In Defence of ‘Non-Expansive’ Character Education KRISTJA ´ N KRISTJA ´ NSSON I first put the notion of non-expansive character education in context by locating its place within recent trends in values education and, in particular, by distinguishing it from more expansive accounts such as civic education and critical postmodernism. I argue that the essential characteristics of non-expansive character education are, on the one hand, moral cosmopolitanism and, on the other, methodological substantivism. In the second part of the essay, I defend this sort of character education against various common criticisms, with special reference to two canonical works of the movement, by Lickona and Kilpatrick. Non-expansive character education stands out, in the end, as a reasonable middle-ground proposal with neither too little nor too much meat on its bones. I INTRODUCTION It has become more or less de rigueur to initiate discussions of character education with a nod back to its halcyon days when character-building and moral tutelage formed an integral part of any educational programme: a period which lasted, almost uninterrupted, from the time of Plato and Aristotle to the middle of the twentieth century. A fair diversity of individual reasons, or a combination of such reasons, tends to be given to explain why the belief in direct moral and emotional formation, at least at school if not also in the home, crumbled. These range from the effects of bleak research findings about how context- dependent and chameleon-like children’s virtues and qualities of character are, to increased personalism and relativism, growing fear of paternalism and indoctrination (encapsulated, for instance, in the basic tenets of humanistic psychology), the general anti-traditionalism of the hippie-period, Sputnik-inspired emphasis on technology and science at the expense of ‘soft’ disciplines such as morality, the mounting antagonism of religious groups toward secularised moral teaching, less optimistic views than before (based on Kohlberg or at least on some stock interpretations of Kohlberg’s research) about children’s capacity Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2002 & The Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain 2002. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.