By Fiona Isaacs, Tara Anglican School for Girls
Character is about who our students are and who they are becoming. As educators, we often think about character in terms of what we teach: the values programs we run, the virtues we display on posters, or the lessons we design. Yet character formation is not only taught. It also emerges from the countless messages embedded within a school's culture, traditions, and everyday practices.
One of the questions that drove my doctoral research was: Who do our students think we think they should be?
At first glance, that might seem like a subtle distinction. Most schools can clearly articulate the kind of graduates they hope to develop. In fact it is probably on your website somewhere written, accompanied by students looking happy and engaged. But students do not simply absorb what we say. They interpret what we celebrate, reward, notice, and talk about.
I used to explore this idea with students in Religious Education classes. I would ask them to draw a "good kid." The exercise was always illuminating. In the girls' schools, students often described a good student in terms of neat hair, correct ribbons, and appropriate skirt length. These were the characteristics they associated with being "good." But those qualities have very little to do with character, and mattered very little to me compared with virtues such as courage, integrity, compassion, humility, or justice. Yet for many students, appearance and compliance were the strongest messages they believed the school was communicating. Whether intentionally or not, they had learned what the school valued.
This is one of the central challenges of character education. Our explicit values and our implicit values do not always align.
A helpful illustration comes from Harry Potter. During the holidays, I was reading the books to my nephew and was struck again by Percy Weasley’s character. Percy appears to embody the model student. He is academically successful, follows the rules, earns positions of responsibility, and consistently seeks approval from authority figures. In many schools, he would be held up as the ideal. Yet as the story unfolds, readers discover that these visible markers of success do not necessarily correspond with strong character. Percy becomes willing to sacrifice relationships, loyalty, and wisdom in pursuit of status and recognition. J.K. Rowling's portrayal challenges us to ask an important question: are we confusing achievement with virtue?
My own understanding of character education is informed by narrative virtue ethics. This approach suggests that people do not simply learn virtues through definitions or rules. Rather, they learn through stories. Narratives shape our understanding of what it means to live a good life and help us imagine the kind of people we want to become.
Schools are constantly telling stories. We tell them through our mission statements and values. We tell them through the students featured on our social media accounts. We tell them through awards nights, assemblies, newsletters, leadership appointments, and graduation speeches. Every one of these communicates something about the qualities we admire.
The question for schools, then, is not whether we are forming character, but what kind of character we are forming.
If we want students to become people of courage, integrity, service, and compassion, we need to ensure that our culture celebrates those qualities just as much as academic, sporting, or co-curricular success. We need to think carefully about who our exemplars are and what stories we tell.
Because in the end, students often learn far more from what we honour than from what we say. Character education is not simply a curriculum. It is the story a school tells about what a good life looks like, and who it is inviting its students to become.