Exploring Children’s Ethical Thinking: What Virtues Are and How They Can Be Learned

This article presents an educative research designed in light of some Socratic and Aristotelian philosophical assumptions to promote ethical education in schools and to explore children’s ethical thoughts. In particular, the authors focus on an activity designed with the heuristic purpose of understanding what virtues are and how they can be learned. The presented data was collected from a group of 106 children (divided between six classes of four Italian primary schools) and qualitatively analyzed using a hybridized methodology combining the phenomenological method and grounded theory.