ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 (‘Christian Character and Pedagogical Virtue Education’) begins with the fact that there is no commonly accepted list of virtues today, while various lists are found in Judaeo-Christian tradition and different societies throughout history. Various studies of moral habituation in education from the early 1990s, together with the problem of ongoing ethical scandals in a variety of professions, provided a background for a major initiative through the founding in 2012 of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues. The chapter contains a detailed examination of the main results of the Centre’s research, especially its Framework for Character Education in Schools. Virtues are categorised here into four types, moral, civic, performance and intellectual. There follows an account of its Programme of Study for the building of character in 11- to 16-year-olds. While the work of the Centre is non-religious and its schema does not include spiritual virtues, with the support of a transformative Aristotelian-Thomist approach, it may be apt for integration within a wider Christian framework. Christian schools need to avoid multiple and conflicting interpretations of character virtue, and their practice should be rooted not in a secular but in a Christian pedagogy. Hence there is a need for Christian education in character, which is illustrated with the help of a review of the Catholic Church’s teaching on education in schools.
