Is character education flawed as an approach to values education? A 2013 article answered that question in the negative and defused ten common objections against character education as ‘myths’. The aim of the present article is to revisit those objections and consider the evidence that has accumulated since 2013. After a brief historical and conceptual rehearsal, the core section of the article is taken up with reminders of the original arguments rebutting each myth, complemented with additional updated, and more extensive, (...) considerations that were not available at the time. The original article contained a section on ‘three well-founded misgivings’. We argue that none of those misgivings is as relevant in today’s climate as they were in 2013. However, we acknowledge that those misgivings have been superseded by new challenges that test the theoretical flexibility and empirical credibility of character education. To ensure that those interested in human flourishing can continue to dispel myths about character education and address the most pressing challenges in the field, we close with some reflections on the future of character education and where we see its next ideal academic destinations to be. (shrink)

Despite the prevalence of the virtue of considerateness in everyday moral discourse and the proliferation of philosophical studies of virtue language, considerateness hardly ever appears on philosophical agendas. When discussed in academia, its meaning seems fuzzy and unclear. This article makes amends for this gap by subjecting considerateness to conceptual scrutiny. The author argues that considerateness designates a cluster concept, encompassing three types of virtuousness that share a family resemblance only. One is a hybrid civic-moral social-glue virtue, extensionally equivalent to (...) Aristotle's virtue of agreeableness. The second is an intellectual virtue of phronetic consideration (moral sensitivity and integration). The third is a full-fledged discrete moral virtue with standard Aristotelian features of a golden-mean structure and an emotional component as a motivator. The advantages of identifying these three types of virtuousness are elicited, as are some of the educational ramifications of analyzing the differentia of considerateness in this way. (shrink)