What separates us from AI? Our character.
That’s one of the provocative ideas in a significant 2024 article — Reconsidering the Ten Myths about Character Education (Kristjánsson, Harrison & Peterson, 2024) — and it’s worth your time if you work in education, leadership, or wellbeing.
The authors dismantle ten persistent myths that have held character education back:
- Character is unclear — it’s well-defined across philosophy and psychology.
- Character is redundant — it predicts moral behaviour and flourishing better than modern substitutes focused on personality types.
- Character is old-fashioned — virtue ethics is one of the most dynamic and universal areas of moral theory today.
- Character is religious — it has a robust secular, Aristotelian grounding.
- Character education is paternalistic — character is shaped at school whether we intend it or not; the question is whether we do it well.
- Character education is anti-democratic — done properly, it develops moral and civic character together.
- Character education is conservative — it actively challenges narrow, technicist models of education.
- Character education is individualistic — virtues are rooted in socio-political relationships and networks.
- Character is culturally relative — core virtues are recognised across societies and throughout history.
- Character is situation-dependent — virtuous behaviour becomes habitual through upbringing and repeated choice.
And on technology: rather than threatening character development, VR, gaming, and smartphones are increasingly being harnessed to support it, enhancing human flourishing when thoughtfully designed.
The authors close with a challenge: can philosophers, psychologists, educators, historians, and technology scientists learn from each other to keep building the evidence base?
Their hope, and mine, is that researchers continue to make the case that character development is part of the solution to the most pressing challenges we face – locally, nationally, and globally.
Source: Kristjánsson, K., Harrison, T., & Peterson, A. (2025). Reconsidering the ‘Ten Myths’ about Character Education. British Journal of Educational Studies, 73(1), 49–72.
First published on Queenwood’s LinkedIn.
