Moral Education in the 21st Century, edited by Douglas Yacek, Mark Jonas, and Kevin Gary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023

The book is composed of 17 original chapters written by both established and emerging scholars in the field. Part I lays the historical groundwork by illuminating the contemporary significance of Plato, Aristotle, the Sceptics, Nietzsche and Kant to moral education. Part II introduces some relatively new additions to the landscape of moral education, such as the capability approach, care ethics, non-deal virtue theory and pragmatism. In a bid to prepare students for the moral challenges of today, Part III directly addresses specific issues connected to virtual spaces, consumerism, sex education, democratic disagreement and boredom. This is an impressive and ambitious volume that deftly straddles the fine line between philosophical depth and accessibility. The contributions collectively make a strong case for the necessity of moral education for living a meaningful and flourishing life, and individually bring rigour and practical wisdom to discussions of how moral education might be understood and, importantly, taught. Although not stated explicitly by the editors, the volume can be taken to be sympathetic to a broadly virtue-ethical approach to moral education, with a significant number of contributions advocating this approach or at least ideas that are compatible with it. To me, this is a clear strength, and one that could potentially have added even more internal cohesion to the volume had it been made more visible. I expect, though, that this was a deliberate omission given the number of volumes dedicated to neo-Aristotelian character education already in circulation (e.g., Darnell & Kristjánsson, 2020; Matthews & Lerner, 2024), perhaps to the exclusion of other theoretical voices. A further strength is the volume’s commitment to the fact that education is not morally neutral. Indeed, early on in the volume the editors emphasise the inherently normative—or in their words “value-laden” (p. 2)—nature of education itself, meaning that education cannot be disentangled from moral education. If this is the case, and I agree that it is, then the volume serves as a call for all educators and educational researchers to take moral education seriously, by thinking more formally about how they might best help students to develop the ethical dispositions necessary for them to flourish. Given the significant number of chapters in the book, rather than giving a detailed evaluation of each contribution, I will instead treat them selectively, by zooming in on particularly promising insights. Specifically, I will home in on three contributions, one from each section of the book, that I consider to be especially helpful in advancing teachers’ and educational researchers’ understanding and practice of moral education in the 21^st century. First, Mark Jonas’s contribution, “Neo-Aristotelianism and Moral Education” (pp. 25–48), is the ideal theoretical introduction to the practical incarnation of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics: neo-Aristotelian character education. Particularly compelling is the way in which Jonas synthesises the central tenets of this approach, which are a great resource for both informed and novice readers, with a focus on friendships of virtue, an oft-neglected but nonetheless developmentally important aspect of Aristotelian thought. As key sources of influence on young people, Jonas argues that friendships of virtue—in this case peer-to-peer friendships where each party facilitates virtue-cultivation in the other—ought to have a more prominent place in moral education. Indeed, he, I think rightly, claims that the intensity, desire and trust involved in close friendships enables a deep sense of shared commitment to (objective) virtue (p. 37). Yet Jonas is not naïve about the possibility of such friendships going awry, and suggests that this virtue-seeking process requires guidance from teachers who provide virtue-supportive classroom environments and also serve as role models to emulate. Furthermore, seeking to be more optimistic about individual …