‘Character education’ is an eye-cat

‘Character education’ is an eye-catching buzzword in modern educational circles. As a
matter of fact, character education has become increasingly popular in current educational
policies and practices in many other countries—particularly in the United States
where it is now widely recognized as an inescapable point of reference in this field
(Kristja´nsson 2002; McLaughlin and Halstead 1999). Constructive criticisms and profound
reflections have come in the wake of its fast and widespread development. Among
other things, it has been clearly shown that given the heterogeneous nature of this
character education movement, its focus has become blurred and the notion of character
education has even become equivocal. Its lack of common theoretical perspective and
practice, as well as the various approaches in methodology have all added ambiguity to
the movement (Lockwood 1993, 1997; McLaughlin and Halstead 1999). A great variety
of approaches have been developed and gathered under the generic term of character
education; and for that matter, character education cannot be generalised to represent one
distinct idea. As a result, the very concept of character education is open to different
interpretations, and can thus become a major source of confusion in itself. Furthermore,
it is incumbent on a researcher of character education to specify the particular version of
character education under consideration from the very start. Here, I will borrow
McLaughlin and Halstead’s (1999) and Kristja´nsson’s (2002) distinct conceptual
frameworks of character education for the discussion in this paper. This notion of
character education is non-expansive, and is understood as an educational enterprise
aimed at the inculcation of virtues—with Aristotle’s ethics being widely accepted as its
main theoretical root (Carr 2008; Kristja´nsson 2002, 2006b; Noddings 1997; Pritchard
1988; Sommers 2002). This choice is made predominantly on the grounds that it is
widely agreed that the contemporary character education movement is understood in a
non-expansive sense (Kristja´nsson 2002; McLaughlin and Halstead 1999). This is made
explicit by Kristja´nsson (2002, p. 137):