Character education and virtues: A personalist pedagogical perspective

The subject of character education has aroused increasing interest over the past decades, during which several specialised research centres have taken shape. As part of the awakening of interest in practical philosophy, extensive research on the ethics of virtues has been developed. There are some research centres, especially in the UK, which have linked character education and the development of virtues. A pedagogical framework that would be interesting to explore more deeply can be identified within the personalist approach, above all through the contribution of Thomas Aquinas. This paper develops the idea that Aquinas’s moral doctrine on virtues can be the ideal theoretical foundation for the education of character in the personalist sense