Character Education and Virtue Ethics in Nigerian Schools

The development of character in young people is an obligation that requires the efforts of parents, teachers and the community in a society with a decline moral tone. The involvement in immoral acts by some youths and elders in the contemporary Nigerian society may be traced to inordinate ambition of these youths and elders to accumulate material wealth. The young people engage in what is generally referred to as yahoo and yahoo plus, and elders engage in corrupt acts. Yahoo describes the act of defrauding people through the cyber connection, whereas yahoo plus involves the use of rituals to make financial and material gains. The paper examined how young people could be educated to cultivate the virtues of self-control, contentment, caring for others and self-discipline. It drew inspirations from virtue ethical theories to ground moral virtues in character education, and discussed some intervention programmes that could strengthen character development in young people. It examined the effectiveness of cultural dimension in character development, and argued that a healthy society might be vitiated by the absence of moral virtues, which is the core feature of character development, and concluded that young people develop positive self-efficacy when they are exposed to moral virtues such as trustworthiness, self-control, honesty, self-discipline, tolerance, and so on.