This 2013 article by our scholar Kristján Kristjánsson has become the first in the British Journal of Educational Studies‘ history to exceed 10,000 downloads! Congratulations, Kristján!

Abstract:

Initiatives to cultivate character and virtue in moral education at school continue to provoke sceptical responses. Most of those 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. I expose those misgivings as ‘myths’, while at the same time acknowledging three better-founded historical, methodological and practical concerns about the notions in question.

Download for yourself here.

Kristján Kristjánsson is Professor of Character Education and Virtue Ethics;  Deputy Director of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, University of Birmingham. He is a scholar with the project Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life.