Phronesis and Aristotelian character education

This chapter deals with the problem of Aristotelian character education concerning the development of critical, reason-infused or phronesis-guided virtue, and focuses on to repair the dearth of attention given to phronesis in character-education circles and to bring considerations from other, but related, discourses to bear on it. However, the actual cultivation of phronesis is typically given short shrift by repeating the same Aristotelian truisms or absorbed into a more general discussion of virtue development. According to the skill analogy, the development of the phronesis of the moral learner shares important features with that of the expert in a practical skill. Jason Swartwood illustrates this analogy by relating it to an established social scientific model of expert decision-making; the so-called Recognition-Primed Decision. This model explains how expert decision making develops through a combination of a set of gradually evolving abilities: intuitive, deliberative, meta-cognitive, self-regulatory and self-cultivating.