A Summary of the Work of the Character Education Inquiry

The Study of Character Development: Towards Tests of a Relational Developmental Systems Model

“…For instance, Kohlberg and Mayer [1972, p. 479] asserted that "labeling a set of behaviors displayed by a child with positive or negative trait terms does not signify they are of adaptive or ethical importance." Indeed, Kohlberg believed that the situational variation in behaviors observed by Hartshorne and May [1930] was evidence sufficient "to debunk the very notion of character itself" [Power, Higgins, & Kohlberg, 1989, p. 127]. …”

Ethical Competences for Democratic Citizenship at School, University and in Family

“…The kind of ethical learning that we wish to defend draws upon a theoretical and practical model known as 'the construction of moral personality' . This model has been used for many years in our pre-university education and it brings together ideas from other models that focus on development and moral reasoning (Kohlberg 1981(Kohlberg , 1984Colby & Kohlberg, 1987;Gibbs, 2003), emotion and sensation (Noddings, 2008;Prinz, 2009) and moral character ( Hartshorne & May, 1930;Berkowitz, 2002;Lapsley & Clark, 2005;Carr, 2008;Doris, 2008;Nucci & Narváez, 2008).…”

Best Practices for School-Based Moral Education

“…Until recently, there had been few rigorous assessments of programs fitting our conceptualization of moral education, and the extant research was not promising. In their classic study on character development, Hartshorne and May (1930) concluded that common moral education practices did not work. Even worse, their data convinced them that morality was dictated by situations, not character; therefore, attempting to improve morality by developing children’s character might be an exercise in futility.…”