Philosophical pragmatists rarely receive credit for their contribution to virtue ethics. But perhaps they should. How did America's philosopher of democracy, John Dewey, and one of its most famous elder statesmen, Benjamin Franklin, advise troubled souls in search of moral improvement? According to James Campbell, Dewey and Franklin recommended…

Education is a moral enterprise, and higher education has the accountability to produce skilled learners with cognitive, psychological, and social-emotional competences. Formal and informal approaches of character education increase in demand. On the one hand, students should be guided to gain character strength and moral compass to confront the…

One of R. S. Peters' interests was psychoanalysis. In this paper, I explore the relation between Peters' philosophy of moral education and his Freudian psychology. In section 2 of the paper, I introduce Peters' Freudian supplementation of the Piaget-Kohlberg model of moral development. To clarify the way in which Peters deals with two unresolved…

While Spinoza stipulates an ideal moral person in the propositions on the 'free man' in "Ethics" IV, this account does not seem to be intended to function as a pedagogical tool of political relevance. Hence, it does not seem to correspond to the purpose of moral exemplarism. If we look for that kind of practical guidance, Spinoza's…

In this paper, I argue that Spinoza's political theory gives us a model for how he might have approached a treatise on moral education. Indeed, his account of the method and aims of politics resembles Renaissance humanist rhetorical approaches to pedagogy -- particularly, the work of sixteenth century Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives -- so…

This article explores how different philosophical models and pictures of learning can become dogmatic and disguise other conceptions of learning. With reference to a passage from St. Paul, I give a sense of the dogmatic teleology that underpins philosophical assumptions about learning. The Pauline assumption is exemplified through a variety of…

Despite the Aristotelian renaissance in the philosophy of education, the development of virtue has not received much attention. This is unfortunate, because an attempt to draft an Aristotelian model of moral development can help philosophers to evaluate the contribution Aristotelian virtue ethics can make to our understanding of moral development,…

Flourishing, understood along semi-Aristotelian lines, has re-emerged recently as an account of the ideal aim of education, for instance, in works by educational philosophers Brighouse, White and de Ruyter. This article aims at critically reviewing this new paradigm by subjecting it to philosophical and educational scrutiny. Throughout I compare…

This article discusses research on teaching and learning values education in schools. It offers researchers and teachers an insight as to why values education should be incorporated in classroom teaching. It is suggested that values education, in addition to focusing on moral education, is connected to active citizenship education, social justice…

This dissertation explores the growing epidemic of academic dishonesty in the United States in order to propose an Aristotelian-inspired model for developing moral character to curtail this epidemic. The task is laid out in four parts. Chapter one responds to the problem of "akrasia," adopting a modified version of Devin Henry's…

This essay comments on articles comprising a "Journal of Moral Education" Special Issue (September, 2008, 37[3]). The issue was intended to honour the 50th anniversary of Lawrence Kohlberg's doctoral dissertation and his subsequent impact on the field of moral development and education. The articles were characterised by the Issue editor (Don…

This paper takes as its starting point the Journal of Moral Education Special Issue (September, 2008, 37[3]) "Towards an integrated model of moral reasoning". Although explicitly post-Kohlbergian, the authors in this Special Issue do not, I argue, depart far enough from Kohlberg's impoverished notion of the role of the affective in moral life--or…

In this article I examine the consequences of the dominance of intuitive thinking in moral judging and deciding for the role of moral reasoning in moral education. I argue that evidence for the reliability of moral intuitions is lacking. We cannot determine when we can trust our intuitive moral judgements. Deliberate and critical reasoning is…

This monograph critically examines the growth metaphor advanced by Lawrence Kohlberg as it relates to the development of a moral ideology. Kohlberg's stage theory is viewed as an ideology--that is, as a "style of thinking." Much of the critique in this study is informed by a perspective called "critical social theory." While…

The paper investigates the relationships among indoctrination, education, believing, and action in order to inform students and teachers of methods of openly and collectively guarding against indoctrination in the American school system. Four conditions for distinguishing indoctrination from education are: (1) intent of the teacher; (2) truth or…