Michael Davis What's Wrong With Character Education?

In “What’s Wrong with Character Education?”, Michael Davis presents three main arguments against character education. Character education can be sorted into three different types simple moral education, just-community education, and simple character education. Davis argues that simple moral education lacks in evidence to support its claims (empirical), conflict on what good character is and how to teach it (conceptual), and its failure to do things the right way for the right purpose (moral). In this paper I will be agreeing with the empirical criticism of simple character education. However, I will also be providing a possible objection to the empirical criticism. Davis argues that since character is something that must exist for more than a small part of someone’s life to be character at all, the scientific research given to defend simple character education is not accurate due to the fact it only covers short periods. He states that there is no way to directly observe someone’s character because you must get these observations through watching the person for long periods of …show more content…
And if there is an effect, it is the wrong one. When having the wrong short term effect it suggest we have the wrong long term effect. He clearly states “There is now no reason to believe that simple character education does what it claims to do. For all we know, it is a waste of time—or worse.”
An objection of Davis’ empirical criticism could say you do not need long term studies to prove simple character education. Simple character education can be shown in a person’s everyday character of how they treat everyone around them. It could be said that short term research over many people is just as sufficient as any long term research. As long as there is sufficient evidence, it is enough to prove simple character education is sufficiently taught and has impact on a person’s