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Daisy Dixon, Educating Character Through the Arts, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 59, Issue 2, April 2025, Pages 406–411, https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhae085
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Reviewed by Daisy Dixon
One of my favourite school memories is of a trip with my English class to the French and Belgian WWI graves. On a cloudy spring day at the Somme battlefields, we stood near to where soldier Wilfred Owen had written some of his poems while in the trenches. My teacher read aloud Owen’s ‘Exposure’ (1918)—a lamentation of the horrors and futilities of war, and a portal to his first-hand experience of exhausted frost-bitten soldiers at the front line. Hearing the poem spoken on the site of such tragedy gave Owen’s words cutting potency. We had been studying his poetry in the classroom but listening to it out in the open where it was penned just a century ago gave it a haunting presence. We imagined the soldiers huddled together in the cold—right where we stood—their nerves shot through; their minds wearied with terror.
This was a defining experience in my young adult life. It enabled me to empathize—as much as is possible—with the unfathomable agony of soldiers in WWI trench warfare. The arts—from poetry to video games—can transport us to places like this that we could never go in reality; some places we would never wish to. Many philosophers and educators believe that this aesthetic transportation can educate our moral character. It can teach us to critically inspect our emotional responses to moral states of affairs, to see the nuances in a person’s personality, and to form new moral judgements.
