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This study sets out the main points in Leonardo Polo's theory of moral development, which systematically articulates goods, norms, and virtues. To make them easier to understand, each point has been compared with Kohlberg's theory of moral development, which is well known to specialists and radically different to it. We have chosen three aspects of Kohlberg's theory of moral development to highlight the uniqueness of Polo's theory: (1) Kohlberg does not account for the specificity of voluntary acts, particularly the act of deciding; (2) The options that solve Kohlberg's dilemmas are isolated from potential prior and subsequent decisions, so his moral development ignores any internal biographical storyline to the decisions themselves; and (3) The Kohlbergian morality is an ethics of justice and duty, thereby relegating the friendship, which to Polo is the culmination of ethics, to a morally irrelevant level.

Many teachers believe that becoming friends with their pupils compromises their status as teachers because they regard friendship as a role that is incompatible with that status. However, to consider friendship as a typical relationship or social interaction does not reflect the classical idea of friendship. In a classical approach to friendship, a distinction is made between friendship as an intimate "concordant duality" and its manifestation or operative exercise, which is by necessity social and is regulated by what is right and fair in the exchange of goods typical of every community. Therefore, a school community may become a community of friendship to the extent that its educational purposes are fostered and strengthened by friendship, and what is right and fair in relationships and exchange of goods is respected. Personalised education can flourish in a school community of friendship because the reciprocity inherent to friendship emphasises the personal character of pupils and teachers, and promotes the capacity for coexistence of the students, which is a pre-eminent aim of personalised education.

This article aims to expand the theoretical basis of personalised education with the help of Leonardo Polo's transcendental anthropology. Specifically, it addresses the difficulty of arranging learning and teaching so that they can be regarded as parts of a strict duality, that is to say, exercises that cannot be done without both elements. This particular mutual reference or intrinsic opening enables personalised educational growth, which is intrinsic or habitual perfecting, thus preventing learning and teaching from becoming disconnected as parallel processes that are only coincidentally related. Personalised education, inspired by Leonardo Polo, is understood as a perfecting in common of educators and learners that each of them achieves in duality with the other. In personalised education, teaching and learning are intersubjective or social manifestations that are peculiar to the essence of each human being, given that teaching and learning happen in living-with others, with the performance of individual tasks in a secondary position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the theoretical justification for an indirect method for character education inspired by Aristotle. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses a dianoethical virtue he calls synesis that can be developed without the need to expose learners to real moral situations that compromise them, as it is not a mandatory or imperative virtue like prudence, but merely a discriminatory one. Accordingly, the method we propose here is indirect as it does not try to increase ethical virtues by planning opportunities for moral action by the students, but rather by encouraging the development of their moral criteria, which for Aristotle is not a fixed rule of right actions but rather a habit developed in which the frameworks by which human affairs are judged are enriched thanks particularly to education based on morally meaningful stories and fables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to St. Thomas' theory of knowledge, judgment has the look of certain end in the intelective process initiated by means of simple aprehention. The second operation of intelect is necesary for knowing truth as adequation "intellectus et rei" as well as extramental character of object known with the first operation, so that judgment can be said "generator" of the bounds of Aristotle and Aquinas' "ens ut verum". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]