Artificial intelligence (AI) might be good for advocates of character education.
For many readers, this will feel like a provocative claim. I am not suggesting that AI is necessarily good for character formation. On the contrary, it introduces a whole new set of ethical risks and poses new challenges for the development of intellectual, moral, civic, and performance virtues. What I am suggesting is that AI has exposed long-standing weaknesses in our educational assumptions. In doing so, it has forced a renewed and more urgent conversation about the purpose of education.
In an education system that has often been slow to evolve, AI has created pressure on policymakers, employers, and educators to move beyond rhetoric and take character seriously as a central educational aim. In my experience working with colleagues at the Jubilee Centre and in university leadership contexts, I have noticed that discussions about ‘skills’ such as digital literacy are increasingly being reframed in terms of character virtues including judgement, wisdom, integrity, and creativity. Character is no longer seemingly an optional extra; it is becoming central to how we think about educational value.
Means not Ends
It is perhaps unsurprising that this shift has been driven, at least in part, by the disruption of traditional forms of assessment. For decades, assessment has shaped the curriculum in powerful ways – often narrowing it to what can be easily measured. Yet AI now makes it clear that many traditional assessments no longer reliably indicate what students know or can do. When a colleague recently demonstrated how a substantial portion of a first-year undergraduate assessment could be completed in under a minute using generative AI, it served as a stark reminder: we may no longer be assessing what we think we are assessing.
This raises a deeper question: If AI can perform many of the tasks we have historically rewarded, what should education prioritise instead? The emerging answer for many points less towards content reproduction and more towards human judgement—towards character.
This is good news for longstanding champions of character education. The invention of AI has the potential to bring about swifter educational reform than numerous curriculum reviews or lobbying from pressure groups. AI has legitimised a swift turn towards character, heralding at last a greater focus on the means rather than just the ends of a school or university education.
However, a fundamental question remains; how should we go about educating character in the age of AI?
Framing a Response Through the Four-Category Typology of Virtues
For me, a good place to start is to look at how the four-part typology of virtues, that is in the heart of the Jubilee Centre framework, can help us address some of the biggest challenges and concerns that AI poses educator todays and shape a new way forward. I have briefly provided an overview of what this might look like below and a full version can be found in the open access peer reviewed paper I recently published with my colleague Michael Grove.
Intellectual Virtues: From Information to Judgement
One of the clearest risks posed by AI is the temptation towards superficial learning and intellectual passivity. When information is instantly available and answers can be generated effortlessly, there is a real danger that students bypass the cognitive effort required for deep understanding. This is precisely where intellectual virtues become central. Traits such as curiosity, critical thinking, judgement, reasoning, reflection, and intellectual autonomy are not simply desirable, they are what enable students to engage meaningfully with knowledge in an AI-saturated environment.
The key challenge is not access to information, but discernment. Students must learn to interrogate AI outputs, refine them, and situate them within disciplinary frameworks. Crucially, they must also experience what might is increasingly being called productive struggle – the cognitive effort required to develop genuine understanding before turning to technological assistance. Without this, AI risks producing what might be described as epistemic dependence: a gradual erosion of the capacity to think independently.
Moral Virtues: Rethinking Integrity in an AI World
Perhaps the most immediate educational concern raised by AI relates to academic integrity. Yet what AI has exposed is that integrity cannot be sustained through rules and enforcement alone. A rule-based approach to academic integrity is increasingly inadequate in a world where content can be generated instantly and convincingly. Instead, we are pushed towards a more virtue-based understanding of integrity, one grounded in honesty, authenticity, transparency, and responsibility for one’s own learning.
From this perspective, integrity is not simply compliance with assessment regulations; it is a moral commitment to truthfulness in intellectual work. Other moral virtues become equally important in this context. Courage is required to question AI-generated claims rather than accept them at face value. Humility is needed to recognise the limits of one’s own understanding in a world of increasingly confident machine outputs. Justice becomes relevant when considering how AI systems may reproduce bias or unfairness, and how students should critically evaluate such distortions rather than reproduce them uncritically.
Civic Virtues: Preserving Education as a Social Practice
A further concern is that increasing reliance on AI may subtly reshape education into a more isolated and transactional activity. While AI can support personalised learning at a scale previously unimaginable, there is a risk that it displaces the social dimensions of education that are essential for civic development.
Education has always been more than individual achievement; it is a form of participation in shared intellectual and civic life. Civic virtues such as citizenship, civility, cooperation, and community awareness depend on interaction with others, not simply with systems.
If learners increasingly engage with AI rather than with peers, there is a danger that the development of these virtues is weakened. This is why collaborative and constructivist learning, and exposure to diverse perspectives remain essential. Students need opportunities to learn how to disagree agreeably, to build shared understanding, and to contribute to collective knowledge.
There is also a broader civic question emerging around sustainability and responsibility. The environmental and societal implications of large-scale AI use must become part of students’ ethical awareness as future citizens.
Performance Virtues: The Risk of Losing Productive Struggle
Perhaps one of the most subtle risks of AI in education lies in its impact on performance virtues – traits such as resilience, perseverance, self-regulation, and determination.
AI systems can make learning feel effortless. When difficulties arise, there is always an option to outsource the challenge. Yet it is precisely through difficulty that many of the most important educational outcomes are formed.
If students repeatedly bypass struggle, they may fail to develop the capacity to persist through uncertainty and challenge. This is why educators need to think carefully about how to design learning environments that preserve ‘friction’, moments where students are required to think, attempt, revise, and reflect before turning to AI support. Performance virtues are not developed in the absence of challenge; they are formed through it (see my previous reflection on Per Ardua, Ad Alta).
Practical Wisdom in the Age of AI
I want to conclude where those of you who are familiar with my work might expect: with digital wisdom, or phronesis. In the age of AI, its importance is arguably amplified.
AI significantly expands what we are able to do. It increases productivity, accelerates knowledge generation, and enhances problem-solving capacity. But AI does not tell us what we ought to do. AI cannot determine which goals are worth pursuing, or when capability should be constrained by ethical judgement.
This is where digital-wisdom becomes essential. It enables both educators and learners to navigate a world in which technological possibility is no longer the limiting factor. Instead, the central challenge becomes nuanced and situational ethical judgement: what is worth doing, why it matters, and how it should be done well in any given set of circumstances.
In this sense, the age of AI intensifies the importance of character. If we want education to contribute to human flourishing in a technologically powerful world, then the cultivation of intellectual, moral, civic, and performance virtues is no longer, in my opinion, optional.
