Professor Tom Harrison and Rachael Bushby
The Importance of Praxis
We have learnt, from our time working in universities, that academics love a good debate. This is a vital aspect of the role: to challenge assumptions, ask difficult questions, debate concepts and language, and analyse competing philosophical and theoretical foundations. Such debates are prevalent in the field of character education, as they should be, given that we address fundamental questions related to humanity that have real-life practical and policy implications.
The best debates, over time, often converge into theories that possess both common-sense validity and practical value in informing (and indeed changing) educational practice. At the Jubilee Centre, we believe that the neo-Aristotelian theory underpinning our Framework for Character Education has both of these merits. It has been fundamental to the success of the Centre.
However, if intellectual debate and resulting theory is to have any traction in the lives of children and young people, we must always keep more than one eye on the primary recipients and users of our research: school leaders and teachers. For this reason, we are proud to work in a centre that has ensured a healthy interplay between research, policy, and practice since its formation – it’s a core part of our DNA.
Through the eyes of teachers and pupils
This is why, for us, it is important to consider how debates around issues such as the compatibility (or otherwise) of character education and liberalism hold meaning for those working in schools today. Beyond the theory, these delicate debates need to be seen through the eyes of the teachers and pupils who live and breathe their practice. We need to bring these debates down to earth with a pragmatic response that sees the real-life trees in the philosophical wood.
This does not mean simply taking a balanced view or sitting on the fence but rather taking a principled and purposeful position that is informed by theory and empirical evidence (when it exists) whilst also ensuring it stands up to practical reality. After all, ‘in theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is’ (unknown).
Below, we rehearse what the character education/liberalism debate might look like from the perspective of a teacher. Our starting point is that many teachers’ overall main concern is how education supports or undermines their pupils — their wellbeing, attainment, behaviour, and overall flourishing.
Character education and liberalism – compatibility in the classroom
When it comes to education reality and outcomes, more extreme positions on liberalism and/or character education do not help. An extreme libertarian position, in which moral education is viewed with suspicion and ‘anything goes’ (so long as individual freedom is preserved), while theoretically coherent, struggles practically as no classroom, or for that matter society, can function entirely without shared moral norms, expectations, or forms of civic responsibility.
Likewise, an extreme version of character education: the idea that there is one fixed conception of the good life, grounded in a determinate set of virtues, which schools should inculcate through paternalistic or even indoctrinatory means is also not helpful. This is rightly viewed as problematic, particularly within liberal democratic societies characterised by moral pluralism and competing conceptions of flourishing.
A more defensible position can draw from elements of both traditions while avoiding their excesses. Classrooms function better when teachers and pupils recognise obligations and purposes beyond themselves—an orientation rooted in human goodness and expressed through the cultivation of virtue. However, this conception of human goodness should not be understood as the preserve of any single tradition, authority, or power structure. Rather, it is embodied through the hundreds of everyday micro-interactions that constitute human life: acts of honesty, courage, compassion, fairness, and practical judgement in everyday school contexts.
Beyond blueprints
On this view, virtue and human flourishing are not fixed or static entities. They are continually interpreted, and renegotiated across history and through the culture of schools. Virtue becomes a collective and evolving understanding of how human beings ought to live together well, rather than a rigid blueprint imposed from above.
From this perspective, character education remains legitimate in the classroom even within a liberal framework. It is not a project of indoctrinating children into one comprehensive worldview, but of reminding young people, during formative stages of life, that both their own lives and the lives of others are improved through the cultivation of virtue. Character education, properly conceived, should expose pupils to how virtues have been understood and enacted across different historical contexts and lived experiences, how they emerge in everyday life, and how ethical decision-making often involves complexity, ambiguity, and the exercise of practical wisdom (phronesis).
In this sense, character education is compatible with modern liberal democratic society. It rejects both moral relativism and authoritarian moral imposition. Rather than an ‘anything goes’ ethic, it involves the free cultivation of virtue within socially and democratically negotiated boundaries.
Ultimately, however, the compatibility of character education with democratic citizenship can only be taken so far by theory. It involves a crucial empirical question: to what extent do people who have benefitted from effective character education strive to live morally good lives that promote liberal, democratic and tolerant values?
Researchers and practitioners, working in the field of character education, should continue to work together to seek to answer this complex question objectively, believing that teachers and pupils should remain free to interpret and embody the good life in diverse ways, yet within a shared moral framework that enables collective flourishing.
