“A school cannot not form character”

Question 1What is character education, why is it so important today, and what can schools contribute?

Young people do not have it easy today: we are experiencing a veritable pandemic of mental illness, a massive polarisation of society that extends as far as hatred between groups with different opinions, and artificial intelligence is reaching into more and more areas of life. Character education — in German, Persönlichkeitsbildung — helps young people to navigate this volatile terrain. It is the conscious and systematic cultivation of those inner strengths that, since Aristotle, have been called virtues: honesty, courage, gratitude, self-regulation, good judgement, compassion, civic-mindedness — with the aim of a flourishing life for the individual and for the community.

Today we know a good deal about this. Character strengths are closely linked to mental health and prosocial behaviour — in Austria, according to the WHO’s HBSC study, many young people are not satisfied with their lives, and strengths such as gratitude, honesty or hope are among the best protective factors for mental well-being. We know that character can be formed at school in a very targeted way, and we know that character education works and even goes hand in hand with better academic performance. Internationally, this has grown into a broad discourse, carried by institutions such as the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham, the Oxford Character Project and the flourishing research at Harvard — and underpinned by a broad evidence base, so broad that even the OECD is moving away from pure human capital theory and, since 2025, has advocated the goal of “Education for Human Flourishing”. In the German-speaking world we are still lagging behind here; in schools, colleges and universities, this discourse has so far received less attention than in other countries.

Schools cannot keep out of this anyway, because — loosely following Watzlawick — what is true of communication is also true of character education: a school cannot not form character — every rule, every word of praise, every tone of interaction leaves its mark — and the only question is whether this happens consciously and reflectively, or by chance. This is what our research and development projects in the Austrian Character Initiative at KPH Vienna/Lower Austria aim at: anchoring character education and character-based leadership broadly in Austrian school practice. And we find that school leaders and teachers greatly appreciate this and support it strongly.

Question 2What exactly did the character education project investigate, who was involved, and what are the most important findings?

In the TEPACE project — Teachers’ and Parents’ Perspectives on Character Education in Europe — I have the privilege of leading an international team of more than 40 researchers from twelve countries, together with Martin Brestovanský (Trnava), Verónica Fernández-Espinosa (Madrid) and Tom Harrison of the Jubilee Centre in Birmingham in the leadership team; in Austria, Evelyn Kropfreiter in particular was involved, whose Salzburg dissertation paved the way. From 2023 to 2026 we surveyed — for the first time on this scale for continental Europe — what parents and teachers think about character education at school: whether they consider it important, which character strengths matter most to them, whether teachers feel confident about character education, and whether character and achievement are seen as competing or as complementary. In the first wave, responses from 8,155 parents and 2,754 teachers in eight countries were analysed.

The most important finding: in all the countries where we asked this, more than 93 per cent of parents and more than 93 per cent of teachers consider character education at school to be very important, and around 90 per cent expect more character education to bring better academic performance. At the same time, more than half of the teachers believe that parents care above all about grades — in fact, this applies to only nine per cent of parents. Both groups therefore want the same thing, but do not know this about each other.

We are now in the process of reporting these data to decision-makers at European and national level and making the case for character education to play an ever greater role in schools; in Slovakia, the findings have already been drawn on to support the implementation of the character education standards of the new national curriculum. We are also experiencing support at European level: the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, sent a personal video message to our 2025 conference on character education in Vienna.

Question 3On the survey of 10,000 parents and teachers: which virtues would they particularly like to see at school?

School is a place where a wide range of character strengths can be developed: courage, gratitude, civility, good judgement and critical thinking, honesty, self-regulation, diligence, orderliness — all of this can be learned wonderfully at school, and these strengths are at the centre of our materials and courses.

In our survey, we gave parents and teachers a selection of character strengths to choose from. Parents’ first wish is self-confidence (64 per cent), followed by good judgement (57 per cent), honesty (46 per cent) and resilience (45 per cent). Teachers put honesty at the top (50 per cent), followed by civility (48 per cent) and good judgement (46 per cent). Honesty and good judgement are thus the common ground of both groups; beyond that, teachers wish for more civility, and parents above all for self-confidence — which I read as a wish that school should give children a stable, realistic trust in their own abilities.

The lower end of the list gives food for thought: across Europe, service to others is among the least frequently chosen virtues — only 13 per cent of teachers name it, and among parents only curiosity ranks even lower.

Question 4How does the research of the Character Initiative turn into concrete practice, and what do schools and teachers receive to work with?

The guiding principle of the Character Initiative is “consistently evidence-based and uncompromisingly practice-oriented”. We always work in such a way that our research is prepared so that it can be used in schools, in school development initiatives and by teachers, and we consistently translate research into professional development, school leadership development and teaching materials, and help with the founding of schools (see, for example, rolandbernhard.at).

In concrete terms, schools and teachers receive free online courses (MOOCs) on the iMooX platform with videos and ready-made teaching materials, for example on classroom management or character education, which a whole teaching staff can complete as in-school professional development (more than 3,000 teachers are already enrolled in our courses); a growing pool of materials on character strengths such as courage, gratitude, honesty and self-regulation; and a workbook for school leaders with questionnaires for taking stock and building blocks for school culture and teaching. From February 2027, KPH Vienna/Lower Austria will add the university certificate course “Schulische Persönlichkeitsbildung für psychische Gesundheit” (school-based character education for mental health), in cooperation with the Austrian Federal Association for Psychotherapy, in which school leaders and teachers learn to design teaching and school culture in such a way that character strengths are fostered.

Behind this lies the principle of “caught – taught – sought”: character is caught in the school culture and from role models, consciously taught in lessons and sought by the pupils themselves — and all our educational tools build on these three pathways.

Question 5Lower Austria has made character education its annual theme. What does this mean for schools in concrete terms?

We are very pleased about the wonderful cooperation with the Education Directorate of Lower Austria, which strongly supports our cause. It has made “Leadership and Character Education” the annual theme for 2026/27, and in doing so moves to the centre what, according to the objectives section of the School Organisation Act, is the core of the educational mission anyway: the development of young people according to moral, religious and social values and according to the true, the good and the beautiful.

In concrete terms, no new programme is imposed on schools; instead, each school takes a conscious look at which character strengths it wants to foster in children and adults alike, and how. Nor is it a one-year programme: it is the starting signal for giving this topic more space permanently. For this, we have developed a workbook for school leaders and steering groups; in addition, there are numerous professional development courses and talks for school leaders, the free online course and teaching materials for hundreds of lessons of character education.

The connection with leadership is no coincidence, for no one shapes the culture of a school more strongly than its leadership; on this side, we draw on the Oxford Character Project, which describes seven strategies for how character can be cultivated in educational institutions and in leadership. We want to strengthen school leaders by giving them tools for what matters to them anyway.

The next step is a major undertaking with which we want to bring character-based leadership far into school practice — together with Prof. Dr. Dr. Matthias Ehrhardt and the Autoris Leadership Institute from Boston, which has been coaching leaders in business since 1999 and whose leadership tools we have adapted for school leaders. These are very good tools that work from the school leadership all the way down into the classrooms, where they have very positive effects. For this, we are looking for people who will support us in realising this wonderful project — one that ultimately benefits the pupils.

Question 6What can Austrian schools learn from international research, and what should change in the long term?

First of all: in international comparison, and despite all the prophecies of doom, Austrian schools are doing quite well — the PISA results published in September also show Austria above the OECD average in all three domains, and clearly so in science. This is usually overlooked, and teachers and school leaders are therefore often not shown the respect they deserve. What is more striking is that at college and university level, the international discourses on character education are still receiving little attention — even though they are not being conducted at some marginal institutions, but at top universities such as Oxford, Harvard and Birmingham, with a broad evidence base.

I myself came into contact with this in Oxford, when, as a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Education, I led a research project on school development funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). We studied highly effective London schools in challenging circumstances and saw that many school leaders, alongside excellent teaching, quite naturally focus on character — especially for disadvantaged children — and that the two do not exclude but strengthen each other. In England, the Jubilee Centre in Birmingham has built up a dense infrastructure of research, teaching materials and school certification over 14 years — a recent study by the Jubilee Centre shows that certified schools of character perform significantly better on Progress 8, the government’s measure of pupils’ progress.

This research brings out very clearly how a school builds a climate that fosters personal development, how character strengths can flow into teaching without requiring a separate lesson, and how to help young people work on themselves on their own initiative and do what is good and right. That this happens on the basis of theory and evidence is crucial: many young people have a great longing for personal growth and outsource it to the internet, where more or less — unfortunately often less — well-informed gurus spread their wisdom. Because school cannot not form personality, it is much better to do so consciously — with generally recognised character strengths and not with ideology; here too there is research showing that there are widely shared virtues across cultures and religions.

In the long term, three things should change in our country: character education must be anchored in curricula and quality frameworks in a binding way; it must become an integral part of teacher education — the TEPACE data show that teachers want to see it anchored in all subjects and in the whole school culture, not as an additional subject — and the German-speaking world needs more independent, empirically grounded research on character education that connects with the international discourse.

Question 7On “human flourishing”: what does a flourishing life mean in this context, and what role do virtues play in it?

Human flourishing — in German I like to translate it as gelingendes Leben (“a life that turns out well”), because Aufblühen (“blossoming”) somehow sounds odd — is the ancient Aristotelian idea of eudaimonia: a life that is not only pleasant but good and fulfilled in itself, in which a person can think wisely about the good, act courageously and lovingly, maintain lasting relationships and contribute their share to the common good — it is about a flourishing, meaningful and happy life.

Today this goal resonates far beyond philosophy. The research around Tyler VanderWeele at Harvard describes flourishing empirically through dimensions such as happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships; and even the OECD, the organisation behind PISA, presented a conceptual framework for “Education for Human Flourishing” in 2025 — a departure from an education narrowed purely to human capital and cognitive performance.

Question 8What role does religion play in character education, and what can faith and the Christian concept of virtue contribute?

The Character Initiative deliberately works with a neo-Aristotelian concept of character that is not tied to any denomination and can therefore be taken up at public and denominational schools alike. It was precisely the Christian tradition that carried Aristotle’s teaching forward and linked it with the theological virtues of faith, hope and love — so that much of what character research is discovering anew today has been taught in Christianity for two millennia.

As an educational researcher, not as a theologian, I can also point to remarkably robust evidence: thousands of studies have examined the link between lived religiosity and mental health, and the picture is clear — people who pray regularly or attend religious services are less prone to depression, anxiety and addictive behaviour and show more resilience, sense of meaning and willingness to help. That is why Peter Stippl, the long-standing President of the Austrian Federal Association for Psychotherapy, and I wrote in a 2024 working paper that Christian schools have “one more resource”. The flourishing research at Harvard around Tyler VanderWeele, too, names four central pathways to a flourishing life on the basis of this evidence: marriage and family, education, meaningful work — and the religious community.

Christian schools should tap this resource gently, preserving the freedom of young people, but courageously — not as a catalogue of moral precepts, but as a living relationship with God whose fruits show in the way we treat others.