What’s Wrong with Character Education?

Abstract

We can distinguish three sorts of “character education”: (1) simple moral education (essentially, Kohlbergian moral education in the classroom), (2) just‐community education (a Deweyesque practice emphasizing democratic decision making outside the classroom), and (3) simple character education (attempting to build character both in and outside of class one trait at a time by emphasizing good behavior). Simple moral education may have a modest effect on character; just‐community education probably has no greater effect, even though it has considerably higher risks and other costs. But simple moral education suffers from three disadvantages that should lead us to reject it: the disadvantages are empirical (absence of evidence that it does what it claims), conceptual (a conflict between what good character is and the way that simple character education proposes to teach it), and moral (its failure to do the right things for the right reasons).