Back To Basics: Rediscovering The Historical Purpose Of Education

A Meaningful Education

“Character,” the educationalist Professor Phil Cummins asserted at our recent Manchester Character conference, “is the reason we do school”.

It’s a profound and contentious statement in an age dominated by data, league tables and what many inside and outside of education feel is the ‘tyranny’ of the exam hall. Yet, for the vast majority of human history, Cummins’s view would have been utterly unremarkable. It was the unquestioned truth, the very foundations upon which learning was built. The idea that education’s primary purpose was anything other than the cultivation of a virtuous and resilient human being would have seemed bizarre.

I was prompted to think about this at an event held at a famous traditional school, founded way back in 1562. A group of long-serving educators were discussing the institution’s history and noted that for over 400 years, the core mission was the development of their pupils’ character. It was only in the last 30 to 40 years or so that this noble objective had been almost entirely eclipsed by the frantic, all-consuming focus on examination results.

This shift represents a dramatic break from the past. To understand why character education is now experiencing a powerful renaissance, we must first appreciate where it originated and why, for millennia, it was considered the ultimate goal of a meaningful education. Character education is not a new trend; it is a return to the original foundations.

The Ancient Origins Of Character

The very word ‘character’ derives from the ancient Greek kharaktēr, meaning an engraved mark or a defining quality. The original term connoted an indelible stamp, like that on a coin. It implies something deep, permanent and fundamental to our identity. This concept was central to the earliest models of education, particularly for the Greek philosophers who laid the groundwork for Western thought. Plato, Cicero and, above all, Aristotle, saw the cultivation of character as inseparable from education itself.

Aristotle’s Vision Of A Flourishing Life

Aristotle’s philosophy provides the most enduring framework for character education. He posited that every object, and indeed every human being, has a telos, which is an ultimate aim or purpose. For humans, he argued, this purpose is to achieve a state of eudaimonia, a rich concept often translated as ‘human flourishing’ or ‘living well’. Eudaimonia is not a fleeting feeling of happiness derived from satisfying transient desires; it is a stable, fulfilling state achieved through the consistent application of reason and, crucially, the exercise of arete, which is ‘excellence’ or virtue.

According to Aristotle, you can’t just become virtuous by accident or by reading a set of rules. No, virtue is cultivated through a process he called habituation. This is critical for the neo-Aristotelian approach which drives leading character education initiatives today, such as the work of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham. As the philosopher Sarah Broadie clarified, this is a mindful process: “Forming a habit is connected with repetition… Habituation cannot be a mindless process and the habit once formed of acting justly cannot be blind in its operations, since one needs intelligence to see what different things are just under different circumstances.”

This process requires the development of phronesis, or ‘practical wisdom’ which is the ability to discern the right course of action in different and perhaps complex situations. Aristotle believed moral virtues represent a ‘golden mean’ between two extremes of excess and deficiency (for example, courage is the mean between recklessness and cowardice). Phronesis is the inner compass that allows an individual to navigate these complexities and choose the right course so as to behave virtuously.

Aristotelian ethics therefore are agent-centred, not act-centred. As Professor Robert Louden explains, the focus is on ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’. It is not enough to simply do the right thing; you must be the kind of person who does the right thing for the right reasons. This is the essence of good character. The lesson from Aristotle is clear: character education requires practical experience, reflection and action, where citizens learn through habit rather than reasoning alone.

Character In Industrial And Victorian Britain

The classical emphasis on character resonated through the centuries. In the early 19th century, the social reformer Robert Owen established his “Institute for the Formation of Character”, a school for the children of his factory workers. As the historian J. F. C. Harrison noted, Owen’s philosophy could be summarised by the belief that ‘as poor people’s wages and living conditions advanced, as they became properly educated, just so would their characters be made right’. Owen saw a direct link between environment, education and moral development.

This concern with character became an all-pervasive cult during the Victorian era, most famously through the ‘muscular Christianity’ movement which swept through Britain’s public schools. Historian David Newsome described the educational ideal as being based on ‘the moral and physical beauty of athleticism, the salutary effects of Spartan habits and discipline, the cultivation of all that is masculine, and the expulsion of all that is effeminate, un-English and excessively intellectual’.

As Professor Sir David Cannadine notes, the aim was to produce young men of good Christian character who could play games and lead their social inferiors. Character became synonymous with a ‘have-a-go assertiveness’ and that public school confidence. This ethos was championed by organisations like the Boys’ Brigade, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides, all of whom explicitly sought to promote character growth. Yet, as Cannadine also observes, by the mid-20th century, something had changed. References to ‘character and perseverance, those quintessential watchwords of Victorian morality, suddenly began to decline in the pages of local and national newspapers’.

The cultural tide was turning.

Mainstream Education Shifted Toward Making “Work Ready” Young People

Where Victorian education had aimed to shape the moral fibre of the elite, the end of the Empire, postwar and the neoliberal era reframed education as a mechanism for enabling economic participation, especially for the working and middle classes. This economic rationalisation of education prioritised skills, qualifications and employability, perhaps at the expense of deeper, values-based education.

The Great Forgetting: How Character Was Edged Out

The decline was slow, then sudden. Professor James Arthur, a leading authority on character education, states that ‘after 1950, it’s difficult to find any references to character in government education publications until 2001’. The classical, Victorian and early 20th-century consensus had evaporated. In its place rose a new ideology focused on measurable, standardised and purely academic outcomes. The 1988 Education Reform Act, while placing a statutory duty on schools to promote the ‘spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils’, simultaneously unleashed market forces and a focus on testing which would inadvertently push character to the margins.

The system valued what it could measure, and what it could measure easily were exam grades. The deeper, more profound purpose of education, the forming of good people with purposeful lives, disappeared. As the writer David Brooks articulated, education began to prioritise ‘résumé virtues’ (marketable skills) over ‘eulogy virtues’ (the character strengths that are talked about at the end of your life).

A Modern Renaissance: Responding To A Moral Malaise

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, a counter-reaction was brewing. A growing concern about a perceived ‘moral malaise’ amongst young people brought character back onto the political agenda. After 2010, its importance for policymakers increased significantly, Professor Arthur arguing that a ‘values-based policy’ was required to address the ‘moral rot at the heart of British society’. ‘Character, and specifically its neglect’, as the educator and historian Sir Anthony Seldon has powerfully stated many times, had become ‘the number one issue of our age’.

This revival is not a simple return to the ancient roots but a sophisticated, evidence-led movement drawing on both ancient wisdom and modern psychology. Thinkers in the world of character have developed new frameworks to define character for our time, such as:

• Dr. Thomas Lickona defines character as having three interconnected components: moral knowing (understanding the good), moral feeling (caring about the good), and moral behaviour (doing the good).
• Martin Seligman, a founder of Positive Psychology, shifted the focus of his field from mental illness to the scientific study of what makes life most worth living. The International Positive Education Network (IPEN), involving Seligman, Angela Duckworth, and Kristjan Kristjansson, now collaborates to reform education around principles of well-being and flourishing.
• Professor Phil Cummins, founder of a School for Tomorrow, offers a holistic framework, urging us to consider character in terms of the who (our identity), the what (our values), the why (our purpose), the how (our actions) and the where (our context).

So, What’s Next?

This modern character education movement is robustly defending its philosophical corner. One example in the UK is Kristjan Kristjansson, Deputy Director of the Jubilee Centre, who has systematically dismantled of “the 10 myths about character, virtue, and virtue education,” providing a powerful case against critics.

For thousands of years, education had a clear telos: to form good human beings and help them flourish. Recent decades have been a dangerous diversion from that core mission. The rediscovery of character is about rebalancing, about remembering that while qualifications might help you make a living, it is character which helps you make a life.

By Neil Wolstenholme, Kloodle Chairman