For schools: foundations and materials

School was never only about transmitting knowledge: § 2 of the Austrian School Organisation Act has always formulated a double mandate — knowledge and values. Character education is therefore not an add-on but the core of the educational mandate. There is a serious reason why it is moving centre stage right now: according to the WHO study HBSC 2021/22, 31 per cent of girls and 19 per cent of boys in Austria are currently not very satisfied with their lives, and the level of reported symptoms has been rising continuously since 2010, markedly from about age eleven. Schools cannot reverse this alone — but next to the family they are the most important place where children build the inner resources that carry them: courage, self-regulation, gratitude, honesty, perseverance, community spirit. Research calls these resources character strengths — measurable, developable, and closely tied to wellbeing and mental health.

In psychology, personality denotes the relatively stable pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving (the “Big Five”; conscientiousness in particular is demonstrably linked to school success). Especially fruitful for schools is C. Robert Cloninger’s biopsychosocial model: it distinguishes temperament — the emotional endowment every child brings, strongly biologically anchored — from character, which develops through experience, upbringing, role models and one’s own decisions: self-directedness, cooperativeness, self-transcendence. Behavioural genetics attributes roughly 40 to 50 per cent of personality differences to genetic influences, the larger remainder to environment and experience; character matures throughout childhood and into adulthood. This distinction both relieves schools and gives them a mandate: no temperament is destiny, and a mature character goes hand in hand with higher wellbeing and lower vulnerability to depression and anxiety — in every temperament type. The workbook’s guiding sentence: “Every child brings their temperament — character is formed.” The shared vocabulary comes from the VIA classification: 24 character strengths, found in studies across 75 countries and measurable with validated instruments.

Modern research on character strengths has a forefather: Aristotle. Four of his insights are directly practical for school development. First, the goal: a flourishing life (eudaimonia) — unfolding a person’s best possibilities, in and for the community; today’s flourishing research confirms the connection empirically. Second, the path: practising rather than merely instructing (“We become just by doing just acts”) — character grows through small, repeated actions in everyday life, not through single grand gestures. Third, the compass: the doctrine of the mean — every strength lies between a too-little and a too-much (courage between cowardice and recklessness), and where the mean lies also depends on temperament; even primary school children understand the question “What would be too little, what too much, what exactly right?” Fourth, the developmental path: from imitation and habituation through the struggle between knowing and wanting, on through self-control to consolidated character strength — and nobody falls off this path.

The world’s leading centre for research on character education in schools is the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham. Its Framework for Character Education in Schools distils the state of research and is used by tens of thousands of schools worldwide; since 2025 it has been available in German — translated by Roland Bernhard and Jörg Schulte-Altedorneburg, freely accessible. It organises character strengths into four domains a school should keep in view as a whole: intellectual (curiosity, critical thinking, judgement), moral (compassion, courage, gratitude, honesty, respect), civic (community spirit, courtesy, engagement) and performance strengths (resilience, perseverance, teamwork — and explicitly leadership). Above all of them stands practical wisdom (phronesis). And it provides the organising grid of the three ways: Caught — children absorb attitudes from the lived climate of the school; Taught — character strengths need explicit learning and a shared language; Sought — a strength becomes lasting when young people pursue it of their own accord, in real responsibility.

Two decades of research show ever more clearly that character strengths are protective factors. People with a mature character show higher wellbeing and markedly lower vulnerability to depression and anxiety; reviews of character-strengths programmes in schools show positive effects on life satisfaction, relationships, school climate and attainment; meta-analyses document that gratitude practices raise wellbeing and reduce depressive symptoms, that self-regulation is among the strongest protective factors for later mental health, and that school-based resilience and life-skills programmes protect children and adolescents. One important caveat: character education is not therapy and does not replace professional help in cases of illness. Its strength is prevention — it reaches all children, early, in everyday life and without stigma. And it works twice over: a staff team that works with character strengths — appreciating what succeeds, cultivating gratitude, nurturing relationships — also does something for its own job satisfaction. Character education is always teacher health, too. The freely accessible entry point is the MOOC “Schulische Persönlichkeitsbildung für psychische Gesundheit”, developed under Roland Bernhard’s leadership.

How do you foster character strengths concretely — without moralising and without indoctrinating? The Oxford Character Project has distilled seven strategies from the research and tested them empirically: habituation through practice (strengths grow through regular doing in everyday life); reflection on personal experience (experiencing becomes experience through thinking); engagement with role models (reachable, approachable models — including their flaws); dialogue that builds virtue literacy (those who have words for strengths can recognise, name and pursue them); awareness of situational traps (good action often fails not through lack of will but through peer pressure, time pressure and looking away); moral reminders (visible anchors that keep what matters present in everyday life); and friendships of mutual accountability (character grows in relationships in which people hold one another to account with goodwill). In the workbook, every strategy is translated into concrete examples for the respective school level.

Leadership and character education explain each other: leadership without character becomes technique or the exercise of power; character education without leadership remains a matter of chance. For schools, the connection runs in two directions. First, leading with character: school culture does not arise on posters but in the behaviour of the adults — and nobody shapes that behaviour more than the school leadership. Leadership research describes effective leadership in strikingly Aristotelian terms, as the combination of firm resolve with personal humility, or as values-based, servant leadership that measurably strengthens trust and engagement — and leadership character can be deliberately developed. Courage and humility, perseverance and gratitude are not a matter of a leader’s private self-cultivation; they are leadership instruments. Second, leadership as an educational goal: forming students who take responsibility — for themselves, for others and for real tasks. What matters is less any programme than the principle that leadership is not learned in functions but in real tasks with real responsibility.

To close, two close-ups — as a model of how the workbook thinks. Gratitude is among the character strengths most closely linked to life satisfaction and wellbeing; intervention studies and meta-analyses document causal effects of gratitude practices, extending even to better sleep and strengthened relationships. It, too, has its mean — between entitlement and empty politeness: real gratitude is a way of perceiving, and it begins with attention, not with words. Self-regulation — for Cloninger the core of the mature character — is among the best-documented protective factors for school success and mental health, and it can be practised. Its core fits into one simple image: between stimulus and response lies a space, and in that space human beings have tools — pausing, naming the feeling, asking what would be right, picturing the good response, deciding consciously. Healthy self-regulation does not suppress feelings; it takes them seriously and answers them wisely — a direct protective factor against helplessness, impulsive outbursts and rumination.