and the end of his piece, that he is ‘not a

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utilitarian’ and that he does not think of moral rightness merely in terms of utility maximisation. Such declarations are indeed necessary because of the bad reputation that utilitarianism tends to have in virtue ethical circles. The problem is that what virtue ethicists generally understand by utilitarianism is Benthamite hedonism (named after John Stuart Mill’s predecessor Jeremy Bentham) or, worse still, some form of contemporary preference utilitarianism, seen through an economic lens of crass cost-benefit analyses. I have argued elsewhere, however, that if we juxtapose Aristotle’s virtue ethics with a sophisticated Millian account of utilitarianism, based on an objective theory of the good and the assumption of qualitative differences in pleasures, there is in the end little to choose between the two (Kristjánsson, 2002, chap. 2). Let us not forget that Aristotle himself says that because ‘virtue is defined as an ability for doing good, the greatest virtues are necessarily those most useful to others’ (2007: 76 [1366b2–5], my italics). While clearly not a happiness maximiser of the utilitarian kind, there is no hint from Aristotle of the common modern virtue ethical assumption that the individual virtues are somehow of an incommensurable standing, and can be assessed without any consideration of overall consequences. I do not want to open a can of worms here at the end, because similarities drawn to utilitarianism will be looked at by many readers with a beady eye. However, I cannot help observing that any flat-out denial of the role of consequences in the blueprint for the good life is likely to degenerate into a failure to account for some of Aristotle’s most striking insights about the value of the virtues, not only for the agent’s good life, but for the good life of all. It is a striking testimony to the vitality of the Aristotelian approach to character education that questions about how to cultivate good sense or practical wisdom in the young are still couched in terms of his account of phronesis and its education. Becoming a fully virtuous phronimos is, as Russell (2014a) notes, an ‘extremely messy’ process. Truisms about similarities between virtue acquisition and practical skill acquisition may be the best place to begin an inquiry into phronesis education, but, as I have argued in this chapter, they are not the best place to end it.

Chapter 5

Can Aristotelian character education undo the effects of bad upbringing?

Two apparently aberrant theses This chapter engages – in tandem – with two problems of Aristotelian character education identified in the fourth section in Chapter 1, by directly addressing two theses found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that current character educationists tend to sweep under the carpet. One of these apparently unpalatable theses has to do with Aristotle’s radical pessimism about the possibility that people who have not received decent character education in their early years, through habituation into virtue, will ever be able to develop morally towards full virtue. It is not so much that they are barred forever from wishing to become fully virtuous agents – phronimoi in Aristotle’s terms – but that without the initial correct habituation, they simply do not have the psychological wherewithal to achieve that aim. The trouble with this thesis is that many of us will contend to know examples of individuals who, despite gruelling circumstances in their upbringing and a lack of moral role models, have nevertheless succeeded in transcending those conditions and acquiring a virtuous moral character. The other thesis concerns the content of the best possible flourishing (eudaimonic) life that human beings can live. Ordinary readers of Books 1–9 of the Nicomachean Ethics may be forgiven for thinking that the best life for human beings is constituted predominantly by virtuous, phronesis-guided conduct, and that was indeed the ‘Aristotelian assumption’ that I suggested to readers in the third section in Chapter 1. It therefore comes as something of a bolt from the blue when Aristotle suddenly announces in Book 10 that phronesis is actually not the supreme activity in eudaimonia but rather contemplation – meaning the self-sufficient, god-like and leisurely theoretical study of unchanging things: the supreme objects of knowledge. Some Aristotelian scholars argue that this thesis ‘enshrines an implausibly constricted ideal of human happiness’ (Lawrence, 1993: 4); others charge him openly with indecision or the holding of contradictory views of human flourishing (see various references in Rorty, 1978: 343). My plan is roughly this. In the second section of this chapter, I illustrate the two theses and their counter-intuitive ramifications by dint of three

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stories concerning imaginary persons. In the third section, I explain what motivates Aristotle’s presumed take on these stories by citing his texts. Then, in the fourth section, I offer a reconstruction of the aforementioned theses which – while going beyond Aristotle’s own texts – remains faithful to essential elements of his moral and educational theory. More specifically, I propose a reconciliation of the two reconstructed theses, arguing that the effects of bad upbringing can be undone through contemplation, if certain conditions are met. In the final section, I bring some considerations from current literatures on radical self-change to bear on this Aristotelian reconstruction and explore some of the implications for issues of contemporary character education.

Illustrations Consider the lives of three imaginary women: Anne, Beth and Cecilia, and what judgements we can pass about how flourishing each has been. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that all three have passed away. This satisfies Aristotle’s acknowledgement of the ‘partial truth’ in the claim that no one can definitely be said to have lived a flourishing life until retrospectively (after death), as overall judgements of flourishing are judgements about a ‘complete life’ (1985: 26–27 [1101a8–20]). The background assumption here is that a person can, in principle, commit such a grave offence or suffer such an unbearable misfortune on the last day of their life that their overall level of eudaimonia might be undermined. Anne was fortunate enough to be born into a large and loving, if relatively poor, family. She enjoyed her fair share of care and attention in youth and always had her parents and siblings – and later her friends – to rely on if the going got tough. She enjoyed school and excelled at all aspects of school work pertaining to social and linguistic skills, although her grades in science and maths remained average. With a personality profile high on agreeableness and extraversion, but also conscientiousness, she quickly gathered around her a network of close friends for whom she was always ready to stick her neck out. She developed a knack for solving disputes, so much so that her friends referred to her jokingly as the ‘female Solomon’. At 21, she married her high-school boyfriend and quickly became a mother, already having two children before she completed her undergraduate degree in Social Work. She ended up having five children and a career as a social worker, aiding the homeless and the disabled. She showered her own children with the same love and attention that she had enjoyed, but also remained close to her friends and continued to extend her network of ‘significant others’ until late in life. With care, compassion and kindness bred into her bones from an early age, she was much appreciated by her family and friends. At an advanced age, she told her loving husband that she had few regrets about life except for not having had more time to read literature and

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reflect on life’s ‘big’ questions, which occupied her at school – not enough ‘me-time’ as her children called it. She died peacefully at the age of 82, and at her funeral, her life was described as virtuous, full and exemplary. Beth was also born into a loving family but of quite a different complexion from Anne’s. Her father had made a fortune from his business ventures and had decided to retire at 53, just four years after Beth was born, in order to devote his life to charitable causes. He became a major public benefactor, focusing on helping children of humble origins to go to college and get on in life. He exhibited magnificence on a grand scale by opening a number of high-ranking private high schools that gave poor but promising children free tuition and quality education. From an early age, Beth followed her father (whom she adored) on rounds to the schools, and she quickly set herself the goal of following in his footsteps. Despite the relatively opulent lifestyle of her parents, she never became spoilt, but always had her eye on the prize of benefiting those less well off. When her father passed away, close to Beth’s eighteenth birthday, she decided to pursue a Business degree in order to be able to oversee the financial side of her father’s legacy. While always something of an introvert, Beth developed some close friendships at college and met a nice man, from a family quite similar to hers, whom she later married. They had two children and continued to run the high schools established by Beth’s father, in addition to other exercises in public philanthropy. Beth was generally considered to be a model businesswoman, mother, wife and friend, and her relationship with her children was good, if somewhat detached because of her slightly withdrawn personality. At the age of 50, when her children had flown the nest, Beth decided that while she had achieved what she set out to do as a child, she needed to change course and find her true self. She left the running of the businesses to her husband and moved to Nepal where she found a personal guru and life coach. She became deeply interested in Oriental religious practices and spent most of her remaining years in a retreat in Nepal, meditating and reflecting upon life with her fellow disciples. She made sure she visited her family regularly and got on well with her grandchildren, when she saw them. She was also always ready to offer help and advice when called upon by friends or family. However, she became gradually more detached from the world and passed away quietly at the age of 82 during a yoga session in Nepal. Upon her death, her significant others commented that she had been a thoughtful and kind-hearted person. However, her children did observe that they would have liked to have seen more of her in her later years, and that while she never flouted her moral duties as a mother and grandmother, her way of life had perhaps developed a slight air of self-indulgence. Cecilia was born into a troubled family. Her father was an alcoholic and her mother suffered from a debilitating mental illness that made her incapable of taking good care of her children. Cecilia only experienced sporadic love and attention from her family, and most of the time she was left

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to her own devices. She was not habituated into feeling and doing the morally right things. Despite having an unusually high IQ, Cecilia did not like school and she dropped out of high school. More seriously, she fell in with the wrong crowd and started to drink, shoplift and take drugs at the age of 14. She seemed to be on an inescapable path to vice, self-destruction and meaninglessness. Through a pure stroke of luck, however, she made a friend when she was 18 who had gone through similar experiences in childhood and later become a drug addict, but who had successfully been through rehab and re-entered school. This friend had a profound influence on Cecilia. She also went into rehab and cleared herself of her drug habit. She got a job in a supermarket but also succeeded in completing secondary school education through evening courses. Another life-changing experience occurred when she entered college and starting reading Philosophy. That course of study stimulated her intellect and she herself acknowledged that the watershed, personal conversion of her life happened when she began reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and understood the intrinsic value of leading a virtuous life. She systematically tried to hone her phronesis, both through theoretical and practical exercises. Rarely, said her friends, had they seen such a radical self-change in any person. She became a true paragon of moral virtue and when she established her own family, she made a conscious effort to bring up her children as differently as possible from the way she was reared. She experienced intense ‘flow’ through acts of kindness and compassion, and although at times she also experienced moments of choking self-doubt and unexplained bouts of anger, she considered her life an overall success story, as did her significant others. She died at the age of 82, surrounded by her beloved friends and family who mourned and missed her deeply. In default of an empirical survey, allow me to hypothesise that the overall consensus about the quality of the three lives that I have described would be that Anne and Cecilia had both led excellent, flourishing lives and that although Anne initially experienced much more ‘moral luck’ than Cecilia, Cecilia’s life was actually more praiseworthy in that she overcame the effects of her damaging upbringing and became a model for other early-years sufferers to follow. We would also be inclined to say, I assume, that Beth led a good life but that some vital ingredient went missing through the gradual disengagement from her personal and social network. The sticking point, however, is that Aristotle himself would not concur with these judgements, except that Anne had led a satisfyingly flourishing life. His verdict would presumably be that Beth’s was the most completely flourishing life of the three, and that the description of Cecilia’s radical self-change is psychologically, as well as socially, unrealistic. Cecilia would, on this Aristotelian reading, clearly be a figment of fiction and not a real-life character. One might suggest that the tension between ‘our’ consensual view and that of Aristotle could be dissolved by drawing a distinction between the morally

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best life and the best life tout court. So whereas the contemporary view would consider the lives of Anne and Cecilia morally better than Beth’s, that view would not necessarily contradict Aristotle’s view on the superiority of Beth’s life as a whole. However, no distinction of this kind would have been available to Aristotle in his day and age, and I do not propose to make my task easier by invoking it here. Indeed, I take the contemporary view to be that Beth’s life is inferior to the other two in terms of general flourishing, not only with respect to some specific ‘moral’ features. To cut a long story short, my view is that Aristotle’s presumed verdicts on the goodness of these three lives are counter-intuitive and potentially inimical to a vindication of an Aristotelian approach to character education. While keeping to the essential assumptions listed in the third section in Chapter 1, the contemporary Aristotelian needs to find a way to reconstruct or revise Aristotle’s judgements on Anne, Beth and Cecilia in order to retain the overall integrity of an Aristotelian approach. My focus in what follows will be on the contours of a life such as Cecilia’s, although Anne’s and Beth’s will also crop up from time to time. The first port of call is to rehearse Aristotle’s own words which give rise to the counter-intuitive verdicts in question.

What Aristotle really said (whether we like it or not) Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1985) famously starts with a search for the supreme good for human beings, and while granting that it must be eudaimonia or flourishing (‘happiness’ in an objective sense), he correctly points out that interpretations run rampant on what flourishing really involves. Aristotle rules out certain proposals, such as that eudaimonia consists of money-making (getting and spending) and honour or hedonic pleasures, but the question is not fully settled before the discussion heads off in the direction of a life of moral virtue and how to achieve it. Many readers will be tempted to understand this expository logic as implying a suggestion of what sort of activities eudaimonia essentially incorporates – but that turns out to be an all-too-hasty inference. We gradually learn that eudaimonia consists of activities in accord with excellence, but there are many different excellences, most notably in virtuous living, practical endeavours and contemplation (theoria), and different sorts of possible lives devoted to such activities. As already explained in Chapter 4, excellence in the sphere of doing things virtuously is phronesis (and the people who achieve such excellence to a high degree are called phronimoi), in the practical sphere of making things it is techne and in the contemplative sphere of reflecting upon the supreme objects of knowing it is sophia or theoretical wisdom. Some Aristotelian exegetes, so-called ‘inclusivists’, have argued that in so far as Aristotle upholds any consistent view on the subject (which some of them question), he takes ‘the mixed life’ to be the best life: the life of a proper mixture of techne, phronesis and sophia. So-called

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‘intellectualists’ retort, however, that for Aristotle the exclusive cultivation of sophia in the sphere of theoria is actually the best possible life (on this debate see e.g. Curzer, 2012, chap. 18). If there ever is good reason to speak of a definitive victory in the field of philosophical exegesis, I believe it was won with Richard Kraut’s (1989) intellectualist interpretation. After reading Kraut’s work, it is difficult to understand how anyone can seriously contend that Aristotle is ambiguous on this issue – and inclusivist interpretations that have appeared subsequently (for example Garver’s in 2006, which understands theoria as an ideal perfection of the morally virtuous life) seem to be increasingly strained. However surprising the argument in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics may appear to readers (and however disappointing for some moral philosophers and character educationists!), it scarcely leaves many loose ends. Pure contemplation activates the most divine, continuous, self-sufficient, noble, intrinsically valuable and leisurely elements within us: the elements that are most ‘us’. This line of thought is then continued in Aristotle’s Politics (1941a), which repeatedly underlines that however admirable the life of the statesman is, who devotes his energy to the smooth running of the polis, it still involves self-sacrifice as it precludes the best possible life of contemplation. A life devoted to phronesis is admittedly a good life, but ‘in a secondary way’ (1985: 287 [1178a9]). In other words, Beth excels over Anne. Two important caveats must be entered at this point. One is that Aristotle tends to define concepts with respect to their most fully realised (and idealised) instances. An order of actualisation does not always reflect an order of prioritisation. Thus, as Lawrence (1993) correctly notes, we must make a distinction between a ‘however circumstanced ideal’ and a ‘utopian ideal’. The pure life of theoria belongs to the latter. What Aristotle says about its perfection does not mean that if one is forced to choose, in the actual world, between an option involving the exhibition of a moral virtue and an exercise in sophia, one should prioritise the latter. Quite the contrary, even the very paragons of moral virtue in Aristotle, the great-minded (megalopsychoi), who are not only phronimoi but who have also been endowed with an unusual amount of moral luck in the form of riches, power and prestige, do not spend their time at all in leisurely contemplative activity but seem to be engaged in a life of relentless philanthropy (see Kristjánsson, 2002, chaps. 3–4). The life of contemplation is thus not the one that one should prioritise, given the current state of affairs, but rather the sort of life that one would choose if the world were a more harmonious and opulent place where moral virtues, such as generosity, courage and compassion, were less often required as appropriate responses to conflicts and misfortune. This is why one must understand Aristotle’s claim that contemplation is the supreme activity in eudaimonia to mean that it only counts as supreme for persons who are already living morally virtuous lives. This is also why it was important to incorporate the detail in the story of Beth that she was not flouting her moral duties in

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choosing the contemplative life. The second caveat is that although the primary objects of contemplation seem to be those of mathematics and physics, it can also involve reflection on the most general ends of human life, in so far that they are fixed, necessary and eternal, given the nature of the human species (see e.g. Rorty, 1978). I make substantial use of that observation in the following section. Let us now turn to the presumed Aristotelian dismissal of the story of Cecilia as being psychologically unrealistic. Aristotle firmly believes that in order to be capable of ever reaching the high ground of the phronimoi, the soul of the moral learner needs to have been ‘prepared by habits’ (that is, via systematic early-years habituation) ‘for enjoying and hating finely, like ground that is to nourish seed’. The effects of the antecedent circumstances of bad upbringing cannot be undone because of the intractability of altering ‘by argument what has long been absorbed by habit’; for a person in such a condition ‘would not even listen to an argument turning him away, or comprehend it [if he did listen]; and in that state how could he be persuaded to change?’ (1985: 292 [1179b11–31]). Bad upbringing compromises, stifles and stunts. It is, therefore, ‘very important, indeed all-important’ to acquire the correct sort of moral habit right from youth (1985: 35 [1103b21–5]). Although Aristotle does acknowledge character education to constitute a life-long process (as I explain further in Chapter 6), the period of early-years education is essential. To talk of this thesis in terms of ‘early-years determinism’ is not entirely accurate from a philosophical perspective, as determinism is usually considered to rule out responsibility, but Aristotle claims that even the vicious are morally responsible for their states of character. But if the desirable state of phronesis presupposes extrinsically administered habituation, in what sense are we ourselves responsible for it – or for the opposite state of vice? Aristotle claims that it was ‘originally open’ to the persons who are now virtuous or vicious not to have acquired this character. Hence, they are responsible for it; though once they have acquired it, they can ‘no longer get rid of it’ – just as ‘it was up to us to throw a stone, since the origin was in us, though we can no longer take it back once we have thrown it’. We are, thus, ‘ourselves in a way jointly responsible for our states of character’ (1985: 68, 70 [1114a11–31, 1114b22–5]). It may not be so hard to understand, on this thesis, how moral habituation is a necessary but insufficient condition of full-blown virtue, for in order to count as true phronomoi, the virtuous must add their own critical reason to the traits with which they were originally inculcated (as I explained in Chapter 4). It is more difficult to understand how the vicious can be held responsible for their states of character, given Aristotle’s bleak remark that ‘no one has even a prospect of becoming good’ without proper habituation (1985: 40 [1105b11–12]). His idea seems to be this. Even those badly brought up will need to reflect upon life and sort out the actions and

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emotions that are conducive to their ends. During that process, they will become aware of the fact that laws and social customs mete out sanctions for vice. If all is well, they will also educate themselves, through a process that Aristotle calls a ‘second-best tack’ (1985: 52 [1109a34]), to recognise derivatively what is morally good and proper. It is within their mental repertoire, therefore, to choose a decent condition between virtue and vice – continence or self-control – and that is what can justifiably be expected of them. This does not change the fact that they can never reach the level of full phronesis, and that is why the story of Cecilia is psychologically unrealistic according to this thesis. (Aristotle does produce a counter-example to his own thesis in another and more obscure context, 1941b: 32 [13a22–31], but I postpone discussing it until the following section.) Although Aristotle may seem to be overly uncompromising at some points where we would want him to compromise, it is not as if his early-years determinism constitutes a startling anomaly or anachronism with respect to current mainstream psychology and virtue theory. Consider attachment theory, according to which secure attachments in early childhood have a privileged relation to subsequent virtue and other pro-social factors (see Harcourt, 2013, on similarities between attachment theory and Aristotelian theory concerning parents as patterns). Recall Hume’s eighteenth century message on how it ‘is almost impossible for the mind to change its character in any considerable article’ (Hume, 1978: 608) – later echoed in Nagel’s (1979) theory about who one is, deep down, really just being a matter of ‘moral luck’. Bear in mind the insights of moral-schema theory according to which ‘the moral habits of virtue theory are social cognitive schemas whose chronic accessibility favors automatic activation’ and whose origins lie in early moral socialisation (Lapsley and Narvaez, 2006: 268). Add to this mixture Swann’s (1996) empirical research which indicates that people’s psychological need for self-equilibrium and self-coherence is stronger than the need for self-enhancement, and that we spend considerable parts of our lives searching for confirmations of our own early self-beliefs from those who abstain from challenging us or prompting us to change. It would not be difficult to put an Aristotelian spin on all this theorising and argue that it provides further proof of the old slogan, identified by Moody-Adams (1990), that character – settled at an early age – ‘is destiny’.

An Aristotelian reconstruction of Aristotle Aristotle’s early-years determinism is not, strictly speaking, a necessary feature of the essential assumptions of Aristotelian character education that I listed in the third section in Chapter 1. Yet the idea that the ‘palace’ of phronesis must be entered through the ‘courtyard’ of early-age habituation (recall Chapter 4), and that it is thus only accessible to people ‘brought up in fine habits’ (Aristotle, 1985: 6 [1095b4–9]), is so deeply ingrained in

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much of what Aristotle says about character education that relaxing or abandoning it may require a significant departure from Aristotle’s own theory. Yet that is precisely what I want to try to do, in the service of a more enlightened, reconstructed Aristotelianism. Let me start with personal, anecdotal evidence that I have found to be shared by many other people. I contend to have known individuals like Cecilia who have transcended the effects of seriously morally adverse conditions in their upbringing to become what I would unhesitatingly call phronimoi: fully virtuous moral agents. What characterises the individuals I have known is that they have, like Cecilia, a) been persons of unusually high intelligence, b) been fortunate enough to meet role models (for instance teachers or friends), postchildhood, who have influenced and inspired them and c) have undergone something like a personal transformation: radical self-change. Could there possibly be untapped resources in Aristotelian theory to account for these exceptional cases, and are they backed up by current social scientific evidence? In order to answer this question, it is instructive to begin with some reminders from the previous chapter about how phronesis develops in the virtuous, turning them into critical, reflective agents. What happens is that phronesis gradually latches itself onto every individual moral virtue and infuses it with systematic reason (the constitutive function of phronesis) while promoting ‘living well’ in general by helping us to act virtuously in an overall way (the integrative function of phronesis). This second function, in particular, requires phronesis to be informed by a general blueprint of the good: a consciously accessible, comprehensive and systematic – if also flexible and open-textured – conception of what makes a human life prosper. The blueprint in question is provided by Aristotle’s theory of eudaimonia, acquired essentially through teaching (recall the fourth section in Chapter 4). Now, a close look at the textual evidence reviewed in the preceding section indicates that the main obstacle to reform towards full virtue in the badly brought up is that the moral argument contained in the blueprint will not resonate with them; they will either not listen to it or not comprehend it even if they do, and hence cannot be persuaded to change. Di Muzio (2000) is correct in that Aristotle never says that moral reform towards full virtue (as distinct from mere self-control) is impossible per se in these individuals; he simply says that they cannot be persuaded to change through argument or, more generally, that they are impervious to external means of correction. This observation may not seem all that significant at first sight, however, for if the blueprint required for phronesis can only be acquired through teaching, and the teaching route is ruled out for those not brought up in fine habits, then there does not seem to be any Plan B for reform towards full virtue. But here is the rub: Aristotle himself maintains in another place – in one of his logical treatises when he is illustrating a mere conceptual point – that such a Plan B does indeed exist. The following quotation is so important that it is worth citing in full:

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The bad man, if he is being brought into a better way of life and thought, may make some advance, however slight, and if he should once improve, even ever so little, it is plain that he might change completely, or at any rate make very great progress; for a man becomes more and more easily moved to virtue, however small the improvement was at first. It is, therefore, natural to suppose that he will make yet greater progress than he has made in the past, and as this progress goes on, it will change him completely and establish him in the contrary state, provided he is not hindered by lack of time. (1941b: 32 [13a22–31], my italics) Aristotle is clearly talking here about the possibility of a complete, if timeconsuming, change towards full virtue – a radical self-change – rather than just change towards the second-best tack of self-control. But how can ‘the bad man’ be ‘brought into a better way of life’ if his soul has not been prepared for it through proper habituation? Some indication is perhaps given in Aristotle’s discussion of friendship where he talks about the possibility of coming to the ‘rescue’ of a corrupt friend through – it seems – not direct persuasion but by offering yourself as a role model for her to emulate so that she may be prompted to undo, and then redo, her own habituation (1985: 243–244 [1165b13–22]; I return to the issue of friendships as character forming in Chapter 6). Yet having a moral exemplar at hand does not seem enough if your bad habituation – your lack of an ingrained psycho-moral anchor – prevents you from understanding the content of the blueprint for eudaimonia. There is no indication in Aristotle’s above-cited passage about how ‘the bad man’ can be brought into a better way not only of ‘life’ but also ‘thought’. As this book is an exercise in Aristotelian retrieval rather than exegesis, I deliberately circumvent here the question of whether or not Aristotle’s oeuvre is, in fact, internally consistent. What I offer below is, therefore, simply the outline of an internally consistent Aristotelian reconstruction which, while arguably remaining true to the spirit of Aristotle’s essential theory, clearly goes beyond its letters. Contemplation (theoria) reflects, as earlier noted, upon the unchanging form and telos (final end) of things. Rorty correctly observes that species – such as humankind – fall potentially under that rubric; it is possible to reflect upon the telos of human life and by so doing, discover the unique ergon (function) of human beings (1978: 344–346; cf. Curzer, 2012: 394–396). But if it is possible to reflect upon and gain wisdom (sophia) about the ergon, then the ergon will presumably lead one to understand the specific eudaimonia of human beings also: namely, activity in accord with the ergon. And even if that ergon is, in its most ideal form in human beings, concerned with contemplation only, we have seen that in the non-utopian world it requires us to exhibit our moral virtues to the full. The successful contemplator will thus, in principle, through mere contemplation, be able to gauge the

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significance of the phronetic life and what it demands. These demands may seem daunting to the Cecilias of this world who do not possess the psychomoral anchor that good upbringing provides and who realise that what is demanded of them is nothing short of a profound self-change. But if they are, at the same time, blessed (as Cecilia was) with a role model in the form of a significant other who is willing to offer an example as a rescue route, it may well be that they can bring themselves into that ‘better way of life and thought’. What I suggest, therefore, is that there is a possible Aristotelian Plan B for people brought up in bad habits to reform themselves into virtuous agency. Or, to revert to Peters’s metaphor, it may be possible to enter the ‘palace’ of phronesis not through the ‘courtyard’ of early habituation but through an alternative route, namely through the ‘palace sewers’, even when the ideal ‘drawbridge’ is up. The necessary ingredients for this route are contained in Aristotle’s own account of contemplation, although he fails to bring them to the fore. While it is obviously good news if an alternative route does exist to full virtue, there are a couple of stings in the proverbial tail. One is that this putative route, through a sophia-inspired transformation model rather than a phronesis-guided acquisition model (cf. Curnow, 2011), is bound to be much more taxing, painful and precarious – involving the sort of profound, existential soul-searching (when the discrepancy between the discovered final end of human beings and the individual’s own imperfect state comes to light, cf. Aristotle, 1985: 166 [1143b1–6]) with which the well brought up person, such as Anne, never has to grapple. For even if Anne may, at times, find herself torn between two alternative virtues or ways of living, her upbringing precludes, ex hypothesi, the sort of self-estrangement which Cecilia needs to overcome. Moreover, it is likely that if this existential soulsearching fails, moral selfhood will be further malformed rather than reformed, and vice will break forth with redoubled ardour. Entering the palace through the sewers is not a journey for the philosophically faint at heart! The second sting is that whereas the early-acquisition-through-practice route of character education is potentially open to everyone of minimal intelligence, the alternative route is both, in a sense, elitist and privileged. It is elitist in that truly successful contemplation requires a high level of general intelligence – an ability to transcend the world of particulars and think in highly abstract terms about final ends. It is privileged in that it also requires considerable ‘moral luck’ in the form of a suitable exemplar at hand who can act as a catalyst and model for the necessary reshaping and re-entrenchment of moral selfhood. This proposed Aristotelian reconstruction explains away Aristotle’s presumed judgement of the story of Cecilia as being psychologically unrealistic. It does not, however, explain away the other counter-intuitive thesis about Beth’s life being overall better than Anne’s – and indeed the sensible

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contemporary Aristotelian is probably wise to reject the Book 10 idea of contemplation as the supreme activity in eudaimonia – but it does at least show how sophia excels over phronesis in one specific, significant aspect: by allowing (if certain conditions are met) for the sort of radical self-transformation that phronesis alone is unable to provide.

Update on empirical evidence – and some character educational implications Armchair philosophy would be simpler if uncontaminated by empirical evidence! However, the dyed-in-the-wool naturalist Aristotle, if he were alive today, would have none of it. It is therefore incumbent on those offering an updated Aristotelian reconstruction that they bring current empirical evidence to bear on it. So are there any empirical grounds for supposing that the Plan B suggested above is psychologically realistic? It must be admitted that radical self-change (let alone radical self-change involving moral reform) is an under-researched area in contemporary social science. Most studies still focus on a unique subset: the sociology and psychology of religious conversions, especially so-called Damascus experiences. Extensive research has been done into how people come to achieve increased self-understanding, but the perspective from which that research is pursued is typically an anti-realist one where the emphasis is on the renegotiation of self-identities rather than the substantive content of new understanding (see Kristjánsson, 2010, chap. 10, for a critical overview of the literature). Current research being conducted on the brain promises to shed new light on what happens to our biological make-up during self-change, and so far the findings all point in the direction of an ‘enormous plasticity we possess to make and remake ourselves in ever-new ways’, precisely by activating meta-skills such as wisdom (Flanagan and Williams, 2010: 446). Nevertheless, radical self-change also seems to require an enabling social and co-operative context (Russell, 2009, chap. 12; Homiak, 1999), for example the availability of alternative role models, and it usually does not occur through sudden Damascus experiences but rather through a long, onerous process where one repairs the ‘vessel’ of one’s self one ‘plank’ at a time (Moody-Adams, 1990: 128). One distinctive feature of self-reformers is their enjoyment of the realisation of their newfound abilities (Homiak, 1999) – which again tallies with Aristotle’s well-known thesis on how pleasure in unimpeded activities completes virtue (see Kristjánsson, 2013, chaps. 2.2 and 8.2). All in all, it is remarkable how well what we know empirically about selfchange seems to tally with Aristotelian assumptions (cf. Homiak, 1999: 70). Although current research does not directly vindicate the route that I proposed above as a possible Plan B, we can at least conclude that none of it goes directly against the grain of the idea of self-reform through moral emulation and philosophical contemplation.

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Is there any way in which the Cecilias of this world can be given a head start through character education and schooling? Armed with the proposed Aristotelian reconstruction and the empirical evidence that I have briefly sketched, there does seem to be a lesson to be learnt; that children who have not been brought up in good habits need to be exposed to the sort of transformative forces that can make radical self-change, through the contemplative route, possible. More specifically, they need to be exposed to teachers who can act as moral exemplars (Kristjánsson, 2007, chap. 7), literature that can challenge their prevailing self-conceptions (Carr, 2014) and to the sort of dialectical disturbances and disputations that can only be achieved through critical dialogues about the purpose and meaning of life (Sanderse, 2012, chap. 4). These are no mean tasks, however, especially given well-documented, empirical findings of how ambivalent teachers generally seem to be about their role as moral exemplars (or even just moral discussants) and how badly they consider themselves to be prepared for it (Sanderse, 2013). Regarding the school as an institution, the call for transformative forces clearly rules out any crass version of Bourdieuianism, according to which the habitus of the school should ideally be as close to that of the students’ home habitus as possible. Instead, we may be drawn here towards the model proposed by German educationist Thomas Ziehe (2000) of the ideal school as an institution of ‘normative difference’ vis-à-vis the existing habitus of students: an institution offering a radically alternative territory with initially alienating features. Students such as Anne, who come to school equipped with a sound psycho-moral anchor, will take such challenges in their stride. For persons like Cecilia they can, however, be no less than life-saving. For if the Aristotelian reconstruction developed in this chapter bears scrutiny, an experience of self-estrangement is required before the person brought up in bad habits can acquire the motivation to embark on their arduous journey through the sewers to the palace of a virtuous life. In a world of quick fixes, there is nothing quick about the proposed Aristotelian Plan B. Nor is there a particle of charlatanism about it. The best option is always to have virtue bred into one’s bones from early childhood, like Anne and Beth, through solid character education in the home. This chapter has nonetheless explored the option that seems to have been available to Cecilia, and how there is a plausible Aristotelian story to be told – if not exactly Aristotle’s own – about how she seized that opportunity and actualised its potential.

Chapter 6

Towards method Dialogue and Aristotelian character education

The received Socratic–Aristotelian dichotomy In this chapter I discuss the common complaint lodged against Aristotelian character education that it flouts or scorns the very method of general moral education that has turned out to be the most useful through the centuries: moral dialogue, as conducted for instance by Aristotle’s predecessor Socrates. I am tempted to call the received wisdom about dialogue being exclusively a Socratic, not an Aristotelian, method of education for moral character ‘an old saw’. The aim of this chapter is to chip away at this received wisdom, to blur the boundary between the two thinkers in relevant respects – and to bury the old saw. The old saw about a dichotomy between Socrates and Aristotle concerning the value of dialogue is a source of some embarrassment for current followers of the latter, as most classroom evaluations of the impact of moral education programmes, both in the Kohlbergian and post-Kohlbergian eras, have tended to single out the rigorous discussion of moral problems, stories or dilemmas as a productive avenue for such education. Keenly aware of this discomfiture, Wouter Sanderse – commendably one of very few Aristotelian philosophers who have tried to derive a systematic, practical approach to character education for modern uses from Aristotle’s writings – has deemed it necessary to recruit Socratic dialogue as an add-on to the Aristotelian methodological staples. After working through such staples, Sanderse admits, albeit reluctantly, that ‘Aristotelian virtue ethics cannot do all the work in moral education’; the Socratic method may, however, helpfully ‘complement’ what Aristotle writes about the cultivation of practical moral wisdom and thus enable us to ‘realise an Aristotelian ideal in a contemporary educational context’ (Sanderse, 2012: 166–167). Sanderse’s general approach comes closer to that of Aristotelian ‘reconstructors’ than ‘exegetes’. This fact, however, makes his concession about the need to supplement Aristotle’s method with a strong dose of Socratic dialogue more glaring; it implies that even reconstructed Aristotelianism could not accommodate dialogue except as an alien element. While there is no good

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reason to dismiss the idea that the best overall programme of character education will constitute an eclectic or academically ecumenical patchwork, it does indicate a disparagement of the Aristotelian approach if a wholly extraneous element is needed to make it succeed in the classroom. I propose to argue in what follows that this is not the case at all and that – pace Sanderse and received wisdom – dialogue is an essential element of the Aristotelian method itself. I argue this point not in the service of Aristotelian idolatry, which I have written off in previous chapters as futile for practical educational purposes, but in the service of making sense of the potential for a reconstructed form of Aristotelian character education as a viable candidate for today’s schooling. Before weighing in on and challenging received wisdom, let me give it all the credit that it deserves. A good point of entry to understanding the potentially tense and discordant relationship between Socrates and Aristotle is provided by Ronna Burger’s 2008 study, in which she argues that Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is written as a running critical commentary on and dialogue with Socrates. Although Socrates is only mentioned intermittently in passing, Burger claims that he serves implicitly as Aristotle’s argumentative foil throughout: both as a person representing an alternative moral outlook and as the advocate of a certain type of moral inquiry to which Aristotle takes exception (Burger, 2008: 4, 50). On Burger’s account, which undergirds and reinforces the received wisdom in question, the dichotomy between Socrates and Aristotle concerning dialogue sits atop many other, more deeply entrenched dichotomies, some of which she singles out for careful consideration. I draw on Burger below, but also add a few more potential areas of discord, in the following brief summary of the relevant dichotomies. (a) Psychology. On the Socratic conception, wisdom or reason forms the (ideally) dominating part of the human soul which can aim directly at the good and police other parts. On the Aristotelian conception, however, reason aims at the good via desire which belongs to the non-rational part of the soul but which can, ideally, be infused with reason rather than policed by it (Kristjánsson, 2007, chap. 2). (b) Moral ontology. Socrates is a hard rationalist who believes that moral facts exist independently of our emotions, and that those facts can be tracked by human reason. Aristotle, however, is a soft rationalist who believes that emotional reactions can constitute virtues and that they have not only an exploratory (truth-tracking) but also a constructivist role to play in moral evaluation (Kristjánsson, 2010b). (c) Moral epistemology. Socrates holds that knowledge gained through intellectual virtue is the key to moral truth. Aristotle, by contrast, criticises Socrates for reducing moral virtue to logos or episteme. As an antidote to Socrates’s intellectualism, he proposes that while the moral virtues require the intellectual virtue of phronesis, they cannot be reduced to it because they also incorporate perceptual, conative and behavioural components (Burger, 2008: 127–128). (d) Moral motivation. Socrates is a motivational internalist, holding that knowing what is good is intrinsically (conceptually) linked to motivation. Aristotle maintains, however,

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that people can know the good without being intrinsically motivated to pursue it; only at the highest level of moral development does motivational internalism hold true (Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 5). (e) Moral development/education. Socratic moral development/education is all about the cultivation of faculties of dialogical moral reasoning. Aristotle thinks, in contrast, that moral development requires, more than anything else, secure parental attachments and guided experiences of life – and that cultivation of phronesis can only work in tandem with or subsequent to the moulding of psychological and behavioural patterns of seeing and doing through repeated practice. He warns specifically against the (Socratic?) tendency to want to ‘take refuge in arguments’, thinking that by so doing one is ‘doing philosophy’ (1985: 40 [1105b12–14]). Mere arguments may ‘stimulate and encourage the civilized ones among the young people’ – the best brought up – but they will cut no ice with the majority (1985: 291–292 [1179b5–11]), nor with any of the very young such as the tantrum-prone toddler. (f) Style. The above-mentioned dichotomies are subsequently mirrored in the different writing styles concerning moral issues chosen by Socrates and Aristotle. The hard rationalist assumptions of Socrates are reflected in his use of a specific, logically rigorous, albeit playful, form of dialogue – the epitome of the reasoning approach – while Aristotle prefers the more standard form of a treatise to teach, motivate and persuade (Burger, 2008: 3). Some scholars have been tempted to draw quite dramatic inferences from these dichotomies, claiming for instance that Aristotle ‘seems to share Piaget and Kohlberg’s underestimation of the moral capacities of young children’ (Pritchard, 1996: 100), and that Aristotelian character education will necessarily fail to ‘provide opportunities for students to express doubt or criticism of the […] virtues, or to practice open-ended ethical inquiry’ (Gregory, 2009: 113). I consider such general misgivings to be hyperbolic and on close inspection, unfounded, but as I responded to them in Chapter 2, I need not repeat myself here. Let me focus rather on the more moderate inference that the Aristotelian, Sanderse (2012, chap. 4) has been tempted to draw, namely that dialogue does not really belong to the repertoire of Aristotelian methods of character education, for reasons implicit in dichotomies (a)–(f), and that it needs to be added as an essentially extraneous element for those who believe in its value. I propose to attack this inference in two stages, in the third and fourth sections below. Prior to that, however, it will be instructive to say something about the ideal of a Socratic dialogue, both in its historic (ancient) context and in its more current incarnations. As we shall see, this ideal itself contains a number of disconcerting complexities.

Interrogating the ideal of ‘Socratic dialogue’ In Plato’s Socratic dialogues the method on display is famously that of an ongoing inquiry into truth, where the discussants ask each other penetrating,

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critical questions which illuminate and stimulate their truth-finding mission. Although Socrates is usually the person asking the pertinent questions, he refuses to call himself a teacher – as teaching on his understanding involves the transmission of the teacher’s ready-made knowledge. Rather, he compares himself to his mother who worked as a midwife, and his dialogical method to sophisticated midwifery. After all, midwives do not create or transmit children, but simply help ‘drag them out’. Since antiquity and until the present day, a number of theorists have suggested Socratic dialogue, on this original understanding, as the ideal method for moral education. For those who want to take that suggestion on board, a problem beckons, however. The Socratic method of inquiry assumes two quite discrete forms: that of the early dialogues – on the one hand – where most scholars claim to hear the voice of the historical Socrates, and that of the later dialogue – on the other – where the voice of Socrates’s puppet master, Plato, has arguably taken over. A dilemma emerges here for contemporary moral educators. If we rely on the method of the early dialogues where the aim is mainly deflationary (to expose the hubris-ridden ignorance of Socrates’s interlocutors) and which typically end in continued aporia (doubt, perplexity), moral education might seem to bewilder, rather than enthral. Indeed, the Socratic method, on this understanding of the teacher as a merciless stingray, has often been accused of painful and cruel cynicism, eating away at any moral fibre (cf. Boghossian’s 2012 analysis and response). If we opt for the more constructive Socratic method of the later dialogues, however, which go beyond dwelling in the conundrum, that choice comes with a heavy price tag. To remain faithful to Socrates – the dummy of the ventriloquist Plato – in these dialogues, one needs to buy into two controversial Platonic assumption that few people nowadays share: the elusive ‘theory of forms’ (of transcendental, immutable ‘forms’ residing in a world of eternal truths) as the ultimate foundation of knowledge – including moral truths – and the implausible ‘theory of recollection’, which explains all moral knowledge as the reawakening of truths immediately accessible to human souls only in an assumed pre-existence, but forgotten during birth into the present world. It is no wonder that as conceptions of the Socratic method evolved in educational thought and practice over the centuries, they became either ever more general, referring to any application of a discussion method in the classroom, or ever more idiosyncratic, referring to the given theorist’s own conception of a proper dialogue without any particular homage to the figure of Socrates in either the early or later dialogues (see e.g. Schneider’s 2013 helpful overview of the chequered history of the Socratic method in American education). Two examples of the latter tendency – of a ‘Socratic’ method without much of Socrates in it – can be given here as cases in point. One is of the philosophy-for-children (P4C) movement, which purportedly builds on Socratic dialogical principles (see e.g. Pritchard, 1996). This movement

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works on the premise that children, from a young age, are reasonable in a literal sense (namely, able to reason) and that by building a ‘community of inquiry’ in the classroom – where knowledge is co-constructed through a formulaic dialogical method – they can be made more reasonable, that is able to reason better (more flexibly, reflectively and fair-mindedly) and to achieve greater harmony between their thoughts and actions. The closer we look, however, at the ontological and epistemological assumptions behind the idea of a community of inquiry, as espoused by P4C spokespeople, the further they become removed from anything that we could helpfully label ‘Socratic’. Gregory suggests that P4C operationalises a ‘pragmatist notion’ of a community of inquiry as a ‘protocol for classroom dialogue’ (2009: 115). Kennedy is even more explicit in rejecting any Socratic aspirations about a quest for objective moral truth. P4C does not assume that any such truth exists or that any ‘final closure’ can be achieved in the moral realm because of the ‘stubborn perdurance of the multiplicity of individual perspectives’. It simply aims at the co-ordination of those perspectives through some sort of a pragmatic consensus (1999: 349). This, however, is not the voice of Socrates, but rather that of educational pragmatist John Dewey, dressed up as Socrates, or – more specifically – Dewey with an added dialogical dimension. The second example is of a method that has assumed the Socratic mantle to such an ambitious extent that the very term ‘Socratic dialogue’ is now often understood to be synonymous with it. Based on the ideas of German philosophers Nelson and Heckmann in the early twentieth century and developed further in Germany and Holland until the present day, this method of Socratic dialogue employs the five-element procedure of the socalled ‘Hourglass Model’: to move from a distinct question about x posed by the discussants, through a concrete example and subsequent judgement about x, towards rules or reasons for the correct application of the example and finally towards a general principle upon which the discussants can agree (see Van Hooft, 1999; Sanderse, 2012, chap. 4.4). As in the P4C movement, little remains here either of the essential painfulness or the non-formulaic playfulness of the original Socratic method. More worryingly, this new version seems to build upon the same epistemological assumptions as P4C. The dialogue in question aims at consensus (Van Hooft, 1999), is typically placed in a ‘social constructionist framework’ (Sanderse, 2012: 154) and relinquishes any aspirations towards a traditional ‘correspondence theory’ of truth (Wortel and Verweij, 2008). These antirealist escapades then inevitably wind up in the same pragmatist neck of the woods as P4C: where moral inquiry is conceived as ‘the common construction of knowledge’ (Knezic et al., 2010: 1010). Arguably, ‘Socratic dialogue’ on this understanding has completely lost touch with the ideas of either the historical Socrates or his puppet master, Plato – for both of whom the ideal of consensus for consensus’ sake would have been an anathema.

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I cannot help concluding that much of what goes on at the moment in the name of ‘Socratic dialogue’, or more generally ‘Socratic method’, is Socratic in name only, and that his own method has become enfeebled by dissipation. This conclusion should be a matter of serious concern for a theorist like Sanderse (2012) who argues that Aristotle’s methods of character education need to be augmented with Socratic dialogue – especially since Sanderse himself seems to identify ‘Socratic dialogue’ with its recent reincarnation in German and Dutch practice. That said, none of the complexities explored in this section subvert the point of the ‘old saw’ under scrutiny here that dialogue is not an Aristotelian method of character education – much to the latter’s peril. The time has now come to turn the spotlight from Socrates to Aristotle and to investigate whether or not this charge holds true.

Towards phronesis via dialogue: Aristotle reconstructed Despite Aristotle’s passing swipes at Socrates for his unremitting intellectualism – for taking refuge in arguments only – it is clear that the intellectual demands that Aristotle himself places on the fully virtuous life are pretty strict as well. As I explained in detail in Chapter 4, no matter how sound one’s parental attachments were and how well one has been habituated in early childhood, one does not advance to the level of the phronimoi – the fully virtuous – unless one has mastered some relevant intellectual virtues of one’s own accord, most notably the virtue of phronesis. Aristotle’s description of phronesis entails its developmental dependence upon a period of radical intellectual reassessment of the traits of character (hexeis) that one has been sensitised to, and internalised previously, in a less intellectual fashion. As Burger points out, the young person must be able to ‘put into question the fixity of the moral education with which he has been brought up’ (2008: 18), and that can be a painfully sobering and challenging process. Generally speaking, while scholars debate the details of the psycho-moral story that Aristotle tells us about the nature and (especially) the trajectory of phronesis, Sherman’s (1989) reconstructive account has attracted a substantial following, as I reviewed in Chapter 4. If her developmental picture is taken on board, new light is shed not only on the early habituation process but also on other staples of Aristotelian character education, as those will now be seen to include critical engagements between the learner and the educator: ‘dialogue and verbal exchange about what one sees (and feels) and should see (and feel)’ (Sherman, 1989: 172) – a guided dialogical coaching practice (cf. Shaw, 2011: 139–140). For only through dialogue will it be possible for the moral learner to engage critically with the viewpoints of others (Sherman, 1989: 30). For instance, the cognitive aspect of the emulation of moral exemplars – one of the Aristotelian staples – which is meant to involve an understanding of why the admired quality in the exemplar is worthy of being valued and how the emulator needs to alter

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herself to acquire this quality (Kristjánsson, 2007, chap. 7), becomes more transparent if we see it as necessarily, or at least ideally, involving a dialectical exchange between the exemplar and the learner. The same would apply, mutatis mutandis, to other Aristotelian staples such as the use of literature and music; these would now all seem to require an extended dialogue with the moral educator, rather than simply receiving and digesting moral messages monologically and in isolation. It may, then, seem as if we have already succeeded in undermining the received wisdom that dialogue is not an Aristotelian method of character education. Contra Sanderse (2012), Aristotelian virtue ethics seems capable of doing all the dialogical work required for sound character education, without an extra input from Socrates. There is something not completely reassuring about this conclusion, however. First, although Sherman’s reconstructions are not ad hoc, they are highly impressionistic with regard to Aristotle’s own words, and Sanderse might plausibly argue that she, no less than him, has imported an extraneous element into Aristotle’s theory. Second, we are still short of details on how dialogue really works in bringing about positive moral and educational outcomes. So, the complaint may still linger on that Aristotelian character education is undercut by its failure to provide such details. Fortunately, there is still one underexplored resource to be tapped here, namely Aristotle’s description of character friendships. I propose to argue in the following section that this resource provides precisely the missing ammunition needed to defang once and for all the received wisdom about Aristotle and the dialogical method.

Friendship and dialogical self-constructions Barring a few notable exceptions (esp. Millgram, 1987; Sherman, 1987; Brewer, 2005; Walker, Curren and Jones, 2015), Aristotle’s account of friendship is rarely mentioned in the same breath as his account of character education. The reason for that is, I gather, relatively simple. The term ‘character education’ typically conjures up, in today’s world, an image of the parental home or the classroom, and in the majority of contemporary sources no clear distinction is made between ‘character education’ and ‘character schooling’. Aristotle, however, had a much more capacious view of character education, according to which it is seen as a life-long process towards excellence and whose most realised form can be found in the interactions between mature ‘character friends’. Given Aristotle’s penchant for defining things with respect to their ideal actualisations and then using that definition as a benchmark for less realised instances, there is reason to pay close attention to his account of the educational components of character friendships and to tease out its potential implications for more mundane forms of character education. The quickest of rehearsals of Aristotle’s overall account of friendship (as an independent virtue and a breeding ground for other virtues) will have to

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do here at the outset (see further in Kristjánsson, 2007, chap. 8). In Aristotle’s account, all friendship (philia) rests on conscious, reciprocated goodwill between persons. The different reasons and motivations mediating the goodwill, however, call for a distinction among three kinds of friendship. Of those three, only one – character friendship – is true and ‘complete’. The other two – friendship for utility and friendship for pleasure – constitute lean counterparts of character friendship and can, in fact, only be subsumed under the concept of friendship to the extent that they resemble the complete kind. In character friendships, friends love one another because of their respective virtuous characters and wish the best for one another, each for the other’s own sake. In friendships based on utility, by contrast, we love others not for themselves, but only in so far as we can gain some good from them; in friendships based on pleasure, we are fond of others not because of their moral characters but simply because they appear pleasant to us (witty or affable, for instance). Remove those characteristics – or the relevant benefits – and you remove the friendship (Aristotle, 1985: 209–216 [1155b16–1157b5]). Aristotle makes claims about character friendship that may at first sight appear hyperbolic or metaphorical but that he wants us, nevertheless, to take literally and seriously. The most famous of these is that for a person who has a true friend, this friend is ‘another himself’ (allos autos: 1985: 246 [1166a29–32]). When Cathy in Wuthering Heights was made to say ‘I am Heathcliff’, most people will have taken that as poetic licence. Aristotle is, however, making an important psychological and ontological point about selfhood and self-construction. He is claiming that character friends reciprocally shape each other’s selves to the extent that the dividing line between them becomes blurred; ‘for each moulds the other in what they approve of’ (Aristotle, 1985: 266 [1172a11–13]) to make up ‘two jointly produced sensibilities’ (Brewer, 2005: 758). Here is why. We are able to observe others better than ourselves (Aristotle, 1985: 258 [1169b33–35]), but at the same time they become mirrors in which we see ourselves reflected. As our success in striving for and achieving excellence depends to a large extent upon our ‘capacity for perception and understanding’ (1985: 259 1170a16–19]), most importantly understanding of ourselves, having a mirror in which we can reflect our self-image and then, if needed, reform it, is invaluable. Just as the friend (qua mirror) becomes causally responsible for me being who I am, so I become the partial procreator of her selfhood (cf. Millgram, 1987: 368). Notice, however, that this account of mutual self-creations stops well short of the social constructivism undergirding the twentieth century symbolic interactionist ‘looking-glass view’ of the self – namely of the assumption that selves are social constructions all the way down (developmentally and ontologically) ‘negotiated’ (Swann and Bosson, 2008), much like how executives broker a business deal, in interactions with others. Aristotle’s concept of a self is still of a realist self – a set of objective, identify-conferring traits, partly genetic, partly shaped in early childhood – that the agent brings to the table,

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a self that can be distinguished from mere attributed self-concept (Kristjánsson, 2010a, chap. 2). What Aristotle is saying is simply that this self then becomes further shaped and moulded in interactions with character friends, to the extent that my traits also become their traits and vice versa. What, then, is the relevance of this self-theory for character education? Although the foundation for the virtues is laid in early childhood, so much so that bad upbringing becomes a pale beyond which phronesis in later life becomes either inaccessible or extremely difficult to attain (recall Chapter 5), we continue to shape and refine the virtues through our whole lives. We may do so, partly, through monological reflections, but given the above account of the mutual self-constructions of character friendship, we realise that the most salient avenue for continuing life-long character education is through dialectical interactions with friends. As Talbot Brewer explains eloquently in a masterful article, character friends become ‘partners in the ongoing task of talking their own half-formed evaluative commitments into a full-fledged and determinate stance in the world’ (2005: 735). The true telos of character friendships is thus ‘the mutual reshaping of our evaluative outlooks’ (2005: 740) through an essentially self-corrective mechanism. To put this in more simple terms, it is precisely by being inducted into friendships and striving to perfect them that we become capable of reassessing, reinforcing, revitalising and, if necessary, restructuring our broad moral schemas. Friendship is thus an important, perhaps the most important, school of virtue. Or, as Aristotle himself puts it unpretentiously, ‘good people’s life together allows the cultivation of virtue’ (1985: 259 [1170a11–12]). What is the main medium of this self-corrective mechanism? Significantly for the purposes of the present chapter, Aristotle is unambiguous here. Friends educate one another when ‘they live together and share conversation and thought’ or ‘do philosophy’ together; conversely, ‘lack of conversation has dissolved many a friendship’ (1985: 261, 265, 216 [1170b11–12, 1172a4–6, 1157b12–14]). The crucial medium for the meeting of minds in friendship is thus dialogue between the friends in which they throw themselves into challenging conversations in order to help each other see more ample and appropriate ways of being, feeling and acting (cf. Brewer, 2005: 735, 750). In other words, dialogue is the essential medium or method of the most advanced form of character education. Someone could argue, at this juncture, that the above description carries scant ramifications for character education in a more mundane, everyday sense. After all, character friendship is a privileged good, reserved for mature phronimoi who alone possess moral virtue to the extent that they are capable of forming the idealised character friendships between moral equals that Aristotle describes. This objection contains barely a half-truth, however. While it is true that the most perfectly realised instances of character friendships will take place between grown-up phronimoi, who possess all the virtues and only need to finesse them through further experiments in living as well

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as through extended dialogues, Aristotle emphatically rejects both the claim that (a) young moral learners cannot possess virtue and (b) character friendships between ‘unequals’ are impossible. To take up (a) first, Aristotle famously describes in his Rhetoric (2007) two virtuous dispositions unique to young people: emulousness and shamefulness. In addition to these, there are some morally praiseworthy characteristics that virtuous adults should ideally possess but that, according to Aristotle, come more easily to young people for reasons of developmental psychology. The young are typically open-minded and optimistic, tending to look at the good side rather than the bad side of things, as they have not yet ‘seen much wickedness’. They trust others readily ‘because of not yet having been much deceived’. They are also more courageous and guileless than the old are, and have more exalted notions, not having yet been ‘worn down by life’. Moreover, they are fonder of their friends than older people are and have not come to value them for their usefulness only (2007: 149–151 [1389a16–b3]). These childhood virtues are fragile, however, and more than anyone else, the young need true friends ‘to keep them from error’ (1985: 208 [1155a11–13]). They are, notably, able to learn from their friends because although they lack fully fledged capacities for practically wise choices, they are far from being essentially irrational creatures (cf. Sherman, 1989: 144, 161). What they need is simply some minimal ‘comprehension or [at least] perception’ of the moral character of the friend, to be cherished and emulated (1985: 230 [1161b26–27]) – and normal children do already possess this capacity (for recent empirical evidence which bolsters this case, see Walker, Curren and Jones, 2015). Regarding (b), Aristotle’s notion of philia is broader than our everyday notion of ‘friendship’ and includes, inter alia, all forms of non-erotic love, most significantly for present purposes the love of parents for their children, since ‘a parent would seem to have a natural friendship for a child’ (1985: 208 [1155a16–18]). In addition to that conceptual point, Aristotle makes it adamantly clear that friendships, even character friendships, are possible between people of unequal moral and developmental standing (e.g. parent–child; teacher–student) – devoting a lengthy discussion to the subject (1985: 220–224 [1158b11–1159b23]; see also p. 232 [1162a32–b2]). He even countenances the possibility that character friendships can be formed between two people who are both deficient in their moral excellences (1985: 244 [1165b23–36]). In such ‘imperfect’ character friendships, the friends do not value each other for their whole character but rather for certain aspects of it (cf. Curzer, 2012: 249). Although the character education inherent in unequal friendships will be more of a one-way street than in friendships between people of equal moral standing, and the dialogue less balanced, the unique virtuous schemas of the young enable them to contribute constructively to these interactions also – helping adults, for example, to perceive the world in less cynical and blasé ways (see further in Kristjánsson, 2007, chap. 8).

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We have seen in this section how the mechanisms of character friendships constitute – through their dialectical self-constructions and mutual shapings of evaluative outlooks – the most advanced form of character education. Given Aristotle’s method of explaining ordinary things by means of highly idealised examples, there is no doubt that he would have liked to see as much as possible of the essential features of this ideal form of character education replicated in less ideal forms. At the end of the third section, I argued – by parity of reasoning from Sherman’s reconstruction of the habituation process – that dialogue would have to be incorporated in all suitable forms of Aristotelian character education, including role modelling and the educative use of the arts. The weakness of that argument lay, arguably, in its being premised upon what Aristotle ‘should have said’, rather than what he did in fact say, about the habituation process. In the present section, however, I have rehearsed what Aristotle did say on the relationship between character education and character friendships and, more specifically, the essential role of dialogue in both. We can safely derive from his account that dialogue is not an un-Aristotelian method, nor a mere playground for the wise and privileged. Rather, it is an essential feature of any veritable form – ancient or modern – of Aristotelian character education.

The need for constructive, educative dialogues The conclusion that I reached at the end of the preceding section should not be viewed as one of mere pedantic interest for a small coterie of Aristotelian scholars. Rather, it helps bring Aristotelian character education into the fold of historically mainstream views on the practical methods of moral education, which typically give dialogue pride of place. Moreover, it helps fend off the suspicion that some theorists still harbour about Aristotelian character education as being more about drill than discussion, rote learning than reflection. Perhaps the contemporary focus on the distinction between Socratic and Aristotelian methods of moral education epitomises a quintessentially modern split between reason/dialogue and tradition/habituation, a split that is then projected back onto Socrates and Aristotle in order to make them standard bearers for the respective modern concerns, although it is alien to their own ways of thinking. I have argued that the justification for the use of dialogue in Aristotelian character education need not be secured by drawing upon extra-Aristotelian considerations – for instance by weaving the warp of Aristotle and the weft of Socrates together, as Sanderse (2012, chap. 4) has suggested, or through freewheeling reconstructions of Aristotle, as undertaken by Sherman (1989, chap. 5), however necessary such reconstructions may otherwise be, but that the justification stares right at us from Aristotle’s own account of friendship and its role in character development. At the same time, I hope to have

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remedied some of the neglect that this account has met with in the character-education literature of late. I have not, however, answered the practical question of how, exactly, dialogue is to be woven into the standard Aristotelian methods such as habituation, role modelling and learning from the arts. Dialogue as such is no magic window through which morality can be seen in an epiphany, unsullied and unmediated, without accounting for the structure and transparency of the window pane! We clearly need to know much more about how dialogue works and how it is best structured as a vehicle to achieve maximum benefits in character education. In a recent overview paper on empirical findings about what works best in classroom discussions – to bring about students’ learning and comprehension – the authors conclude from their data that ‘the most productive discussions (whether peer or teacher-led) are structured, focused, occur when students hold the floor for extended periods of time, when students are prompted to discuss texts through open-ended or authentic questions, and when discussion incorporates a high level of uptake’, generating affect-inducing, high-level thinking (Soter et al., 2008: 373). None of these conclusions may seem startling, but they do at least convey to us the fact that there is an important distinction to be drawn between classroom dialogue that is constructive (i.e. truly educational) versus dialogue that is barren – a waste of time. Empirical considerations of this sort are invaluable in assessing the epistemological and practical efficacy of different forms of dialogue, be it traditionally Socratic, ‘Socratic’ on the sort of understanding that I critiqued in the second section above, or Aristotelian. The aim of this chapter was not, however, to offer a classroom manual on serviceable Aristotelian moral dialogue. I shall simply close with a salient reminder from Nel Noddings (1994) who argues that much of what goes on in the name of dialogue in contemporary moral education may have an unnecessarily learned flavour – ranging from artificial Kohlbergian dilemma analysis, through contrived Habermasian conversations, to formulaic P4C community-of-inquiry discussions. Noddings makes a plea for classroom dialogue on moral issues along the lines of ‘the rough-and-tumble conversations of real people’ (1994: 109), rooted in ongoing experiences and actions. Many children and teenagers in today’s world lack opportunities to engage in genuine dialogue with adults, where they are taken seriously as conversation partners. If only by giving young people the opportunity to experience dialogues of this everyday natural sort, teachers of character education may already have gone some distance towards tilling the soil for the development of phronesis – of helping the young on their journey to become phronimoi.

Chapter 7

Educating the educators Teachers and Aristotelian character education

Teachers of morality – moral teachers Educationists often speak of the ‘moral dimension of teaching’. This concept may refer to the teaching of morality at school: directly, for instance, through special character-education classes, or indirectly, by teachers conducting themselves as moral exemplars towards students. However, there is another facet of the ‘moral dimension of teaching’ that has less to do with didactic considerations than with morality in a more basic, personal sense: with the moral teacher rather than the teacher of morality. Teachers engage daily in emotionladen and morally complex interactions with other persons within their school walls: colleagues, administrators, students, parents. In addition to the example they set to their students by the way they behave – critically important as that is from an Aristotelian perspective – there are surely independent reasons why any good teacher would want these interactions to satisfy the requirements of morality: reasons concerning general moral aspirations towards others, professional aspirations and with aspirations vis-à-vis oneself, in striving to flourish as a good human being (see Chen and Kristjánsson, 2011). It is a matter for some surprise and disappointment that Aristotelianism has not informed recent discussions of this second facet of the moral dimension of teaching to any significant extent (for notable exceptions, see Carr, 2000; Hansen, 2001). The aim of the present chapter is to make amends in this area, by adding an Aristotelian backbone to discussions of the second facet of the elusive concept of the ‘moral dimension of teaching’. To start with some empirical evidence (see further in Walker, Roberts and Kristjánsson, 2015), Joseph and Efron’s 1993 study examined 180 US public school teachers’ understandings of themselves as moral agents and discovered that teachers perceived their role not only as that of teaching subject matter, but also exhibiting and imparting moral values. More recently, some teachers have been found to consider the moral dimensions of education even more important than academic success (Tuff, 2009). Across selected schools in Europe, Puurula and colleagues (2001) found that most teachers viewed affective education as part of their role. Here ‘affective

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education’ refers to a focus that lies beyond school subjects and includes the encouragement of good interactions across the school – attending to emotional and aspirational features of the whole, flourishing child. Repeated studies have shown, however, that teachers fail to identify the proper moral language to address ethical issues in the classroom or with colleagues. Although many teachers possess a strong interest in moral issues, they rarely consider themselves adequately trained to critically reflect upon and convey moral views in a sophisticated way (Sockett and LePage, 2002). The teachers in Sockett and LePage’s study often seemed to make moral judgements in the relative isolation of a classroom, based on little more than intuition. As limited moral vocabularies were available to them, this incubated an egocentric lens where views beyond their own understanding were rejected. Thus, teachers in the study typically sought ‘right answers’ rather than intellectual or moral engagement. In the UK, it has been discovered that both teachers and students are aware of their lack of a vocabulary to talk meaningfully about character-related issues; however, when provided with such a vocabulary, they experience mastery and relief (Arthur, 2010, 79–84; Arthur et al., 2014). In the United States, teachers have been found to be confused by definitions of morality and the moral education of children (Fenstermacher and Richardson, 1993; Sanger, 2001; LePage et al., 2011; Sanger and Osguthorpe, 2011). In Canada, a study showed that many teachers yearn for the sort of clear guidelines and standardised vocabulary that they are used to in other subjects (Tuff, 2009). So, although a picture is emerging of the inescapability of moral teaching in the classroom – at least on the Aristotelian understanding proposed in this book – teachers often complain that they suffer from moral ambivalence and lack of self-confidence in their (inescapable) professional position as role models, character educators and professional colleagues. In South Korea, Lee and colleagues (2012) showed that pre-service teachers failed to recognise themselves as moral actors. At the start of their careers, many teachers are motivated to choose their profession for its moral content (Sanger and Osguthorpe, 2011); sadly, however, this early moral aspiration is not being adequately developed in teacher training and beyond. Nearly half of pre-service teachers feel ill-equipped for moral education (Mathison, 1998). There is also a reported lack of moral self-knowledge among teachers. Character education clearly requires reflective, phronesis-grounded teaching (Cooke and Carr, 2014) but we cannot assume that teachers are reflectively aware of their own moral beliefs. Indeed, Sockett and LePage (2002) found that a number of teachers at the beginning of a non-traditional graduate programme could not critically reflect on themselves as moral agents. A lot seems to depend here on the ethos of individual schools. The overwhelming, bureaucratic dynamic of some schools diminishes moral judgement and decision making in favour of a network of tests and audits, swamping students and teachers alike with an imperative to defer to authority

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for rewards and punishments (Sockett and LePage, 2002; Kwon, 2015). In other schools, however, teachers describe more holistic school policies rooted in broad and encompassing philosophies (Chow-Hoy, 2001). Yet even in these more ‘enlightened’ places, teachers are often not sure what to make of themselves as character educators and especially what demand their role as moral exemplars to students places upon themselves in their apparent dual capacity as moral persons and moral teachers. Before analysing the situation further, it is instructive to begin with a short, illustrative example – the story of ‘Runner Fan’. In the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake in China in May 2008, many stories of individual heroism emerged. Especially heartening were stories of brave, selfless teachers using their bodies to protect students as classrooms collapsed around them. One of them, teacher Tan, was found dead with four students alive, shielded under him. In glaring contrast to those tales of heroism was the story of teacher Fan Meizhong – a story he told unrepentantly after the quake. As the tremors began, ‘Runner Fan’ – as he came to be known – yelled ‘earthquake’, abandoned his students and ran for his life. No thanks to Fan, none of the students were hurt. In subsequent interviews, Fan explained that there were no formal legal or ethical obligations on teachers to sacrifice their lives for their students in such situations. He would have sacrificed himself for his one-year old daughter, Fan argued, but it would be totally unrealistic to expect him (or any normal person) to do the same for what was merely a group of students in a classroom. What upset many people was not so much the act of running away, which Fan could have done spontaneously in the panic of the moment. Rather, they were offended by his relentless insistence that this had been the right thing to do, and the fact that he did not regret his decision. Fan’s defiant stance provoked a spate of replies and for weeks thereafter, weblogs in China and all over Asia were flooded with divisive responses to his argument (Datong, 2008). Among Asian educators, reflections on Fan’s story quickly evolved into discussions of more abstract topics such as the notion of professional versus personal duties and the emotional burdens that the profession of teaching places upon its practitioners. Indeed, this story connects well to at least two recent discursive traditions in education: concerning teachers’ professional identities (see e.g. Beijaard, Meijer and Verloop, 2004) and the emotional practice of teaching (Hargreaves, 1998). My previous comment about the lack of Aristotelian contributions to one of the facets of the ‘moral dimension of teaching’ referred precisely to a current, discursive situation that I rue within these two traditions. Not only has the relevant literature been driven by concerns that often neglect the moral dimension of teaching in general (and Aristotelian character educational theory in particular), but both traditions have become saddled with a domineering paradigm that I consider at once theoretically dodgy and practically unwholesome. I call it the ‘constructivist-cognitive paradigm’ and take serious exception to it in

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what follows. By ‘constructivist’ I am referring not to a plausible, if somewhat trite, didactic constructivism according to which teaching is most effective when it connects to students’ existing knowledge structures, but rather to a form of anti-realist epistemological constructivism which will be explained in the following section. Similarly, by ‘cognitive’, I do not mean the sense invoked in such locutions as ‘cognitive theories of emotion’, in which the cognitive is also meant to embrace ‘hot’ sentiments, but rather ‘cognitive’ as narrowly understood to denote ‘cold’ mental processes that exclude the affective. My aim is not to offer a full-blown Aristotelian alternative to the constructivist-cognitive paradigm. I have a more modest aim in this chapter: to pave the way for such an alternative and offer some suggestions as to its outcome by exposing the weaknesses of the dominant paradigm. In any event, I hope that my exploration reveals how the problems of either issue – the professional identities of teachers and the emotionality of teaching – change if we examine them through an Aristotelian character-oriented lens.

Professional identities and selfhood ‘Professionalism’ has been a keyword in educational discourse since the mid1980s. With the idea of teachers’ professionalism came the notion that it was tied to certain operationalisable standard-based skills or competences (see e.g. Burke’s volume, 1989), and that these skills would have to find their way – through systematic teacher education or through the consciousness-raising of existing teachers – into professional identities. Truly expert teaching was suddenly all about identity development and dedication to continuing selfimprovement. Although the emphasis on standards and measurable outcomes tended to include suggestions about the adoption of ethical codes of practice by which practitioners were formally instructed, among other things, to allow the interests of their ‘clients’ (read: students) to come before those of their colleagues, many theorists complained that the ‘professional reforms’ reformed much of the moral life out of teaching. Some critics suggested that the language of professional competences was scarcely applicable to the moral dimension of the teaching practice at all (Hansen, 2001); others argued that if competence-talk were to be made applicable to that practice, it had better incorporate moral concerns (Fenstermacher, 1990). Yet others ventured to claim that the notion of the professional teacher should be equated with that of the moral teacher (Sockett, 1993; cf. Carr, 2000; Campbell, 2003). Following these wake-up calls, it seems to have become more widely accepted of late that excluding the moral dimension from teacher professionalism is unadvisedly restrictive and that professional identities cannot be understood in full isolation from moral identities. In general, the professionalism literature regarding teachers and other professionals is

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becoming more ethically sensitive and even virtue-oriented (see e.g. Maxwell’s 2008 book on compassionate empathy as a professional ideal). Even if this literature has gradually been relieved of its most acute ‘moral problem’ however, a deeper conceptual problem remains. In their extensive meta-analysis of studies between 1988 and 2000, Beijaard, Meijer and Verloop (2004) found the very concept of professional identity to be enveloped in a fog of confusion. Either it was not defined at all or merely given an un-argued-for stipulative definition. No clear or shared sense of a teacher’s professional identity emerged. In the research they reviewed, it tended to be assumed that teacher education would have to begin by exploring the ‘teaching self’, but whether or not that ‘self’ was the same as ‘identity’ remained an enigma. The studies that offered any characterisation of the core concept seemed to rely on an anti-realist notion of a socially constructed self. Within that self, or rather that constructed identity, we were told, lurked many sub-identities, among which was that elusive professional identity as one voice in a multiple identity chorus. Supposedly, then, it is this sub-identity which is meant, from time to time at least, to take on the role of a character educator! How is this sub-identity constructed? Through narration, was the typical answer found in the 2004 meta-analysis: by living out and telling stories about oneself as a teacher (cf. Connelly and Clandinin, 1999). Narratives are typically said to be the only means of understanding teachers’ identities because there is no objective truth ‘out there’ (or, for that matter, ‘in here’ about their true selves) for us to comprehend. Truth is, in any case, ‘a floating value, akin to a swirl’; but in making subjective sense of the chaos of experience, teachers contrive coherent-like stories about themselves which, in turn, produce their identities (Day and Leitch, 2001). Postmodernists such as Zembylas have a field day with such creation stories. The idea of a singular, stable and permanent selfhood is, according to them, an Enlightenment myth. People partake in various power-structured language games, however, in which they create their own locally articulated, locally recognised, fleeting, fractured, contextual and multiple identities – or such identities are created for them (Zembylas 2003a). Ironically, Zembylas thinks that identity formation can and should have a moral goal: resistance – the struggle to free oneself from subjection. But given the postmodern assumption, with which Zembylas whole-heartedly agrees (2003b), that all aspects of a people’s lives are subjected to ‘disciplinary formation’ and that no ‘true self’ exists underneath all the masks and façades, the clarion call for ‘freedom from subjection’ sounds paradoxical. There is reason to take stock here and pursue a miniature history of ideas. First of all, narrativism about selves or individual characters is not a single theory. There are at least three distinct versions of it: a hard anti-realist, postmodern version that understands ‘storied accounts’ of identity as feeble and essentially invalid attempts to make sense of stable truths about oneself where

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no such truths really exist; a soft anti-realist version, according to which storied self-accounts are valid in so far as they satisfy the epistemological conditions of coherence and believability; and a realist version, which claims that narration is the true underlying structure of selfhood and that identity stories are valid to the extent that they correspond with this actual structure. Simply positing that teachers’ professional identities are narratively constructed, therefore, does not help to solve the underlying conceptual problem of what such identities really are. In order to resolve that problem, we must come to grips with a notoriously complicated and intractable philosophical debate between so-called self-realists and self-anti-realists. For the former (such as Aristotle), selves exist through moral character, comprising our actual deepest traits and commitments. Identities or constructed selfconcepts also exist, obviously, but those are either true or false. When they are true (by capturing the actual underlying self), we possess self-knowledge; when they are false (by missing the self), we are self-deceived. For self-antirealists (such as Hume, 1978: Book I; he modifies his position in Book II), no actual selves exist. What we call ‘selves’ are simply identities or selfconcepts: our own beliefs about who we are and what we are. This is not the place even to begin a comprehensive rebuttal of anti-realism (see Kristjánsson, 2010a). In fact, it must be admitted that Hume marshals some convincing arguments against the notion of substantive realist selfhood – while wanting to preserve the notion of the ‘soft’ realist self of everyday experience. Although there is something to be said for the view that Hume’s scepticism about hard self-realism does not get the better of him, there is nothing to be said for the view that the postmodernists’ Hume-onsteroids version of anti-realism does not get the better of them! Unfortunately, it is the latter that seems to have taken captive the discursive tradition on teachers’ professional identities. But not only does postmodern anti-realism set ordinary experiences of selfhood utterly at nought, it is unable to make any coherent sense of the difference between self-knowledge and self-deception about who one actually is, deep down, as a person with a certain characterological make-up. What would be the main ingredients in an Aristotelian paradigm of professional identity? The first salient observation would be that as important as identities or self-concepts are, actual selfhood is more important, comprising – most essentially – individual moral character. To be sure, one’s selfconcept does not simply interpret the self without influencing it. Just as noticing a blemish on your face in a photograph may induce you to remove the blemish itself rather than merely airbrush it from the photo, so the projection of one’s self-concept may prompt one, consciously or unconsciously, to recast some of one’s core traits or commitments. In that sense, the ‘identity construction’ of teachers is a worthy object of inquiry in its own right. But in the end, what really matters is that teachers’ selves are in order – that they have the proper character traits and commitments – not merely

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that they want to have them or assume that they do! The second ingredient, Aristotle would argue, is that one’s selfhood and emotions are intimately linked; I return to this point in the following section. Third, Aristotle would abide by a ‘one-self-to-a-customer’ rule (Flanagan, 1996). Each person has one self. Truly multiple selves exist only in pathological cases. Some of the core commitments of teachers’ selves will concern their profession. We can refer to those as their ‘teacher selves’, if you like, although it is slightly misleading, and to their beliefs about those commitments as their ‘teacher identities’. Moral persons will, however seek morally grounded consonance among (a) their various commitments, among (b) their various beliefs about those commitments, and between (a) and (b). The tool that we have at our disposal to do just that – and to resolve any remaining dilemmas, according to Aristotle – is phronesis (recall Chapter 4). That is basically what phronesis is for! The upshot is that it is futile to study teacher selves or teacher identities in isolation. What matters is how they fit into the teacher’s moral character and resonate with her overall life plan. The Aristotelian message stops nothing short of proclaiming, then, that the currently dominant epistemological constructivism obscures the goals of identifying and influencing teachers’ professional identities and that it does disservice to those engaged in that endeavour. To put it in as simple terms as possible, the teacher as a character educator can only be understood in the broader context of the teacher as a person with a certain moral character.

The emotional practice of teaching Even for advocates of the claim that the professional teacher must be a moral teacher, the role of the emotions in the functioning of good moral character has not always taken hold. In her otherwise enlightening account of the moral dimension of teaching, for instance, Campbell focuses on the idea that teachers’ moral knowledge is demonstrated through their classroom behaviour, and that such knowledge is ‘necessarily action-oriented’ (2003: 139). In the detailed subject index of her book, there are no entries for ‘emotion’, ‘feeling’ or ‘affect’. It is no surprise, perhaps, that emotions were virtually absent from mainstream educational literature before the 1980s, as they were from mainstream moral philosophy literature. The Aristotle-inspired revival of emotions in recent mainstream virtue ethics, however, has taken some time to find its way into educational discourse. Maybe the tenacity of Kohlberg’s Kantian formalism, which influenced whole generations of teacher educators, is to blame here. That said, one is more likely now than before to come across handbooks for teachers making bold claims like: ‘People often talk as though emotions should be banned from the teaching relationship. Impossible. Emotions are at the heart of [it]’ (Wilson, 2004: 30)! Notably, this quotation is taken from a book on ‘the emotional business of teaching and learning’ (2004: 1).

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Zembylas (2003b) writes about three ‘waves’ in the introduction of emotions into educational discourse. The first wave was that of the teacherburnout literature of the 1980s. Theorists suddenly became alert to the fact that teaching, as well as many other ‘people professions’, involved hard emotional labour, the burden of which constituted a common reason for early exits from such professions. It is not as if this realisation came as a complete bolt from the blue, but after the invocation of scientific measurements of experienced burnout (see especially Maslach and Jackson, 1981), folk wisdom about the effects of long-term emotional stress was finally incorporated into a theoretical framework. Among the key indicators of burnout in human service institutions, including schools, turned out to be ‘emotional exhaustion’ (frustration, stress and fatigue) and its resulting ‘depersonalisation’ (evidenced as self-dehumanising cynicism and callousness). Every teacher has a story to tell: the hurt produced by spending hours preparing stimulating materials, only to have them sabotaged by a handful of disrupters (Wilson, 2004: 31); the burden generated by an expectation that the distinction between personal sensitivities and public image in the classroom must be erased (see various examples in Nias, 1989); the price of maintaining the appearances of a cheerful and enthusiastic professional while worrying about a critically ill mother (Day and Leatch, 2001: 411). Such examples can be multiplied many times over. The burnout literature focused on personal emotional strain and the adverse effects of emotional labour. The second wave of research on teacher emotion widened the perspective to include sociological aspects of emotion. I am referring here to the literature sparked by Hargreaves’s seminal article on the ‘emotional practice of teaching’ (1998). We must not overemphasise personal factors (private origin, individual responsibility) when gauging teachers’ emotions, Hargreaves argued, for such an approach aggravates guilt and increases burnout. Rather we should understand emotion as an institutional factor: part of the structure of the job. The sources of teachers’ specific emotional vulnerabilities are thus not to be sought inside their heads, but in the policy measures and complex professional relationships that create an impact on their work (cf. Kelchtermans, 2005). Think here of all the strict curricular requirements that must be met and the fearful ‘school inspections’; the policy makers’ constant demands for change; the steady increase in administrative responsibilities and paperwork; the constant lack of time, certainty and emotional space (cf. Wilson, 2004: 30–33). But we should also remember that emotional labour can be ‘pleasurable and rewarding – when people are able to pursue their own purposes through it’ (Hargreaves, 2000: 814) and succeed in integrating it into their moral characters. The most notable contribution of the sociological approach is its useful conceptualisation of the emotional landscape. Concepts help to structure thought; and in Hargreaves there is no shortage of new frameworks of thinking. Apart from the notions of (a) ‘emotional practice’ and (b) ‘emotional labour’, which he fleshes out in some detail, there is also the notion of

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(c) ‘emotional geographies of schooling’ (referring to the specific ‘spatial and experiential patterns of closeness and/or distance in human interactions’ within schools; Hargreaves, 2000: 815) and that of (d) unique teachingrelated ‘emotional understanding’. One of the defining features of Hargreaves’ sociological approach emerges in explaining (d). Emotional understanding differs from cognitive understanding because emotions are essentially non-cognitive (Hargreaves, 1998: 840; 2000: 815). Cognitive reflection can help us to guide and moderate emotion (2000: 812) – regulate it, if you like – but emotions constitute affects, not beliefs or judgements. When we are captured by strong emotions, it is the emotional mind that swamps the rational mind (Day and Leitch, 2001: 406). Schools should, as much as possible, be structured in such a way that this does not happen. Non-cognitivism is common in psychological, natural-kind approaches to emotion. So is the notion that emotions can be divided according to their ‘valence’ into positive (read: pleasant) and negative (read: painful). When we feel bad, we are in the grip of negative emotions – the good life is life with as few of those emotions as possible. It is not clear if Hargreaves accepts this characterisation, but in subsequent works influenced by the sociological approach it is rife: ‘If teachers cannot feel good about themselves in the classroom’, Wilson thus remarks, ‘there is little chance of them being able to cause pupils to feel good about themselves.’ Moreover, ‘negative emotions may have a malign effect on teacher–pupil relationships’ (2004: 31). Changing the emotional structure of the school is tantamount to diffusing the channels of potentially negative emotions (2004: 151). Zembylas (2003b) writes about the postmodern movement as the third wave in research on teacher emotion, and is a vocal representative of that movement. He faults the burnout literature for its myopic personal perspective and the sociological literature for reifying existing school structures and taking them for granted, while overlooking the causes of emotion in reigning political ideologies and oppressive power relations. He does not even hesitate to state that previous approaches have done ‘little to improve our knowledge about teacher emotion’ (2003b: 121). What, then, is the postmodern approach to emotion? Zembylas unpacks it into four assumptions (2003a: 110). First, emotions are not private, universal or passive experiences (‘the Aristotelian view’), but rather public, local and active discursive practices. Second, power relations are inherent in ‘emotion talk’ and shape the expression of emotion. Third, by using emotions, one can create sites of social and political resistance. Fourth, emotions are embodied (corporeal and performative). According to this view, teachers’ emotions ‘are not internal states, but […] are about social life’ (Zembylas, 2004: 187) – more specifically, about social life inside the school as it plays out power structures inherent in society. Emotions may either help or hinder teachers in constructing strategies of resistance and self-formation; the postmodern route would be to try to overcome the hindrances.

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Now, what would Aristotle say about those three approaches? I am not sure he would have much to say about the first – which is essentially descriptive rather than normative – except to acquiesce in its insights. To be sure, emotional labour can be difficult to square with moral character, and teaching is rarely easy! As to the sociological approach, Aristotle would condemn the restrictive cognitivism underlying the dualism of cognition (or reason) and emotion: of head and heart. The fact that an issue is emotionally loaded, stemming from the ‘heart’, does not mean that it disrupts the governance of the ‘head’; rather emotions can be properly thoughtful, just as thoughts can be properly felt. Hargreaves relegates emotions to the status of such mere feelings as toothaches or palate pleasures. Aristotle does not deny that emotions incorporate painful and/or pleasant affects, but he notes that they also incorporate cognitions – beliefs or judgements – and rather than different ‘feels’ differentiating them, they are essentially set apart by different cognitive consorts. A teacher does not become angry with students out of the blue, but only because she believes that they have done something inappropriate. Even more unsettling for Aristotle would be the idea that a teacher’s emotional repertoire should be developed so as to maximise pleasant emotions and minimise painful ones. Surely some of our most valuable and morally worthy emotions are painful (compassion with those in need, for instance) and some of our most despicable ones are pleasant (Schadenfreude, for example). I gather that Aristotle would be baffled by the postmodern approach, as expounded by Zembylas. In any case, it hardly requires an Aristotle to notice that Zembylas’s four ‘assumptions’ about emotions contain a mixture of misconceptions and platitudes. First, emotions are private ‘internal states’, in the sense that they are psychological processes that happen to individuals. By rejecting this fact and claiming instead that emotions are ‘about social life’, Zembylas is confusing the location of the emotion with its intentionality (‘aboutness’). True, when a teacher feels angry with her students, the anger is about the students, but the emotion is still inside her! Moreover, one needs do no more than pick up an ancient tragedy or a novel written in another country to realise that emotions such as anger, jealousy and pride are universal rather than local. Notice also that the view that emotions happen to passive sufferers – which Zembylas ascribes to Aristotle and subsequently rejects – was not Aristotle’s view at all. Admittedly, if a teacher has allowed an emotional disposition of excessive anger to grow within her, she may not be able to control bouts of episodic anger. But Aristotle had a proactive view on the cultivation of emotional dispositions. In the end it is within the power and the responsibility of each individual to develop the proper dispositions of that kind (recall Chapters 4 and 5). Second, Zembylas’s point that power relations shape ‘emotion talk’ is true, given his bloated postmodern conception of power according to which any attempt at controlling or influencing another person constitutes an exercise of power. But its truth then also

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becomes trivial! The angry teacher may succumb to the power of disruptive students and try to control them with angry shouting. But has anyone ever denied the claim that all occurrences of emotion are reactions to some outside influence and are themselves attempts to influence a state of affairs? Zembylas’s third assumption is also platitudinous. To be sure, one can create sites of social and political resistance by using emotions; Aristotle’s main discussion of emotions (2007) was even set within his treatment of political rhetoric. Against whom, then, is this assumption supposed to be directed? The behaviourism inherent in Zembylas’s fourth assumption is strangely oldfashioned. It is true that the body is normally used to express emotions. However, well-known experiments with subjects whose bodies are completely paralysed by drugs have shown that these subjects can experience intense emotions! More mundanely, every teacher has surely had the experience of being angry in class but succeeding in hiding her emotional state from students. Why can anger not be non-performative, then? Just as in the previous section on teacher identity, I do not propose to develop here a full-blown alternative Aristotelian paradigm of teacher emotion. Suffice to say that Aristotle’s focus would be on emotions as enduring traits of character. As such, emotions constitute virtues or vices that comprise one’s selfhood qua moral character. An emotional virtue is not policed by reason but ideally infused with reason; and when emotional virtues conflict, the moral agent relies on phronesis to adjudicate the conflict. Applying these general insights to teachers’ emotions, in particular, requires more work than I can undertake in this chapter. In any case, it should already be clear to readers why Aristotelians will reject any approaches to teacher emotion that view emotions essentially as non-cognitive thrusts – or worse still, as localised social capital exchanged by anguishing postmodern bodies! It should also be clear that if the discourse about teachers’ identities is really about their selfhoods, as Aristotelians will claim, and selfhoods are essentially constituted by character-constituting emotions, as they will also claim, then the two discourses that have been canvassed in this chapter are actually in the end one and the same discourse. What traits (including emotional traits) constitute a teacher’s moral character – and how can those be improved upon to make the teacher a better character educator?

A case in point The last sentence in the previous section may suggest that I have been exploring the second facet of the ‘moral dimension of teaching’ – that of the moral teacher – for mere instrumentalist reasons from the beginning, with an exclusive view to strengthening the teacher’s position as a moral coach of students. However, as character education is a life-long process (recall Chapter 5), it is no less important that teachers continue to improve their moral characters in order to enhance their own flourishing. To improvise on

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a famous George-Bernard-Shaw pun, character education is too important to waste it all on the kids! As a case in point, let me rehearse some observations from a paper that I co-wrote with Taiwanese educational philosopher Yen-Hsin Chen (Chen and Kristjánsson, 2011), about how professional jealousy often blights the lives of teachers. As one headteacher in Taiwan remarked, when interviewed by Chen: It’s difficult to evaluate the process of teaching. The government, however, evaluates the professional quality of teachers solely along quantitative performance lines: for example, by counting how many prizes or awards teachers have received after pushing their students through gruelling competitions. It’s sad to say that a few teachers even use unethical methods to procure positive results for themselves. Therefore, competitive jealousies are created among teachers, schools or even school heads. The headteacher draws attention to the fact that excellence in teaching is often seen as a zero-sum game. Teachers feel threatened not only if they or their students do badly but also if other teachers and their students do well. In this way, jealousy becomes, as it were, institutionalised. At the same time, prevailing morality considers jealousy a vice. Teachers do not know how to deal properly with the resulting emotional ambivalence and tension. The pressure to produce good results may even induce them to marginalise and exclude some students (e.g. those with special educational or social needs) out of performance tables. The headteacher in Chen’s interview seemed to be genuinely worried about the effects of inappropriate emotional reactions from teachers on the school ethos. Keenly aware of the societal context – increased demand for teaching appraisal and school evaluation in an era of financial cut-backs and the lack of a formal career-ladder for teachers – he explains this phenomenon as the emotional internalisation of societal pressures. Notice that in a Confucian context, when conflicts occur within a social network, the prescribed norm is to show forbearance. People are supposed to restrain themselves, even if smarting under emotional pressure, in order not to undermine the social order. The emotional labour of the teacher thus risks becoming a solitary affair: a personal problem. This can easily lead to emotional suppression or, as the headteacher points out, to the inappropriate transfer of negative emotions to colleagues. As part of their training in Taiwan, teachers have not been taught how to bring their own emotions to moral scrutiny nor to find appropriate outlets for them, especially in a society where social norms do not facilitate their expression. These concerns do not, by any means, fall into a theoretical vacuum. Much has been written about professional jealousy in general (see e.g. Bers

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and Rodin, 1984), for instance in connection with the so-called ‘tall poppy syndrome’ (see Feather, 1989) and, more specifically, the gossiping and sniping that commonly occurs between colleagues in school and university environments. In a trenchant analysis of envy and jealousy in the workplace, Glenn Hudak recalls how often he himself has ‘experienced the debilitating pain of alienation and marginalization, because others envy either my work or my enthusiasm or both’ (2000: 607). Hudak is particularly worried about the effects of inappropriate envy or jealousy on how one views other people; one no longer relates to the other person as a person, but rather to one specific aspect of her personhood as if that were the whole person. He also hypothesises that the negativity of envy/jealousy is fuelled by a sense of powerlessness, which is likely to be related to contradictions felt in one’s life between where one is at the moment and where one would like to be (2000: 610). If, on the other hand, he argues, we can learn to appreciate goodness and excellence in ourselves, we will also locate what is good in, and for, others (2000: 612). On this account, overcoming inappropriate jealousy is a necessary part of learning how to piece together what is meaningful and worthy of aspiration for oneself and others – the personal as the educational. This is a search not for the overcoming of emotion itself, but for being driven by rational and morally justifiable emotions. Given both the headteacher’s aforementioned comments and Hudak’s analysis, preparing teachers for such a search for moral meaningfulness would constitute a valuable (I would even say invaluable!) aim in teacher training, be it in Taiwan or the West.

Implications for teacher training To see anything like an Aristotelian approach required for understanding – and developing character-wise – teachers’ professional identities and teachers’ emotions, one must, of course, have become dissatisfied with other contemporary approaches. I hope the third and fourth sections above gave readers good reasons to be dissatisfied with some such approaches. For example, the currently fashionable idea of independent professional selfconcepts is alien to an Aristotelian outlook. Consider again the story of Runner Fan. A constructivist analysis of his reaction would focus on the putative conflict between his personal and professional identities – with both being seen as ‘voices’ in a chorus of multiple constructed identities. A narrowly construed cognitive approach would see him as having become overpowered by the emotion of fear as a non-cognitive thrust. A postmodern approach would consider him to be an unfortunate actor in ubiquitous power relationships. In contrast, an Aristotelian analysis of the story would focus on the teacher’s self-qua-character rather than his identity (let alone identities) – and on possible emotional dissonances within that single self. It would look for the beliefs and judgements underlying Fan’s fear and his lack of emotion

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with regard to his students. It would subject these emotions to moral scrutiny with the aid of phronesis – notably not phronesis as mere intuitive artistry but as an intellectual virtue guided by general moral truths as well as situation-specific observations (as explained in Chapter 4). Aristotelians would seek congruence between professional and personal values, not hesitating to pass judgement on the moral rightness or wrongness of emotional reactions. Rather than understanding teaching as a unique practice with its own independent set of norms and rules, Aristotelians would be ready to concur with Campbell’s view (2003: 12) – provocative as it may seem in our fractured times – that professional morality is nothing but the extension of everyday morality into the nuances of professional practice. I propose that much more attention be given in teacher training to the moral practice of teaching qua emotional labour: labour that places moral burdens on all teachers as individual human beings. Research shows that considerable variation in teacher efficacy results specifically from variance in teachers’ emotions (see Sutton and Wheatley, 2003). Students are quick at picking up emotional cues from their teachers. The fact that a teacher is in the grip of debilitating emotions or on an ‘emotional roller coaster’ can undermine the learning process that is supposed to take place in the classroom. Notice that the emotions in question may have nothing directly to do with the students. The cognitive content of the emotions may, for instance, be the belief that another teacher is being undeservedly favoured: the kind of jealousy that the headteacher above described as an increasingly common problem in Taiwanese schools (Chen and Kristjánsson, 2011). The ideally good teacher is ‘a certain sort of person’, as the inspiring educationist Terry McLaughlin used to put it: namely, a person who exhibits pedagogical phronesis in her dealings with students (2008: 76–77). Such a view of teaching as a moral profession clearly calls for a ‘richer account’ of the nature and requirements of teacher training (McLaughlin, 2008: 61), and even for the revival of the age-old idea of teaching as a moral vocation. In our 2011 paper, Chen and I offered some remarks about the possible contours of such a ‘richer account’. First, it must be ensured that ‘only those who show some evidence of appropriate character traits are admitted to professional training – or that any who fail to exhibit them are prevented from further professional engagement’ (Carr, 2007: 383). Second, we must make sure that education in and about character is a dominant theme in teacher training. This does not necessarily mean more classes in moral philosophy, narrowly construed, but perhaps a broader education in those subjects – in particular arts and literature – where teacher trainees have the best opportunity of gaining reflective self-knowledge and learning to evaluate themselves critically from a moral perspective. Just as doctors need to learn to heal themselves, prospective teachers need to get a grip on the values that underpin their characters before they begin to teach values to others. They must, inter alia, learn to evaluate and regulate their own emotions from a

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moral perspective and to prepare themselves for dealing with the rough and tumble of the institutions in which they are going to work. Third, teachers must be helped to grow as moral and emotional agents throughout their careers, in order to lead well-rounded lives as integrated personal and professional beings. For instance, Sigrún Aðalbjarnardóttir’s framework of school development aims to interconnect students’ social, emotional, ethical and civic growth with corresponding growth in their teachers. Her idea of twoway traffic between students’ interpersonal awareness and teachers’ professional development is original and well supported by empirical data – while remaining keenly aware of restrictive institutional factors that can impinge negatively upon this process (Aðalbjarnardóttir, 2010). The education of our children ‘begins with the preparation of our teachers’ (LePage et al., 2011: 374). Character educationists – both theorists and practitioners – have long called for radical overhauls of the training of prospective teachers to equip them with the expertise and personal qualities required to exhibit, model and teach good character (Carr, 2007; StiffWilliams, 2010). No concerted effort appears to have been made at the moment, either in Europe or the United States. Indeed, a large volume of literature describes the international teacher-training deficiency in this regard (e.g. Sanger, 2001; Ryan and Bohlin, 1999). A lack of engagement with moral-and-character issues in the field of teacher training may be the single biggest practical obstacle in the path of successful school-based efforts at character education (cf. Walker, Roberts and Kristjánsson, 2015). More positively put, improvements in this area may constitute the least cumbersome and costly intervention to make schooling a more morally rewarding experience – both for students and teachers.

Chapter 8

Concluding reflections

From academic musings to public policy This book has offered an elucidation and defence of character education. Character education, however, is not statuesque and all of a piece. It has appeared in many guises and incarnations through history and is perhaps best known in modernity for its US version, which took off with considerable gusto in the early 1990s, happily coinciding with the decline of the Kohlbergian rationalist paradigm of moral development. This book has not given much attention to the history of character education, in general, nor to its US variant, in particular. Its aim has, rather, been to elicit the valueaddedness of an Aristotelian form of character education. I refrain from calling it a ‘back-to-basics’ form because the Aristotelianism presented on those pages has not simply rehearsed and retrieved themes from the old master – to whom most character educationists defer, in any case, as their progenitor – but has reconstructed them in the service of a form of character education that would be suitable for contemporary practice. I have argued throughout that this sort of reconstructed Aristotelianism is, in a sense, more ‘Aristotelian’ than mere exegesis of old texts, as it corresponds better to Aristotle’s own empirically grounded moral method. In his view, as well as mine, all academic musings need to bow down to the force of empirical evidence and to go through a constant process of revision and update in light of the latest findings. I have been keenly aware, throughout, of the need to respond to objections that are typically levelled at Aristotelian character education. The book has thus, more than anything else, offered exercises in rebuttal. I have tried to steer clear as much as possible of academic trifles. Rebuttals have been offered not for the sake of saving Aristotle’s face or for securing the coherence of his academic outlook, but for their practical effectiveness in moving the discourse on character education forward, and for making it more amenable to potential implementation in today’s world. Here is the briefest of summaries of what I have done, after setting the stage with a detailed opening review in Chapter 1:

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Chapter 2 argued that the commonest misgivings about character education – Aristotelian or otherwise – that one comes across in the media and in political discourse are based on myths that admit of relatively easy responses. Chapter 3 affirmed the need to take the problem of measuring character and virtue in Aristotelian character education seriously, but – by synthesising state-of-the-art research in various measurement-relevant fields – also proposed to advance the discussion. Chapter 4 acknowledged the necessity of saying something more about education for phronesis than simply repeating Aristotelian truisms. It turned out that modelling phronesis acquisition on the acquisition of a simple skill does not cut the mustard here, as phronesis requires grasp of a full moral theory in addition to experiential learning. Chapter 5 suggested manoeuvres within the Aristotelian arsenal to account for post-adolescence character education, even when the moral learner has not been brought up in good habits. This manoeuvre also afforded an extended role to Aristotle’s much debated ideal of contemplation. Chapter 6 argued that since self-constitution is, according to Aristotelianism, partly dialogical, the method of moral dialogue will constitute part and parcel of any standard staples of Aristotelian character education, rather than being just a Socratic add-on. Chapter 7 reminded us of the salience of teachers’ moral characters, and how, without attending to their own continued character development, it would be futile to expect them to act as able educators of our children.

Current literatures in philosophy and education are increasingly constructing the flourishing child as a major discursive theme (Walker, Roberts and Kristjánsson, 2015). By regularly directing attention to that fact and by responding – successfully, I hope – to a number of doubts and reservations about the contours of Aristotelian education towards flourishing, this book will seem to be conveying a very upbeat message about the potential of such education. Rightly so! Yet it must be borne in mind that I have focused on academic hurdles in the path of Aristotelian character education. However successfully those can be surmounted, let us not forget that the paradigm of the flourishing child has so far failed to make a significant dent in educational policy making and teacher training in Western liberal democracies. Indeed, contemporary policy discourse, with its amorally instrumentalist, competence-driven bent, seems to shy away from any perspective that embraces normative visions of persons in the context of their whole lives. The lack of teacher-training establishments with a coherent approach to any character education – let alone of the Aristotelian kind – is most likely the result of more dominant legitimating principles of grade attainment and classroom management. This seems a lost opportunity, however, given the hunger

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among trainee teachers to make a moral difference (Sanger and Osguthorpe, 2011). In his classic analysis of the uneasy relationship between educational philosophy/theory on the one hand, and educational policy on the other, Terry McLaughlin (2000) explains how these two fields trade in different conceptualisations, aims, interests and priorities. McLaughlin ponders the extent to which theoretical considerations can properly be expected – or made – to ‘bite’ upon educational policy making, and he coins the term ‘taxonomic bite’ to describe educational theory translated into the ‘taxonomy’ apt for the attention of policy makers. McLaughlin considers various possibilities of how to bridge, or lessen, the gap between those fields, one of which would be for academics to move closer to policy making itself. By venturing to ‘enter constitutively into the world they describe’ (Giddens, 1987: 20) and ‘dirtying their hands’ in that way, they could help interrogate the principles of educational policy from the inside, as it were, which in turn would – ideally – lead to a restructuring of legitimating principles. As noted by Walker, Roberts and Kristjánsson (2015), the gap between research evidence on the one hand, and policy, training and practice on the other, is in no way confined to the educational arena or, indeed, to the public sector. In large corporate firms, this gap is well-known – and the term ‘knowledge mobilisation’ has been coined in management studies for the transference of knowledge from departments of research and development to those of management and execution. Special intermediaries, called ‘knowledge brokers’, are typically assigned to this knowledge-transfer role. A recent UNESCO report (2009) emphasises the need for the public sector to emulate the private sector in this regard and to draw upon the expertise of people who can package information obtained from research in an appropriate, digestible way for politicians and policy analysts. The report mentions consultants and science journalists as possible examples. Judging from how far below the radar of educational journalism the theme of the flourishing child still flies, there is not much reason for optimism that the media alone can be relied upon as significant knowledge brokers in the area of character education. There may be no other option than for character educationists themselves – theorists and practitioners – to assume the mantle of knowledge brokers and to engage in more sustained networking and gap-bridging across social fields than they have ‘deigned to’ so far. As most policy makers are more familiar with the halls of government than the hallways of schools (Loveless, 1998), let alone the labyrinths of academia, one can only expect the discourse on character education to make serious inroads into the field of educational policy if the message of the discussion targets the unconverted – who in this case are the people with the real power to enact a restructuring of educational priorities. That said, politicians are notoriously sensitive to subtle changes of opinion among the electorate. If polls such as the one commissioned by the

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Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues (2013) continue to show strong parental support for school activities aimed at character education, and politicians interpret those findings as evidence of true opinions rather than simply lip service paid by parents to ideals that they do not really support in practice, one can expect more and more politicians to adopt principles of the flourishing child paradigm and to filter them into educational policy (although they might meet with some Yes-Minister-style resistance there from the mandarins). Schools tend to be conservative institutions, however, and are as difficult to move quickly as large aircraft carriers. That is generally a good thing. We do not want educational institutions to jump on just any approaching bandwagon and to adjust themselves slavishly to the flavour of each new month. Yet this conservatism can easily degenerate into indiscriminate resistance to any new ideas, especially radical and controversial ones. While I would hesitate to categorise the call for Aristotelian character education as ‘radical’, since it is built on the accumulated experience of generations of educators on what makes children flourish and does not require the tearing up of the whole fabric of schooling, it does necessitate a turn away from high-stakes testing as the ultimate measure of school success. For some people – including some politicians – that may be a bridge too far. Hence, their tendency, noted in Chapter 1, to favour forms of character coaching that make good character instrumentally subservient to grade attainment. However, as I have argued consistently throughout this book, character without non-instrumental moral features is like Hamlet without the prince.

Lessons from some halcyon days of moral education Despite everything I have said so far, I consider the paradigm of the flourishing child – and Aristotelian character education as a means to actualise this paradigm – to be facing an uphill battle. To be more precise, I still deem one crucial ingredient to be missing for making Aristotelian character education a truly successful model of moral education. By ‘successful’ here I do not mean ‘championed by academics’ but, rather, ‘widely acknowledged and implemented to good effect’. By looking back in history, I hypothesise that in order to be truly successful in this sense, a paradigm of moral education needs to satisfy four main criteria. It must: (1) Align with public perceptions and speak to the dominant anxieties and vulnerabilities of the given era. In most cases, connecting to the spirit of the times involves tapping into prevalent concerns about perceived moral declivity and how it can be reformed. (2) Meet with a relatively broad political consensus and attract political interest, ideally both on the political ‘left’ and ‘right’. (3) Be underpinned by a respectable philosophical theory, providing it with a stable methodological, ontological, epistemological and moral basis.

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(4) Be supported by a dominant psychological theory, explaining how the ideals of the educational theory fit into actual human psychology and are, as such, attainable. To cut a long story short, my view is that Aristotelian character education satisfies criteria (1)–(3) quite well, but (4) much less so. Aristotelian character education (1) aligns with public perceptions about a moral ‘value gap’ in the wake of the financial crisis and, more generally, with concerns about the current state of the social-media savvy but socio-morally deprived ‘me’generation. It (2) meets, in the UK at least, with an increased political consensus where ‘character’ is becoming a buzzword across party lines. It is (3) underpinned by a distinct philosophical theory that is – as has been shown in this book – particularly resourceful in providing foundations for educational efforts. Moreover, the contribution of recent virtue ethics has further revitalised the field of character education and renewed its confidence. I consider (4), however, to be the elephant in the room. Contemporary psychological theory is, as yet, not distinctively virtuefriendly. More generally and crucially, perhaps, serious doubts tend to be entertained in psychological circles about the very idea of moral education and how efforts at such education are typically designed in isolation from the best available psychological evidence. I return to this ‘elephant in the room’ in the third section below, but propose to offer first some historical evidence for my hypothesis. The closest contender in time for a system of moral education that exerted almost unquestioned hegemony in the field is that of Lawrence Kohlberg. For a quarter of a century, Kohlberg was the high priest of moral education (see e.g. Lee and Taylor, 2014) – so much so that when I attended my first annual Association for Moral Education conference, I was invited to attend a kind of induction session, presenting a video of Kohlberg in action! This is not the place to critique the content of Kohlberg’s paradigm of the cognitively developing moral child; as an Aristotelian, I would be tempted to see it as seriously misguided in many respects (see e.g. Kristjánsson, 2002, chap. 6; 2013, chap. 4). Yet for a while it attracted a broad following. Why is that? Kohlberg presented his system at a certain cusp in intellectual history when its message hit home at a number of different levels, satisfying the four above criteria very well. Kohlberg succeeded in (1) tapping into deep post-World War Two and Cold War vulnerabilities. The great wars of the twentieth century were widely seen as manifestations of the breakdown of human rationality – as glaring errors of thought. Any system of moral education that would stand a chance of attracting public acceptance needed to explain how children could be inoculated against onslaughts of irrationality, and Kohlberg specifically proffered such a service. Moreover, although Kohlberg’s paradigm always appealed more strongly to political liberals than conservatives, he (2) couched his ideas about education for justice-as-rationality in terms

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that resonated (potentially at least) with any political ideology considered remotely ‘modernist’. Indeed, Kohlberg’s paradigm of moral education can be seen as the mirror image of modernist formalism in architecture and art. The grounding in (3) a respectable philosophical system was pretty clear also. Kohlberg was a devout Kantian – and he read and digested Kant through some of his more practically minded successors such as Hare and Rawls. The message was that one becomes (more) moral by (better) applying principles of practical reason. Finally, to Kohlberg’s fondness for Kantian philosophy was added his fascination for Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, enabling him to (4) ground his moral developmental and educational theory in a state-of-the-art psychology. Kohlberg’s paradigm was in many ways a masterpiece of co-ordinating the four criteria of success and harnessing their cumulative effect. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that for a long time, the fields of moral psychology and moral education turned into Kohlbergian cults and that, even nowadays, theorists who have given up on some of his most powerful assumptions still prefer to refer to themselves as ‘neo-Kohlbergians’. Rather than analysing the allure of Kohlberg’s paradigm in more detail here, however, I want to visit another example of a paradigm that successfully met the four proposed criteria of success but has now largely fallen into oblivion. The great didactic by John Amos Comenius (written in 1633–1638; I use the 1907 translation) is a truly imposing piece of work, synthesising insights from budding Renaissance empiricism and Christian doctrines read through a Protestant lens. It influenced the field of moral education greatly, being much admired and imitated for at least two centuries. While the persistent equation of piety and morality will alienate many modern readers, Comenius’s work counted as radically progressive in its time and age, and it would – in my view – deserve to be widely read by today’s character educationists, Aristotelian or not, as a source of insight and inspirations and as a spectacularly prescient historical text. Comenius’s work is thoroughly anchored in (1) public conceptions of his time of a faltering morality in a ‘world growing aged and cold’ (1907: 6, 262). He saw this caused by the fact that questions of ‘virtuous living’ had gradually disappeared from the curriculum of the traditional Latin School (1907: 78), being replaced by ever-drier parrot learning of raw facts. Comenius’s paradigm of the sinful child that needs to be corrected also played into public conceptions at the time, which were hardly put into question until a century or so later, about human beings as essentially tainted and ‘corrupted by the Fall’ (1907: 49). ‘Education’ for Comenius is thus educatio in the original sense of the word: e-ducare as leading away from one’s sinful self (Hábl, 2011: 9), a self that is most clearly manifested through ‘the abominable vice of selfishness’ (1907: 214). Politically (2), Comenius had prevailing opinion on his side also, as Protestant politicians – inspired by ideas of the separation of church and state – envisaged a new role for schools in preparing students for life of civic engagement in this world.

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Philosophically, (3) Comenius had nothing less than a whole Christian worldview to fall back on, rooted in Aristotelianism and scholasticism but partly upgraded by the mechanicalism of the seventeenth century. ‘Man’ is seen as a potentially rational, albeit corrupt, creature endowed with freedom of choice, made in the image of God and given the role of lord of other natural creatures (1907: 36). At the same time, the scholastic epistemological notion of truth-seeking via scriptural immersion and contemplation had been abandoned, superseded by truth derived ‘from no other source but the operations of nature’ itself (1907: 100). Comenius obviously had no discrete discipline of academic psychology to draw on; yet his (4) reliance on a dominant Cartesian dualistic psychology (of soul versus body) is plain enough, as is his insistence that human beings are endowed with powers to seek, discover and test information themselves, and that all education must thus ultimately aim at making students informed, not just formed (Hábl, 2011: 10) – a nice echo of the Aristotelian distinction between habituated virtue and phronesis-guided virtue. Moreover, the developmental thread that runs through Comenius’s whole work – according to which each level in the child’s development must be respected and taken seriously – has often been rightly seen as a precursor of later developmental stage theories of the Piagetian kind. On the back of this neat alignment of the four suggested success criteria, Comenius constructs a formidable edifice of moral-education theory (see esp. 1907, chap. 13). Many of his assumptions are of clear Aristotelian provenance – probably influenced by Aquinas’s reading of Aristotle – but others are more distinctly original. Virtue is cultivated by learning to walk the walk rather than talk the talk, from an early age, and by interacting with virtuous people, where everything is taken in ‘through the medium of the senses’ (1907: 127). A lot of the practical advice given by Comenius here is of surprising modern appositeness. He explains the lack of student motivation caused by only learning to the test, the corrosive effects of rough and disagreeable teachers lacking in sincere fondness for the children they teach, and in general the harms caused by the common adult lack of appreciation for the unique charms of the child’s enchanted, whimsical and humorous view of the world (2007: 270). Aristotelians may not find much in Chapter 13 of Comenius’s great book that surprises them – but there are passages in this book that add considerable rhetorical force to time-honoured messages, such as when he says that words ‘should always be taught and learned in combination with things, just as wine is bought and sold together with the cask that contains it, a dagger with its sheath, a tree with its bark, and fruit with its skin’ (1907: 177). Comenius’s work is an object lesson in how to create impact in the field of moral education, by co-ordinating public concerns with prevailing political, philosophical and psychological assumptions. Aristotelian character educationists in the present day could have much to learn from the way Comenius distilled and packaged his message.

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Another distinguished moral educator of the past, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who has now been largely forgotten and turned into an unsung hero, wrote the classic tale of Gertrude and Leonard in 1781–1787 (see the 1889 translation). Written more than a century after Comenius, Pestalozzi’s work will probably resonate better with moderns, in that he has adopted a number of Enlightenment assumptions and reconciled them with his Christian beliefs. For example, although Pestalozzi does not go as far as his contemporary Rousseau in renouncing the doctrine of the original sin, that doctrine has now taken on a less theological form as a thesis, mainly, about how humans are shackled by their natural sensuality and egoism. Leonard and Gertrude is, like Rousseau’s Émile, a story about particular characters, especially the enlightened mother, Gertrude, who brings up her children in an ideal way and transforms the whole community at the same time, despite being held back by her debt-ridden, layabout, drunkard husband! This is not the place to rehearse Pestalozzi’s allegory except to bolster my hypothesis about the four criteria, by noting the role of four protagonists in the story. One is Gertrude herself – a representative of those (1) members of the public who are worried about the moral state of the youth and wish to improve it. Another is Arner, a local (2) politician who solicits aid from the state for implementing Gertrude’s ideas. The third is an unnamed parish clergyman who supports Gertrude’s efforts and adds (3) a philosophical-cum-theological dimension to them. The fourth is the school teacher Glüphi who tries to adapt Gertrude’s basic intuitions to the (4) actual psychology of the children he is teaching in his school. The upshot of the story seems to be that for moral education to work, all the four criteria – the public, political, philosophical and psychological – must be met and harmonised: exactly the point that I have been trying to make in this section.

The elephant in the room I spoke sanguinely in Chapter 1 about the rising interest in character and virtue in various academic and non-academic quarters, one of them being psychology – citing the example of positive psychology’s recent virtue theory (Peterson and Seligman, 2004). While I have no wish to put a damper on this optimism here, there is a long jump from pointing out – correctly – that some psychologists are now finally showing some interest in the re-accommodation of virtue, to claiming that we have already reached that stage in the development of Aristotelian character education where all the four criteria listed in the previous section have been met. There is no good reason for character educationists to make the second claim yet, either explicitly or implicitly; rather, that would constitute a vain attempt to put on rose-tinted spectacles and avoid looking the elephant in the room in the eye. Compared to the halcyon days of the paradigms of the sinful child and the cognitively developing child, the paradigm of the flourishing child is still seriously

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under-nourished by psychological evidence and enthusiasm. From what I can see, the group of current psychologists who have made efforts to take on board virtue-and-character-related insights can be divided into four broad camps – of what I call the ‘dabblers’, the ‘reconceptualisers’, the ‘conciliators’ and the ‘mavericks’. The dabblers (e.g. Peterson and Seligman, 2004) have identified a niche for virtue within mainstream psychology but – erroneously supposing their hands to be clean of any philosophy – have done so without engaging with the concept in a theoretically profound manner. Thus, there still exists in positive psychology the fatal and unfounded philosophical prejudice that relinquishing David Hume’s famous fact–value distinction will also mean abandoning his is–ought distinction (between description and prescription), thus turning psychology into prescriptive moralism (critiqued in Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 4). Peterson and Seligman (2004) have also failed to grasp the Aristotelian point that offering a theory of virtue education without a virtue adjudicator (such as phronesis) is doomed to be a self-defeating, futile endeavour (Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 7). Furthermore, although Peterson and Seligman themselves seem to have some basic understanding of the intrinsic value of virtues in a flourishing life, most of their colleagues in positive psychology still understand virtue exclusively in instrumentalist terms. The reconceptualisers (such as Jayawickreme et al., 2014) engage with virtue concepts in more theoretically nuanced ways, adopting Aristotelian insights and making a sustained attempt to disabuse their colleagues of various misunderstandings. They also explain and justify the role of character qua ‘personality evaluated’ (Allport, 1937: 52) on psychological agendas. However, the reconceptualisers have typically not (yet) teased out the practical implications of their theoretical retrievals or subjected their notions to sustained empirical scrutiny. The conciliators (e.g. Narvaez, 2005) have gone further down the line of making practical use of virtue ethical insights. However, they typically try to combine those with other paradigms – for example fusing Aristotelianism and Kohlbergianism into a post-Kohlbergian ‘schema theory’ (recall the sixth section in Chapter 3). As the virtue elements are, more commonly, seen as the useful ‘add-on’ in this enterprise rather than the ‘core’, it is not apt to talk about a full retrieval here either. In the case of the mavericks (e.g. Fowers, 2014), however, that terminology would be credible as the mavericks have disposed of the fact–value distinction altogether and argue that since most ordinary people are proto-Aristotelians, in order to make sense of people’s actual psychology – for example in the service of character education – we need to apply an Aristotelian conceptual repertoire to them. Only in the case of the mavericks, therefore, could we profitably speak of the full alignment of the four criteria of a successful programme of moral education. However, as the mavericks constitute a small minority of outliers in today’s mainstream psychology, it is seriously premature to consider the

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paradigm of the flourishing child – and of character education towards flourishing – backed up by the same sort of social scientific wherewithal that Kohlberg’s paradigm was. In the last few years, I have tried to engage constructively with a number of psychologists and other social scientists – both maverick and not – on issues of moral and character education at conferences and in writing. As an Aristotelian naturalist, it is incumbent on me to do so! This engagement has opened my eyes to a number of misgivings that psychologists harbour about the current state of moral education in general and character education in particular. Although some of those misgivings correspond to the shortcomings of Aristotelian character education that I identified in the fourth section in Chapter 1 and have tried to remedy throughout this book, others reflect more general worries. In any case, I consider it instructive to single out ten common psychological refrains for consideration below and offer some observations on them. First, psychologists find the current heterogeneity in the field of moral education (that I mentioned in Chapter 1) off-putting. Although this may sound like a case of the pot calling the kettle black, since psychology is itself internally divided on a number of fundamental issues, it is true that the eagerness of moral educationists to rush off, each in their homemade directions, does not inspire much confidence in the field. The consolation is that this is what often happens in science in between major paradigms. The fall of the Kohlbergian paradigm of the cognitively developing child was a major blow to the field from which it has not yet fully recovered. A new paradigm of the flourishing child, to which the present book has been meaning to contribute, may gradually be taking over. Yet the future is uncertain and, as explained above, a crucial ingredient in this paradigm is still missing. Second, psychologists are surprised by the lack of attention shown in moral education to measurement issues and by how often the discipline relies on mere anecdotal evidence of alleged local successes in local classrooms. Hawthorne effects are rarely considered and randomised control trials seldom executed. I did unashamedly acknowledge this as a problem for Aristotelian character education in Chapter 1 and offered some solutions in Chapter 3. Yet it remains disconcerting how many moral educationists seem to be smugly satisfied with relying on their gut feelings that a real change has taken place as a result of a classroom intervention. Specifically, within Aristotelian character education, an increase in ‘virtue literacy’ in a minimal sense – namely the understanding of virtue terminology – is often taken as evidence of moral progress. However, true success in character education needs to manifest itself in ‘virtue literacy’ in a more maximal sense: in a true reform of virtue traits as applied to real circumstances, emotional engagement and daily conduct (see Arthur et al., 2014). Third, psychologists complain, rightly it seems to me, about the antiPopperian tendency in moral education to persist with ideas in the face of apparently disconfirming evidence. For example, raising self-esteem is still

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high on many moral-education agendas, although empirical evidence has already undermined the hypothesis that self-esteem per se is a worthwhile psycho-moral goal (Baumeister et al., 2003). Some moral educationists also seem to have closed their eyes to the decline of the Kohlbergian paradigm (I am not talking about the neo-Kohlbergians here!), and still measure moral development via the Kohlbergian stages and the old Kohlbergian methods, as if there is no tomorrow. This is particularly worrisome, as obstinacy in response to refutations is often the sign of a pseudo-scientific mind-set. Fourth, psychologists accuse moral educationists of not taking sufficient account of genetic factors. There are some things about individuals that simply cannot be changed! I tried to parry one version of this complaint in the second section in Chapter 1 when I pointed out that even if 50 per cent of our broad personality trait of conscientiousness is genetic, there is considerable scope left for character education to channel this general trait into specific moral outlets – namely what, precisely, the student is conscientious about. I conveniently did not mention there, however, the other side of the coin. What about students who are not hardwired with a strong disposition to general agreeableness or conscientiousness? Virtue ethicists often rely on the mantra that ‘virtue must be within the reach of anyone who really wants it’ (cited and critiqued in Adams, 2006: 163). This mantra harks back to Comenius’s rose-tinted observation that ‘the gardener can unfailingly train a struggling shoot into a tree, by using his skill in transplanting’ (1907: 90). I am not sure, however, that a person very low in innate agreeableness (qua Big-Five trait) can ever acquire the full Aristotelian moral virtue of agreeableness (as explained in Kristjánsson, 2007, chap. 10). She may force herself successfully to act in agreeable ways, but having to force oneself to do x is not to do x virtuously. Conversely, a person high in congenital agreeableness – while privileged with regard to moral agreeableness – may find herself at a disadvantage with regard to some other moral virtues such as honesty as she will find it extremely difficult to call a spade a spade, when needed, in front of a person who will take offence. To give another example, a person high on neuroticism, prone to see her glass half-empty, will most likely never turn into a half-full-glass sort of a person, however hard we (as educators) and the person herself try or how many gratitude exercises she labours through! Given these considerations, there may be some virtues which – for some people – it is useless, or even counter-productive, to persist in trying to develop (cf. Adams, 2006, chap. 9). The takeaway lesson for Aristotelian character educators is that virtue must be seen as relative to individual dispositions (cf. Chen, 2013) – as Aristotle did indeed acknowledge. However, this probably means setting the bar of character reform to a lower and more realistic position than I myself, and many of my colleagues, have wanted to do in the past. Fifth, psychologists worry that many moral educationists still shelter behind a somewhat naïve conception about personal characteristics, rather

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than social situations, being all that matters for moral functioning. Generally speaking, this may well be true. In the third sections in Chapters 1 and 2 I dug my heels in, however, and suggested that, far from being a shortcoming in Aristotelian character education, the facility to account for the insights of ‘situationism’ signals a major strength of the Aristotelian approach. Much depends also (as previously explained) on what, exactly, we mean by the term ‘situation’. That said, Aristotle might well have underestimated the essential frailty of human character – even in the most morally developed persons – when it encounters new and completely alien situations. Human beings are creatures of habit and it is possible, indeed likely, that even in the case of people whom Aristotle would have counted as phronimoi (people possessing phronesis-guided all-round virtue), their consistent display of virtue depends for its stability on their social conditions remaining relatively stable (cf. Adams, 2006: 119). One thing that Aristotle cannot be accused of overlooking, however, is that all moralities are to a certain extent role moralities. One’s aspirations and duties naturally vary between the roles one occupies: as a parent, student, teacher, lover, friend, client, etc. Thus, for example, persons in Aristotle’s exclusive category of great-minded or megalopsychoi – people who are not only phronimoi but also endowed with an abundance of worldly resources – assume a unique role in his system. The great-minded take on extended responsibilities as public benefactors but are, at the same time, relieved of some ordinary aspirations, such as showing gratitude to others, as it would eat too much into the time needed for their philanthropic activities (see Kristjánsson, 2002, chap. 3–4)! When I argued, in Chapter 7, against a strict separation of teachers’ personal and professional ‘selves’, I was not undermining the point that teaching carries certain distinct role-based aspirations of its own; I was simply warning against the misconception that human beings are chameleons which take a discrete new character to any new role they play. Sixth, psychologists often make a related point (to the one about social situations) about social background. Most empirical research into moral development or pro-social attitudes – almost no matter how measured – reveals a strong link to socio-economic-cum-social-capital background. Kids with educated and relatively well-off parents score better than poor kids. Perhaps this is not surprising. What is surprising, however – and here I agree with the social scientists – is how few programmes of moral education attack this issue head-on (cf. Kwon, 2015). Why is not more attention paid, for example, to ways in which varying socio-economic, ethnic and educational self-concepts (or habitus) that children take to school can be turned into a moral resource rather than continuing as a source of potential disadvantage? I am not excluding Aristotelian character educationists from blame here. We have not addressed this issue in any sufficient depth or specificity (although my stab at rejecting early-years determinism in Chapter 5 will hopefully count as a small step in the right direction). Our silence is perhaps even more

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glaring than that of other moral educationists, given Aristotle’s unapologetic moral collectivism. It is abundantly clear that, for him, character education is completely otiose if it does not create better societies (recall the third sections in Chapters 2 and 3). Character educationists of whatever ilk tend to insist, however, that the first educational steps on this route involve the cultivation of individual traits in small-scale situations. For example, it is difficult to imagine an adult fully grasping fairness issues in larger society if she has not, as a child, learnt to deal with fairness issues in the family and the classroom. Judith Suissa (2014) calls this educational move either ‘naïve’ or ‘ingenious’. I refer to it as psychological and political realism. Seventh, the psychologists whom I have engaged with still worry about the much-discussed ‘paradox of moral education’ and the lack of attention paid to critical-thinking issues in most current programmes of moral education. I have harped on about it throughout the book, almost ad nauseam, that this is a point of major concern for Aristotelian character educationists (recall especially Chapter 4). I dare not say more here at the risk of fatiguing readers! The fact that this issue is still raised by psychologists does indicate, however, that once again moral education in general, and not only character education, is faced with a PR problem. Perhaps every book and article on moral education needs to be prefaced with a caveat stating that ‘moral education is not indoctrination and it is not mere socialisation’. Eighth, in the last few years more and more psychologists have started to grumble that Aristotelian character education does not take account of the latest research findings from what Jonathan Haidt (2007) calls ‘the new synthesis in moral psychology’, involving a mixture of hard ontological sentimentalism about morality (on emotion as the sole donor of moral value) and social intuitionism about moral motivation as innate, emotion-driven, modular (Haidt, 2012a) and automatic (albeit partly socially mitigated), with a significantly reduced role for reason. In Haidt’s most famous paper (2001), he describes our ‘rational tail’ as invariably being wagged by the ‘emotional dog’, rather than vice versa (although character educationists persist in thinking otherwise!), and how moral reasons are typically added as mere rationalisations, seconds after actual moral decisions – based on innate intuitions – have already been taken. This is a large topic; indeed too large to tackle adequately here. I direct the reader to a book chapter (Kristjánsson, 2015), specifically about this issue, that is coming out in the same year as the present book. In a nutshell, Aristotelians will have sympathy with many of the anti-hard-rationalism sentiments motivating Haidt and his colleagues. However, they will consider the pendulum here to have swung too far away from reason. The best way to explain quickly the difference between Haidt’s hard sentimentalism and Aristotle’s soft rationalism is to consider the ways in which Haidt wants to co-opt Aristotle to his camp. Haidt understands and appreciates the idea of the automaticity of virtue in Aristotle – although he thinks

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Aristotle is wrong in believing that this automaticity is derived exclusively from upbringing and experience. He likes the idea that virtue qua second nature is but ‘a refinement of our basic nature, an alteration of our automatic responses’; and he ‘loves’ Aristotle’s ‘emphasis on habit’. In general, Haidt considers virtue ethics the moral theory that best accords with recent findings in moral psychology (Haidt and Joseph, 2004: 61–62; Haidt, 2012b, 2012c). Unfortunately, Haidt’s sporadic Aristotelianism is largely based on misunderstandings. He seems, for instance, to labour under the illusion that ‘natural virtue’ in Aristotle is a primitive stage of virtue with which we are born and later refine. ‘Natural virtue’ is anything but that in Aristotle. It is actually a somewhat infelicitous name for an advanced stage of habituated virtue – above that of both incontinence and continence but below full virtue (see Curzer, 2012: 305–307). There is, indeed, no hint of the idea of innate natural virtue in Aristotle. For while we are adapted by nature to receive virtue through being endowed with its raw materials, virtue does not ‘arise in us […] by nature’ (Aristotle, 1985: 33 [1103a23–26]), and we are born neither good nor bad. Furthermore, when writers on Aristotle mention ‘habit’, that term is actually used as an (unhelpful) rendering of his notion of hexis, as I explained in the second section in Chapter 1. A hexis is a dispositional state of character, incorporating emotion and reason as well as action; it is not a knee-jerk reaction. The automaticity exhibited by the phronimos is the automaticity of hexeis originally instilled through habituation and later refined by the agent’s own autonomous, phronesis-guided decisions. It is the automaticity of routines or moral schemas that the agent has developed to enable her scarce resources of conscious attention to be focused elsewhere (Russell, 2014c); it is not the automaticity of spontaneously activated, innate intuitive responses. Haidt’s ‘Aristotle’ thus constitutes a lean counterpart, if not a caricature, of the real Aristotle. Ninth, psychologists keep warning me, and other Aristotelian character educationists, that we tend to overestimate both people’s ability to understand who they really are deep down – namely their self-transparency – and their motivation to change even if they realise that their current character traits leave something to be desired. But without a motivation to change, no change will occur. The fact that the first point is made by psychologists may seem like another case of a black pot chastising a black kettle. After all, the lion’s share of psychological instruments still involves self-reporting which, in turn, presupposes a considerable degree of self-transparency. Philosophers keep making the same point, however. Harry Frankfurt notes, for example that ‘there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgement that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know’ (Frankfurt, 2005: 66; cf. Kristjánsson, 2010a, chap. 2). I would want to claim that Chapter 3 in the present book constituted a sustained attempt to address this concern. Nevertheless, the psychologists are right in that knowing oneself is one thing, wanting to

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change as a result of such knowledge is quite another. Disconcerting psychological findings indicating that people’s desires for self-verification (of their current self-conceptions, good or bad) are often stronger than their desires for self-improvement (Swann, 1996) cannot be ignored here (cf. Kristjánsson, 2010a, chap. 10). Motivational issues thus need to be given further attention in Aristotelian character education (cf. Ryan, Curren and Deci, 2013). We must be ready to face a conclusion here which is in a way anticipated in the Aristotelian corpus: that classroom teachers (barring a minority of exemplary ideals, cf. Damon and Colby, 2015) may often not be the best people to enact radical self-change in students, and that parents or peers who can act as character friends are often in a better position to do so (recall Chapter 5; cf. Walker, Curren and Jones, 2015). Tenth, psychologists keep asking me why moral education seems to have given up on the quest for a grand theory of what they prefer to call ‘prosociality’ in favour of piecemeal psycho-moral engineering. I agree that the big picture often seems to get lost nowadays. Indeed, I do depart here from many of my fellow Aristotelian character educationists by accepting more readily the need for a grand-end theory of moral philosophy to ground character education, and by being more open to consequentialist calculations to solve large-scale global problems (recall Chapter 4). Thinking small and realistically is a virtue – but only up to a point where virtue turns into the vice of small-mindedness and dearth of ambition. Thinking big does not necessarily mean thinking transcendentally – replacing the clod chopper Aristotle with the cloud hopper Plato – but it does mean that we need from time to time to step outside of Plato’s ‘cave’ (as depicted in his famous allegory) and view its insides from the vantage point of the external observer who asks the penetrating question of what all this talk about character education is then really for. All in all, I have learnt a lot from engaging with the sceptical mind-set of social scientists: theorists who – paradoxically perhaps – are often more sceptical about the content and effectiveness of moral education than are their non-empirically minded counterparts in moral philosophy, although being sceptical is supposed to be the philosopher’s trademark! What I have learnt is that if efforts at character research and development are endangered by underestimation of possible impact, they are no less crippled by overestimation. Well-founded misgivings about Aristotelian character education do remain – despite my efforts at remedying some of its most evident shortcomings in this book. We need to take the long view and tread carefully over a bumpy terrain, although that is not the same as treading timidly. The transformative aims of current efforts at moral education, in general, and Aristotelian character education, in particular – however laudable – need to be mitigated by a substantive dose of intellectual modesty. I venture to call it hopeful modesty.

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We need to talk about classroom methods Yes, we do need to talk about classroom methods, but this book is not the right place to do so! However, as already noted, it is firmly on the agenda of the research centre where I am working to write such a book. The present work has offered practical reflections on theoretical issues, rather than practical reflections on practical (classroom) issues. It is not because I do not believe in the usefulness of the latter. I do not share the ‘obstinately unrepentant’ pessimism of my friend, colleague and brother-in-arms David Carr that teaching manuals usually trade in ‘either the largely vacuous or the downright fatuous’ (2012: 8). Although I do not share either the unbridled optimism of Comenius that practical advice about ‘the art of teaching’ can be brought to ‘such perfection’, in and by itself, as to revolutionise teaching like the printing-press revolutionised printing (1907: 287), I doubt that Aristotelian character education can mature into a fully-fledged classroom programme until more attention has been given to how to concretise some of the Aristotelian staples and adopt them for present-day concerns and circumstances. Indeed, what I think Aristotelian character education most urgently needs at the moment are more journeymen and fewer pontiffs. It is not for fear of descending from the lofty to the banal that I have refrained from stepping right into the teacher’s shoes. It is rather because, for present purposes, such a move would have stretched the length of this work beyond breaking point and perverted it from its principal purpose of offering a theoretical prolegomenon to practical implementations. Just to give readers a taste of the work that lies ahead, however, here are some scattered comments on the methods that are commonly invoked as Aristotelian staples of classroom practice (cf. Sanderse, 2012). So-called service learning is typically seen as the natural application of Aristotelian habituation into virtue, building on the assumption that ‘we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions’ (1985: 34 [1103b1–2]). Yet, disappointingly, service learning has often failed to have the desired transformative effect on the attitudes of learners, and no easy recipe exists for how to ameliorate that shortcoming (Kahne and Westheimer, 1996). Moreover, although I have argued that the ‘paradox of moral education’ admits of a theoretical solution (recall Chapter 4), we need to know much more about what sort of rationale and dialogue (recall Chapter 6) needs to be provided by the teacher in order to help children acquire an ongoing critical perspective on the virtues that they are internalising. Emulation or role-modelling on moral exemplars is another Aristotelian staple. As Comenius – neatly echoing Aristotle – put it: ‘Examples of wellordered lives […] must continually be set before children’ (1907: 215). However, (a) role-modelling can easily degenerate into uncritical impersonation, rather than critical emulation, of the characteristics that the role model

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stands for (Kristjánsson, 2007, chap. 7) – and the stronger the tie is between the role model and the learner, the greater the danger that the learnt motivation becomes extrinsic, upon pleasing the role model, rather than intrinsic, upon the point and pleasure of the activity (Annas, 2011b; Curren, 2013). Moreover, (b) if the role models are too perfect – too high above the learner’s present capabilities – trying to emulate them may weaken and stultify rather than broaden and build (Swanton, 2003, chap. 9). Finally, (c) although it tends to be taken for granted that teachers act as role models for students, empirical findings cast doubt on this assumption in two different ways: Teachers typically express self-doubts about their capacity to provide the required feedback to students that a role model must be expected to give, as they lack the moral language to do so; and students rarely mention teachers as their most important role models (Sanderse, 2013). Great literature is another much-rehearsed Aristotelian source of critical moral insight, but the snag there is that modernist literature has long since given up on the ideal of moral didactics and, more seriously, postmodernist literature has relinquished altogether the emancipatory impulse for selfknowledge and self-clarification (Carr, 2014). While that still leaves us with medieval and ancient sources of ‘morally inspirational’ literature, young readers in today’s world may unfortunately have been weaned off the habit of learning from ‘the moral of the story’. Restoring such a habit requires sustained, systematic and guided practice (see e.g. Bohlin, 2005; Arthur et al., 2014; Carr and Harrison, 2015). Music also plays a large role in Aristotle’s description of moral development, as it is supposed to stir the soul to proper emotions. However, what precisely Aristotle means by ‘music’ is cryptic and contested and, in any case, Aristotle talks about music education in the context of laying the emotional underpinnings of natural, habituated virtue rather than in turning it into full phronesis-guided virtue (Curzer, 2012: 346–348). In general, while great art may, indeed, ‘stir the soul’, there is no guarantee that it stimulates the sort of reflective soul-searching that aids moral progress; unless, that is, it is guided by a careful instructor who helps the young digest the message in their own personal ways and turn it into a source of reorientation rather than disorientation. As Dewey kept reminding us, not all education is truly educative. I have only mentioned here a few Aristotelian staples of classroom education for character. Those suffice, however, to spark a fundamental question that needs to be asked: Can his array of insights – this motley admixture – add up to anything like an integrated methodology to cultivate phronesis or if we are simply floundering in a sea of relentless, unworkable heterogeneity? That question, then, connects to one of the proverbial debates about moral education of whatever ilk: if a special subject is needed in the school timetable to teach it or whether it is, more serviceably, seen as an overarching aim of the whole curriculum. Obviously, it is possible to resist this dichotomy and argue that both approaches are needed. Curren (2014a)

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describes an ideal, Aristotle-inspired system of liberal education where the ability to make sound (phronetic) judgements for oneself is seen as the defining aim that unifies and completes education at all levels. In such a system, phronesis is grounded in a general education that provides an understanding of the various contexts of life, an appreciation of the value of diverse goods, and practice in thinking relevant questions through. I would happily agree that in a system like the one Curren describes, there would be no need for a discrete subject of moral education. This system is unfortunately not our system, however. Aristotle’s indirect-blueprint view, explained in Chapter 4, suggests in my estimation that – given the actual state of play in Western educational systems – a special taught subject is needed to integrate efforts at character education: a subject where students learn in a systematic fashion about the essential features of human flourishing and how they fit together in a well-rounded life. It does not matter if this subject is called ‘Character education’, ‘Moral education’, ‘Positive education’, ‘Life skills’ or simply ‘Flourishing’; the important point is that in order to develop the sort of critical distance from their own character traits that budding phronimoi need to re-evaluate those traits and perhaps transform them (cf. Russell, 2009, chap. 12), they must be provided with a general theory of the good life. Moreover, in order to integrate the different insights gained by the methods mentioned above (service learning, role modelling, literature, music, as well as many others), they ideally need a reserved space and time where this integration can take place. That said, a discrete integrative subject of character education will be futile unless there is something substantial to integrate! In other words, a freestanding subject of this kind will be futile – in a similar way as phronesis-training for adolescents who have not previously been habituated into the individual virtues will be futile – unless the development of character is highlighted, explicitly and implicitly, across other school subjects and activities. The research evidence is clear on a related point: The whole school ethos matters no less – and perhaps more – than the efforts of individual teachers in individual classes (Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, 2014b). Schools that are committed and determined to develop the character of their students through the articulation and demonstration of core ethical virtues are the true breeding grounds of good character (see Seider, 2012). Because the ethos of a school is the expression of collective character, it is important for every member of a school community to have an understanding of what character is. Students, teachers and other members of staff need to learn not only the names of character virtues, but display them in the given institutional context. Character virtues should be reinforced everywhere: on the playing fields, in classrooms, corridors, interactions between teachers and students, in assemblies, posters, headteachers’ messages and communications, staff training and in relations with parents. The headteacher needs to monitor all of these efforts and lead by example. The process of being

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educated in virtue is not only a process of acquiring ideas. It is about belonging and living constructively within a community, such as the school. By following those principles, schools undoubtedly stand the best chance of helping students to know, notice, understand, appreciate, feel and do good.

Back to the personal I concluded the first chapter of this book by waxing personal, and I shall end it in the same manner. The fundamental belief motivating my efforts in writing this book cannot be better put than in those rousing words from David Carr’s classic: I have taken the view that some definitive initiation into those virtues or qualities ordinarily acknowledged in the familiar human discourse of fundamental human association must lie at the heart of the moral education of all children and that parents and teachers who fail to acquaint children with these fundamental dispositions of moral life are seriously reneging on the full educational implications of their roles. (2012: 6) This belief, however, will have little traction if it is not developed in sufficient detail, both theoretically and practically, and adopted into the vocabularies of those who need to carry out its application. I have argued throughout this book that character education of the sort presented by Carr is most usefully worked out through an Aristotelian lens, albeit one of self-styled and reconstructed rather than orthodox Aristotelianism. Even reconstructed Aristotelianism presents many unsolved riddles, however. I do not pretend to be the prince who has solved all the riddles and obtained the princess. But I have systematically marshalled arguments that, hopefully, unseat some of the general distaste that many academics and practitioners have for character education; more specifically, I have tried to plane away some of the blemishes that tarnish the Aristotelian variant. Nevertheless, more concerns await further scrutiny, as the third section above made abundantly clear. So there is still work ahead. In the derelict battlefields of moral education lie the hulks of many old theories, either discarded or forgotten – and some undeservedly so, as I have pointed out in the case of Comenius and Pestalozzi. That fate may also await Aristotelian character education. It must be said, however, that this form of moral education has turned out to be extremely resilient and durable through the centuries, being reawakened in new incarnations at regular intervals. ‘New incarnations’ is the keyword here. To revitalise and extend its currency, Aristotelian character education needs to be rethought for each era and each society – even each individual school – and adapted to the relevant needs. Otherwise, it will quickly secure a place in the niche of oblivion.

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I am privileged to be working in a research centre, the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, which is explicitly grounded in Aristotelian virtue ethics. The year 2015, when the present book is coming out, is going to be a particularly exciting one in the work of the Centre, when two reports – highly relevant for this book’s remit – will be published, one on character and character development in UK schools (see Walker, 2014, for a taster) and another on virtues and values in the lives of UK teachers at different career stages (see the preamble in Kotzee et al., 2014). A Jubilee Centre report on a successful literature-based character intervention has already appeared (Arthur et al., 2014) and a more general work on literature and character is in the pipeline (Carr and Harrison, 2015). Specific programmes of study for schools will be made available on the Web shortly, and work will hopefully commence in 2015 on a major Jubilee Centre textbook on character education in the classroom. I am sure Aristotle would have looked upon all those efforts at integrating the theoretical and practical with approval. He might even be working in the Jubilee Centre if he were alive today – although my suspicion is that he would have opted for a career in neuroscience instead! I leave the reader with the thought from David Carr – to whom this book is dedicated – that the major reason for why people fail in the task of moral education is their ‘uncertain grasp of what moral life actually means’ (2012: 8). I have argued that to dispel that uncertainty, an updated Aristotle is our best bet.

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Index

Aðalbjarnardóttir, S. 143 Adams, R. M. 154–5 Alexander, H. A. 62 Alexandrova, A. 51 Allport, G. W. 19, 46, 152 Annas, J. 15, 28, 60, 86, 90–1, 94–7, 100–1, 160 Anscombe, G. E. M. 27, 49 Ardelt, M. 93 Aristotelian character education see character education: as Aristotelian Aristotle 2, 10–13, 17, 19, 21–78, 81–96, 98–119, 122–63 Arthur, J. 10–11, 20, 27, 48–53, 83, 130, 153, 160, 163 Ashworth, V. 72 Baltes, P. B. 92–3 Baumeister, R. F. 11, 46–7, 154 Bebeau, M. J. 73–4 Benninga, J. S. 7 Berkowitz, M. W. 9, 20, 35, 64 Bers, S. A. 140 Besser–Jones, L. 25–9 Bier, M. C. 35 Biesta, G. J. J. 53, 60–2 Big Five 19, 46–7, 65–6, 68–9, 80, 154 Blanton, H. 80, 84 Blasi, A. 10 Boghossian, P. 120 Bohlin, K. E. 143, 160 Bok, D. 68 Bondi, L. 87 Bosson, J. K. 124 Bourdieu, P. 75, 116 Brewer, T. 123–5 Buchmann. M. 18 Burger, R. 118–19, 122

Burke, J. W. 132 Burnyeat, M. F. 12, 89, 91 Campbell, E. 132, 135, 142 Campbell, S. 83 Carr, D. 6, 17, 19, 27, 30, 39, 42–3, 49–50, 53, 55–6, 78, 85, 87, 116, 125, 129–30, 132, 142–3, 159–60, 162–3 Cawley, M. J. 66 character education: as Aristotelian 2–3, 14, 21–45, 53, 57, 59, 65, 82, 85, 90–1, 94, 101, 104, 108, 111, 117, 119, 122–3, 127, 131, 144–62; myths about 3–4, 44–59, 145; US-style 11, 20, 29, 32 character strengths 18, 47, 55, 63, 65, 67, 69–70 Chen, Y. L. 154 Chen, Y.-H. 61, 79, 129, 140, 142 Chow–Hoy, T. K. 131 Cigman, R. 47 citizenship education 8, 11 Clandinin, D. J. 133 Colby, A. 82, 133, 158 Comenius, J. A. 6, 12, 149, 151–4, 159, 162 Confucius 2, 12, 28, 45, 55, 140 Connelly, F. M. 133 consequentialism 88, 158 conservative 20, 34, 52–3, 59, 147–8 constructivism 40, 43, 47, 55, 118, 121, 124, 131–2, 141 contemplation 38, 104–5, 108–10, 113–15 Cooke, S. 41, 72, 87, 130 Cordner, C. 24, 56, 57 Crowson, H. M. 73–4

182

Index

Curnow, T. 114 Curren, R. 11, 25, 27, 31, 33, 42–3, 60, 63, 70, 77, 84–5, 90–1, 123, 126 Curzer, H. J. 34, 36, 42, 48, 71–2, 86, 88–91, 96, 99, 109, 113, 126 Damon, W. 82, 158 Datong, L. 131 Day, C. 133, 136–7 De Raad, B. 46 Deci, E. 25, 27, 158 Derryberry, W. P. 73–4 determinism 98, 110–11, 155 Dewey, J. 12, 121, 160 Di Muzio, G. 112 dialogue 39, 43, 82–3, 116–28, 145, 159 Doris, J. 31, 58 Dunn, E. W. 18 Durlak, J. A. 7, 35 Ecclestone, K. 10 Efron, S. 129 Ellenwood, S. 77 emotions 2, 7–11, 14, 18, 28–31, 39–40, 47–54, 57–8, 64, 67–71, 77–8, 81–2, 84, 88, 93, 111, 118, 130, 132, 135–42, 156–7, 160; see also teachers: emotions of emulation 39, 65, 67, 115, 122, 126, 159 eudaimonia 12–13, 19, 25–6, 29, 37–8, 49, 64, 98–9, 104–5, 108–9, 112–15; see also flourishing Evans, J. 3, 51, 53 Exline, J. J. 46 Fallona, C. 60, 76 Feather, N. T. 141 Fenstermacher, G. 130, 132 Fiedler, S. 79 Flanagan, O. 115, 135, flourishing 7–8, 11, 13–14, 17–21, 24–8, 41, 55, 102, 104–5, 107–8, 130, 139, 145–7, 151–3, 161; see also eudaimonia Fowers, B. J. 26, 84, 152 Frankfurt, H. 157 friendship 39, 70, 106, 113, 123–7 Frimer, J. A. 80–1 Funder, D. C. 46, 66 Furedi, F. 10

Garver, E. 33, 38, 102, 109 Gawronski, B. 79–80 Giddens, A. 146 Gilead, T. 15 Glover, G. H. 82 Glück, J. 87, 92 Goleman, D. 10 good sense see phronesis Goodwin, G. P. 46 grades 1, 3, 4, 7, 21, 27 Greene, J. D. 81 Gregory, M. 121, 191 Grigorenko, E. L. 94 Gulliford, L. 45 habituation 30, 36, 39, 51, 85, 88–91, 99, 101, 104, 110–11, 113–14, 122, 127–8, 157, 159 habitus 5, 53, 75, 116, 155 Hábl, J. 149–50 Haidt, J. 156–7 Haldane, J. 60 Han, H. 82 Hansen, D. T. 129, 132 happiness 13, 80, 103, 104, 108 Harcourt, E. 111 Harðarson, A. 26 Hare, R. 146 Hare, S. 56 Hargreaves, A. 131, 136–8 Harrison, T. 27, 160, 163 Haybron, D. M. 51 Heckman, J. 5, 121 Hertz, S. 83 hexis 12, 14, 32, 71, 75, 84, 157 Hofstee, W. K. B. 46 Homiak, M. L. 115 Hudak, G. N. 141 Hume, D. 111, 134, 152 Immordino–Yang, M. H. 82 implicit measures 78–82 individualism 31, 34, 52–3, 59 instrumentalism 1, 8, 19, 23, 26–7, 52, 76, 139, 145, 152 intrinsic value 2, 8, 11, 19, 25–7, 61, 68, 107, 109, 152, 160 Irwin, T. H. 70, 100 Jaccard, J. 84 Jackson, S. E. 136 Jarvin, L. 94 Jayawickreme, E. 15, 152

Index Jeong, C. 82 Johnson, J. A. 66 Johnson, R. B. 84 Jones, C. 123, 126, 158 Joseph, C. 157 Joseph, P. B. 129 Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues 4, 16, 21, 30, 41–2, 50, 63, 65–6, 69, 70–3, 75–6, 78, 80, 82–4, 147, 161, 163 Kahne, J. 159 Kaldjian, L. C. 87 Kamizono, K., 61, 79 Kant, I. 12, 18, 27, 29, 55–6, 63, 71–2, 89, 135, 149 Kawakami, K. 82 Kelchtermans, G. 136 Keller, M. 18 Kennedy, D. 121 Kern, M. L. 80–1 Kesebir, P. 45, 47 Kesebir, S. 45, 47 KIPP schools 5–7 Knezic, D. 121 Kohlberg, L. 9–10, 29–30, 63–4, 71–4, 85, 90, 93, 117, 119, 128, 135, 144, 148–9, 152–4 Konstan, D. 57 Kotzee, B. 41, 63, 72, 163 Kraut, R. 100, 109 Krettenauer, T. 83 Kristjánsson, K. 2, 9, 11, 14, 17–18, 20, 23–4, 26–7, 29–30, 33–4, 36–7, 42, 45–7, 49, 51, 54, 57–9, 64–5, 68, 79, 85, 87, 92, 94–5, 99, 102, 103, 109, 115–16, 118–19, 123–6, 129, 134, 140, 142–3, 145–6, 148, 152, 154–8, 160 Kvernbekk, T. 61 Kwon, S. 77, 131, 155 Lapsley, D. K. 24, 28, 64, 74–5, 111 Lawrence, G. 51, 89, 90, 104, 109 Lee, C.–M. (A.) 12, 70, 148 Lee, H. 130 Leighton, J. P. 77 Leitch, R. 133, 137 Lenz–Taguchi, H. 78 Leone, L. 79 LePage, P. 130, 131, 143 Lickona, T. 10, 20 Locke, J. 12

183

Lovat, T. 8, 35 Loveless, T. 146 Lyseight–Jones, P. 77 MacIntyre, A. 27–8, 31, 43, 55 Malti, T. 18 Martin, J. E. 66, 80–1, 140 Maslach, C. 136 Mathison, C. 130 Maxwell, B. 133 McCrae, R. R. 70 McGrath, R. E. 55, 68–9 McLaughlin, T. H. 142, 146 measurement see virtue: measurements of Mill, J. S. 2, 12, 55, 103 Miller, C. B. 15, 27 Millgram, E. 123–4 Moody–Adams, M. 111, 115 moral education 2, 8–12, 20, 22, 24, 28, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 44, 51, 63–4, 74, 85, 89–90, 117, 120, 122, 127–30, 147–63; paradox of 36, 51, 89–90 moral schemas 73–5, 84, 111, 125–6, 157 Morgan, B. 45 Morinaga, K. 61, 79 motivational internalism 51, 63, 118–19 Nagel, T. 111 Narvaez, D. 85, 99, 111, 152 Nash, R. J. 20 naturalism 19, 23–4, 31, 33–5, 61–2, 85, 115, 153 neo–Kohlbergian 72–4, 117, 149, 152, 154 Neophytou, L. 10 Newman, J. H. 13, 41 Nias, J. 136 Niemiec, R. M. 65, 68 Nietzsche, F. 28 Nisbett, R. E. 66 Noddings, N. 128 Noftle, E. E. 68–9 Norris, S. P. 77 Nussbaum, M. C. 31, 52, 55–6 O’Shaughnessy, J. 53 Oancea, A. 52 observations 76–8, 84 Onwuegbuzie, A. J. 84

184

Index

Osguthorpe, R. D. 130, 146 Owen, R. 53 Park, N. 7, 18, 47, 67 paternalism 34, 50–2, 59 Patterson, F. 72 Payne, B. K. 79–80 personality 13, 19–20, 46–7, 58, 65–6, 68, 80, 105, 152, 154; see also Big Five Perugini, M. 79 Pestalozzi, J. H. 12, 151, 162 Peters, R. S. 36, 51, 89, 114 Peterson, C. 7, 11, 18, 20, 26, 29, 35, 46–7, 55, 67, 87, 92, 102, 151–2 Phillips, L. M. 77 phronesis 11–12, 17, 30, 36–8, 52, 62, 65, 85–112, 114–15, 118–19, 122, 125, 128, 130, 135, 139, 142, 145, 150, 152, 155, 157, 160–1 Piaget, J. 71, 119, 149–50 Piazza, J. 46 Plato 12, 22, 56, 119–21, 158 policy making 1, 3, 4, 10, 27, 34, 40, 102, 136, 144–7 positive psychology 11–12, 18, 20, 26, 35, 42, 46, 54–5, 63, 64, 67–9, 87, 92, 102, 151–2 post–Kohlbergian 117, 152 postmodern 133–4, 137–9, 141, 160 practical wisdom see phronesis Pring, R. 52 Pritchard, M. S. 119–20 Putman, D. 57 Puurula, A. 129 Rand, A. 21–2 rationalism 9–10, 29, 62–3, 73–4, 76, 118–19, 144, 156 Rawls, J. 149 realism 19, 24, 31, 34–5, 61–2, 68, 124, 134, 156 relativism 10, 55, 58, 92–3 religion 9, 17, 23, 34, 49, 55, 59, 67–8, 106, 115 resilience 5–6, 17–18 Rest, J. 72, 75 Richardson, V. 130 Roberts, M. P. 9, 18, 34, 65, 129, 143, 145–6 Robins, R. W. 68–9 Robinson, G. 75 Rodgers, S. 60

Rodin, J. 141 Rorty, A. O. 104, 110, 113 Ross, L. 66 Rousseau, J.–J. 12, 151 Rozin, P. 46 Ruch, W. 18 Russell, B. 22 Russell, D. C. 29, 58–9, 66, 86–7, 90, 95–6, 98, 100–3, 115, 157, 161 Ryan, K. 20, 143 Ryan, R. 25, 27, 158 Sanderse, W. 10, 30–1, 33, 39–40, 42–3, 78, 83, 85, 116–19, 121–3, 127, 159–60 Sandstrom, G. M. 18 Sanger, M. N. 130, 143, 146 Scales, P. 18 Schneider, J. 120 Schnitker, S. A. 68–9 Scholz, J. 82 Schueller, S. M. 78 Schwartz, B. 30, 86, 97, 99 Schwartz, H. A. 80 Seider, S. 161 Seldon, A. 5 self–change 39, 83, 105–16, 124, 154, 158 self–determination theory 25 self–esteem 10–11, 79, 153–4 self–reports 14, 35–6, 62, 65–72, 76, 78–81, 84, 93, 157 self–respect 47, 67 Seligman, M. E. P. 11, 18, 20, 26, 29, 35, 46, 50, 55, 64, 67, 81, 87, 92, 102, 151–2 sentimentalism 29, 156 Seroczynski, A. D. 83 Sharpe, K. E. 30, 86, 97, 99 Shaw, M. H. 122 Sherman, N. 33–4, 37, 76, 86, 90–1, 122–3, 126–7 Shoshani, A. 18 Siegel, H. 62 situationism 31–2, 58–9, 76, 155 skills 1, 5, 28, 37, 94–101, 115, 132; as soft 5 Slone, M. 18 Smith, J. 93 Smith, R. 47 Snow, N. E. 77, 81, 83–4 Snyder, F. J. 7 Snyder, J. A. 6

Index social and emotional learning 7, 11, 63–4 Sockett, H. 7, 130 Socrates 39, 42–3, 82, 117–23, 127–8, 145 Sojourner, R. J. 3 Solomon, D. 32, 105 Soter, A. O. 128 Staudinger, U. M. 87, 92–3 Sternberg, R. J. 92–4 Steutel, J. W. 33 Stiff–Williams, H. R. 143 Suissa, J. 156 Sutton, R. E 142 Swann, W. B. Jr. 111, 124, 158 Swanton, C. 160 Swartwood, J. D. 87, 94–102 Tachibana, K. 12, 32–3, 91 Tandy, M. 83 Taylor, M. J. 12, 148 teachers: emotions of 135–41; training of 141–3 Thoma, S. 72–6, 116 Tough, P. 1–2, 4–8, 11, 27, 34, 98, 105 triangulation 36, 66, 69–70, 75, 78, 84 Tuff, L. 129–30 utilitarian 2, 18, 27, 55–6, 71, 102–3 Van Hooft, S. 121 Van Oudenhoven, J. P. 46 Vasalou, S. 49 Verweij, D. 121 VIA project 35, 67–70, 75–6 vices 15–17, 20, 27, 50, 53, 55, 58, 77, 80, 107, 110–11, 114, 139–40, 149, 158 virtue: components of 14–17, 28–9,

185

45–9; as intellectual 17, 28, 30, 51–2, 88–93, 99–101, 109, 118, 122, 142; as moral 7, 17–19, 25–30, 34–8, 46, 49, 54, 56, 61, 64, 67–73, 76, 78, 80–2, 88–9, 92, 97, 101–2, 109, 112–13, 118, 125, 154; as performative 1, 5–7, 17–18, 27, 30; measurements of 60–84 virtue ethics 11–13, 18–19, 21, 24, 26–9, 34, 42, 45, 48–9, 54–5, 58, 65, 67, 75, 83, 85–7, 92, 99, 102–3, 111, 117, 123, 135, 148, 151–2, 157, 163 Walker, D. I. 9, 18, 34, 41, 63, 65, 67, 69–70, 75–6, 83–4, 123, 126, 129, 143, 145–6, 158, 163 Wallach, J. R. 57 Watson, M. S. 32 Weber, M. 18, 26 Westheimer, J. 159 Wheatley, K. F. 142 White, J. 25 Wiley, L. S. 51 Williams, B. 56–7, Williams, R. A. 115, 143 Wilson, D. F. 135–7 Winch, P. 62 wisdom 37, 87–96, 103, 108, 113, 115, 117–18; see also phronesis Wollenstonecraft, M. 12 Wortel, E. 121 Wright, J. C. 75, 83 Yeager, D. S. 64 Yu, J. 28, 55 Zembylas, M. 133, 136–9 Ziehe, T. 116