Towards a critical character education
Professor David Ian Walker, University of Alabama

The talk reviews a previously sketched critical character education using sociology and virtue ethics philosophy and enhances it by adding emphasis on intellectual honesty, especially the development among children of the capacity and motivation to seek out knowledge and information that is rationally supportable to the extent possible. In the end, critical forms of character education in public schooling are presented as needing to tread a fine line between occasioning conditions for moral habituation, including subsequent rational sophistication, while also helping children to reflect on their social conditions that are also partly within them.

Dr. David Ian Walker is Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of Alabama and Director of the Center for the Study of Ethical Development. His interdisciplinary research explores how to develop character and how character is shaped by context and culture.