The “MelArete” Project: Educating children to the Ethics of Virtue and of Care

Our educational approach proposes an original interpretation of ethical education: a form of Education to the Ethics of Virtues according to the Philosophy of Care. We suggest an educational project trying to answer this core question: “How can we orient the person to pay attention to virtues, and reflect about the value they can assume in order to realize a good quality of life?”. The philosophical approach from which we started connects the ethical perspective of Ricoeur (2007), to the ones of Plato and Aristotle. Ricoeur distinguishes ethics and morality: in his reflection ethics has a teleological perspective, while moral has a deontological one. In Plato/Socrates (Alcibiades I) ethics is an educational action that allows the others to thrive in their own existential capabilities, and in Aristotle’s (Nicomachean Ethics) ethics searches for eudaimonia, a good quality of life. In our educational project with children, the methods to answer this question are: conversations: (promoting intersubjective thought), narratives (reading and writing stories about virtues), and action (promoting a reflecting cultivation of virtues in everyday life). In this paper we present the theoretical background