<P> Because women and men today may not be well - positioned to fully develop the capacities Aristotle and others considered central to virtuous character, it continues to be a central issue not only in ethics, but also in feminist philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of education, and philosophy of literature . Because moral character requires communities where citizens can fully realize their human powers and ties of friendship, there are hard questions of how educational, economic, political, and social institutions should be structured to make that development possible . </P> <P> Situationism Impressed by scientific experiments in social psychology, "situationist" philosophers argue that character traits are not stable or consistent and cannot be used to explain why people act as they do . Experimental data shows that much of human behavior is attributable to seemingly trivial features of the situations in which people find themselves . In a typical experiment, seminary students agreed to give a talk on the importance of helping those in need . On the way to the building where their talks were to be given, they encountered a confederate slumped over and groaning . Ironically, those who were told they were already late were much less likely to help than those who were told they had time to spare . </P> <P> Perhaps most damning to the traditional view of character are the results of the experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s and Philip G. Zimbardo in 1971 . In the first of these experiments, the great majority of subjects, when politely though firmly requested by an experimenter, were willing to administer what they thought were increasingly severe electric shocks to a screaming "victim ." In the second, the infamous Stanford prison experiment, the planned two - week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended after only six days because the college students who were assigned to act as guards became sadistic and those who were the "prisoners" became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress . These and other experiments are taken to show that if humans do have noble tendencies, they are narrow, "local" traits that are not unified with other traits into a wider behavioral pattern of being . </P> <P> As common schools spread throughout the colonies, the moral education of children was taken for granted . Formal education had a distinctly moral and religion emphasis . In the Christian tradition, it is believed that humans are flawed at birth (original sin), requiring salvation through religious means: teaching, guidance and supernatural rituals . This belief in America, originally heavily populated by Protestant immigrants, creates a situation of a-priori assumption that humans are morally deficient by nature and that preemptive measures are needed to develop children into acceptable members of society: home, church and school . </P>

Who said that education is the development of good moral character