How do people acquire modesty? A simple answer is: if people see that modesty is a worthy trait, they will incorporate it into their character. However, sometimes the knowledge that one is modest would undermine one's modesty. So, Driver claims that the modest person must not know his merits. If we are to accept Driver's claim, it would be…

Some of the students in our classrooms doubt their intellectual strengths--their knowledge, abilities, and skills. They may be unaware of the intellectual strengths they have, or may ignore, lack confidence in, or under-estimate them. They may even incorrectly judge themselves to be intellectually inferior to their peers. Students who do such…

The focus within the European tradition of democratic education has increasingly been on personal traits or character traits, values, and skills, rather than on broad structural features or systemic issues. This is reflected in a recent publication by the Council of Europe titled "Competences for Democratic Culture: Living Together as Equals…

Andrew Aberdein recently explored whether Aristotle held a (proto-)virtue argumentation theory, which would evaluate a good argument in terms of whether the arguers engaged virtuously. Aberdein admits, however, that connections between virtue, character, and argumentation are scarce within Aristotle's works. Accordingly, here Cassie Finley…

Although education for intellectual virtues, including the virtue of intellectual humility, has received increasing attention in recent years, less focus has been devoted to specific obstacles that can inhibit the cultivation of intellectual virtue. In this article, Kirsten Welch presents one such impediment to the development of intellectual…

Despite a resurgence of interest in character education, just what 'character' means is contested. Two strands, while overlapping, diverge on several questions: Is character centrally about moral qualities or more inclusive? Does it consist of one or multiple traits? Does it regard virtue as independently or instrumentally good? Is character a set…

The importance of a healthy K-12 education system cannot be overstated. In today's world it is a prerequisite to social justice, democratic community, a thriving economy, and a flourishing society. Likewise, the importance of the school principal (Louis & Murphy, 2018; Smylie et al., 2020), for it is the principal who is most responsible for…

Humility is widely regarded as a moral excellence and telos, hence, openly inculcated-instructed. Character education in and for humility, however, sits uncomfortably against today's pedagogical maxims such as self-esteem and self-assertiveness. This article looks into this and other tensions from the perspective of humility as experience…

This article begins by clarifying the notion of what Stanley Cavell has called "Emersonian moral perfectionism." It goes on to explore this through close analysis of aspects of Emerson's essay "Experience," in which ideas of trying or attempting or experimenting bring out the intimate relation between perfectionism and styles…

This article argues that ordinary virtue trait attributions presuppose the existence of "realistic" traits that fall short of, for example, Aristotelian ideals and that debate about the existence of virtue traits should be reoriented in the light of this fact. After clarifying and motivating that basic thesis, we discuss what the…

This article emerges from a stream of scholarship demonstrating the inadequacy of broad arguments favouring 'neutrality' as an alternative to 'directive normative instruction' in the early childhood classroom. We advance a moral educational framing of the tension between neutrality and normativity in education: specifically, we argue that…

Hypocritical behavior needs to be watched out for because it is symptomatic in the community, especially now with access to global relationships without any boundaries of place and time where it is associated through social media, people who are infected with this disease are very difficult to guess, can only be known with certain signs namely:…

This paper describes a neglected aspect of the critique of academic 'cultures of speed' offered by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeler in "The Slow Professor." I argue internalisation of the values and imperatives of cultures of speed can encourage the erosion of a range of academic virtues while also facilitating the development of a range…

In response to the abundance of parenting literature and a contemporary emphasis on expertise, recent scholars have suggested that how we parent should be determined by values and a family's particular needs, a combination often referred to as practical wisdom. In this article, I build on previous calls for an ethical approach to being a parent. I…

In "Diving in Where Angels Fear to Tread: Pre-Requisites to Evidence-Based Interventions," John Raven poses a crucial question if the current education system guarantees a high quality of future citizens. He proposes an analytical diagnosis of this complex phenomenon of wasting individual talents and social energy due to shortcomings and…