Lessons in character education: incorporating neoliberal learning in classroom resources

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines a number of teaching resources produced by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, the leading centre for character education in the UK, in the light of the claim advanced by Kristján Kristjánsson, the centre’s deputy director, that various criticisms of character education are best regarded as ‘myths’. The analysis provided in this article highlights significant shortcomings with these teaching resources, suggesting that far from being mythical, concerns about character and virtue being unclear, redundant, old fashioned, essentially religious, paternalistic, anti-democratic, anti–intellectual, conservative, individualistic, and relative, would seem, at least in the resources produced by the centre at which Kristjánsson works, to be very well-founded.