In the intervening 150 years, character education has taken on various guises: moral education, virtues education, values education, non-cognitive skills, spiritual, moral, cultural and social education, to name a few.
Probably Gilligan has been more effective than the academic debates of moral philosophers, but one way or another, there is now a growing movement towards virtues education, amongst both academics (Carr 1999) and teachers in the classroom.
Many decades ago he and his fellow wise men made a foolish choice for ruler; they elected a handsome and charming ignoramus who allowed all the old virtues like education, storytelling and reverence for the past to fade away.
In 1920, Ruth published a young-adult novel of his own, "The Home-Run King: Or How Pep Pindar Won His Title," that extolled the virtues of education, clean living, and inside baseball.
Talking to a group of young black boys and girls in west London the other week about the virtues of education, I realised that a number of them clearly did not want to be at the event, which had been put on for them by one of a number of black education groups that aim to raise attainment levels.
Examples of well-behaved and comparatively atheistic societies like Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark--which surpass us in terrestrial virtues like education, health, public generosity, per capita aid to the developing world, and low rates of violent crime and infant mortality--are of no interest to our electorate whatsoever.
West agrees with Alasdair MacIntyre's recognition of Austen as the culminating figure in the cultivation of the virtues, the education in Paideia, or "the formation of attention" that is critical to releasing us from the "cultural weapons of mass distraction" that perpetually surround us today.
"Bush's virtue on education is simply that he talks about it, which is more than Republicans have done for 20 years," said Geoffrey Garin, a Democratic pollster.
"Remarkably it seems that although our genomes are fragile, our society is robust almost entirely by virtue of education, which allow strengths to be rapidly distributed to all members".
He arranged a contract with Ibrahim whereby he guaranteed Esma's virtue and education and Ibrahim promised not to arrange a marriage for her before she turned 18 (many Roma girls were then married in their early teens).
(To see that Plato is acutely aware of these implications, one only needs to look at what the Republic has to say about virtue and education).
