The Classical Teacher Parent Edition - Late Summer 2021 by Memoria Press

Saving Western civilization one student at a time.

Late Summer 2021

Moral Illiteracy and the Case for Character Education by William Kirk Kilpatrick

Ethics Without Virtue by Christina Hoff Sommers Curing the Disease of the Soul by Dr. Dan Sheffler Reaching for Infinity by Jon Christianson

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

After Virtue by Martin Cothran

n 1981, a book was published by a well-regarded, but-until-then-not-terribly-famous philosopher. The book was called After Virtue; the author was Alasdair MacIntyre. The book sent shock waves throughout the academic community—shock waves that resonate even today. Some consider it the most influential book of philosophy published in the last fifty years. In the succeeding years MacIntyre became the closest thing in the field of philosophy to a rock star— although admittedly the money was probably not nearly as good. Why this book? What did MacIntyre say that was so revolutionary? In fact, what MacIntyre said was not revolutionary at all, but quite conservative. What he did was articulate an older view of morality that had been buried under layer upon layer of modern ethical thinking. What would it be like, he asked, if some worldwide catastrophe occurred—an environmental disaster or, let's say, a virus—that resulted in a rebellion against science and in its ensuing destruction? Imagine all we had left was a portion of the periodic table, a few pieces of laboratory equipment, and a few random scientific terms, none of which we knew the use or the meaning because the system of scientific thought that gave them meaning had disappeared. According to MacIntyre, this is precisely the state in which we find the language of morality today. Having lost any central system of ethical thought that could arbitrate our disagreements about morality, the only standard by which we judge what is right is by what is right in our own eyes. MacIntyre points out that around the seventeenth century, the beginning of what we now call the Enlightenment, Western thinkers largely abandoned traditional views of morality. They ended up in three identifiable camps: Philosophers such as the French thinker Diderot and the English philosopher David Hume tried to base their view of morality on sentiment; 2

Letter from the Editor

the philosopher Immanuel Kant attempted to base moral thought on reason itself; and the Christian thinker Soren Kierkegaard tried to base it on the will. Sentiment, reason, and free will. They all sound good. But none of these theories has succeeded in making sense of what it is to be good, and how to ensure our actions are right. MacIntyre pointed out that the traditional system of ethics that had been abandoned during the Enlightenment as intellectually unfashionable is still there, and it still makes sense. He describes it in one of the most influential statements ever made by a modern philosopher, simple in its formulation, and sensible in its meaning: Consider first the general form of the moral scheme …, which in a variety of diverse forms and with numerous rivals came for long periods to dominate the European Middle Ages from the twelfth century onwards, a scheme which included both classical and theistic elements. Its basic structure is that which Aristotle analysed in the Nicomachean Ethics. Within that teleological scheme there is a fundamental contrast between man-as-he-happens-tobe and man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature. Ethics is the science which is to enable men to understand how they make the transition from the former state to the latter. [Emphasis added]

As Christians we know that this "essential nature" is the image of God in us. A right action is one through which, by means of God's grace, we bring our souls back into compliance with the true image of God in us. And the chief means by which this is done, said MacIntyre, is by the telling of stories that extol virtuous behavior—heroic stories of Fortitude, Justice, and Love—stories which can only make sense in the context of a civilized community. The Christian implications of what MacIntyre argues should be apparent and make sense of why, just several years after writing After Virtue, he became a Christian. MemoriaPress.com

Late Summer 2021

FEATURED ARTICLES

Letter from the Editor by Martin Cothran...................................................... 2 Through a Glass Wine-Darkly by Jon Chistianson......................................... 4 How to Argue by Martin Cothran................................................................... 6 Curing the Disease of the Soul by Dr. Dan Sheffler......................................... 8 Ethics Without Virtue by Christina Hoff Sommers.......................................... 10 Virtue and Discipline in the Arts by Dr. Carol Reynolds................................ 13 Tentatio: A Teacher of Virtue by Cheryl Swope........................................... 15 Reaching for Infinity by Jon Chistianson..................................................... 17 Moral Illiteracy and the Case for Character Education by William Kirk Kilpatrick 19

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LATIN

THROUGH A GLASS WINE-DARKLY by Jon Christianson

ave you heard the one about the color blue? The story goes that the Greeks had no word for the color. In Homer, things traditionally thought of as blue—the sea, the sky—go by gloomy words like "brazen" or "wine-dark." Trivial as it may seem, this is the fact that launched a thousand speculative ships towards dubious frontiers: This proves, some say, that the Greeks had no concept of blue, or stranger yet, that the Greeks could not see blue at all. Some scholars of yesteryear went so far as to suggest that having no word for blue causes an inability to perceive or process the color. While variations of these claims have enjoyed the rounds as pop-science topics du jour, the reach of their conclusions far exceeds the clarity of their premises. How does language relate to perception and understanding, and can one language foster this relationship better than another? These considerations may dwell beyond the regular domain of the classroom Latinist, but the question underpins the goals of the entire discipline. A compelling case for the study of Latin in our century, beyond the prosaic benefits of a voluminous vocabulary and a leg up on the lexicons of medicine and law, is that Latin is a model for thinking and speaking that is more precise and less ambiguous than English. If an educator extols the merits of Latin on this basis—that Latin is a pathway to superior understanding—then it matters quite a lot what the Greeks thought about blue. This is not a discourse on actual brain chemistry. One cannot approach language's relationship to the brain (neurolinguistics) without trespassing on hotly contested ground. Theories and experiments abound Jon Christianson is the Latin director and editor at Memoria Press. He teaches Latin for the Memoria Press Online Academy and has taught Latin and classical literature at Highlands Latin School.

Through a Glass Wine-Darkly

on the subject, of which only the most extreme variations—such as the aforesaid Greek being literally colorblind to blue—have been roundly discarded. Discussion of the brain-language relationship, therefore, is essentially futile outside the laboratory. Psycholinguistics, however, refers to language's relationship to the mind, a distinction that permits us to explore it. While still germane to the brain, we can talk about the psychology of language according to the mental models we develop through learning and practice. The intellect sorts perceived realities according to a mental architecture built out of symbolic systems that permit one to know more than one perceives. These symbolic systems are the bridge between perception and understanding. Mathematics is an especially illustrative symbolic system of this kind. Our neural apparatus for perceiving number is actually quite weak; try to mentally picture exactly one thousand balloons. Mathematics is a system we have devised to render large and complex numerical realities into comprehensible symbols. "1,000" is a quality one can understand quite easily, and one can apply it to those balloons even as one's natural enumerating faculties fail. That, in a word, is language; whereas, however, the quantitative symbolic systems of mathematics are largely universal, the qualitative symbolic systems of language vary demonstrably and to great degree. In assessing the differences between each language, we can approach how Greek and English handle the color blue, and how English and Latin compare as models for thought. We can compare languages by the definition and use of words (semantics) and the structure and use of grammar (syntax). Of the former, no semantic study has been examined more extensively than color. English vocabulary has a huge spectrum of color words, from the essentials like "red" to tiny subgroups of red like MemoriaPress.com

"scarlet" and "vermilion." This variety affords English greater precision; an English speaker hears "vermilion" and can reliably ascertain from it a very specific color. In contrast, Greek color words are fairly few and therefore must cover much larger swaths of the spectrum. The range of hues we describe as blue fall somewhere between the Greek words glaukos, meaning "green" or "gray" or even "bright," and kuanos, meaning "dark" or "murky," from which we derive "cyan." A Greek speaker hears glaukos but cannot reliably deduce from the word as specific a color as in English. Greek can fill the gaps with oblique metaphorical language, such as using words that describe a blue thing as a word for blue itself. Every language engages in this sort of metaphorical language, including English. However, while English uses such metaphors to expand a color vocabulary of extraordinary range and character—violet, ochre, salmon, saffron—Greek's metaphorical vocabulary of this kind still results in a far scantier, and thus less descriptive, color lexicon than English. This certainly doesn't make the color blue incomprehensible to a Greek speaker, but with Greek as one's basis for mental models of color, the discrete quality of blue is lost beneath the murk and glare of less descriptive or distinct terminology. Just as one can compare the semantic merits of Greek and English, it is in considering the syntax of English and Latin that the excellence of the latter shines. For example, Latin is an inflected language, such that the verbal qualities of person, number, tense, voice, and mood are always implicitly present in the formation of each verb. The Latin word do, which we translate as "I give," is unambiguously first person singular present active indicative; unlike the English "I give," whose verbal qualities are clear only so long as the context is clear, every verbal quality available in Latin is discretely present in do, just as it is in the more complex dabamini 1-877-862-1097

or dedissemus. This precision of Latin verb inflection facilitates thought and speech that describe actions and their relationship to each other with an intrinsic accuracy that English can only do extrinsically. What makes Latin not merely different from but better than English in this regard is this ergonomic quality, this suitability to convey ideas correctly and consistently. The Latin tense structure suits the language to express tense relationships in a complex way. Latin verbs correlate in form to each other in time (past, present, or future) and aspect (incomplete or complete). Latin verbs have common stems indicating incompleteness (dat, dabat, dabit) and completeness (dedit, dederat, dederit), as well as common forms between tenses that correlate to each other across the present (est and datus est), past (erat and datus erat), and future (erit and datus erit). English can translate all of these verbs, but there are no such indicators of these relationships; "he gives" and "he gave" do not have any common forms with "he was giving" and "he had given" to correlate them with each other. English describes the same actions, but without the correlation across time and aspect. Language does not shape our perception, but our understanding. The Greek and the Englishman may both look upon the same sea and perceive the same colors, but while the Englishman would understand the color to be its own separate category of color, the Greek would understand the color in relation to some color for which he has a category—perhaps a Homeric wine-dark. Just so, Latin provides various models of understanding that exceed those of English in clarity, order, and precision. Each language has its own traits that suit it for certain intellectual functions; English itself has its own excellences that exceed Greek and even Latin. However, those functions at which Latin excels are of great benefit to the classical student who seeks precise understanding of complicated truths. Through a Glass Wine-Darkly

LOGIC

HOW TO ARGUE by Martin Cothran

hen I worked in public policy many years ago, one of my jobs was to take long policy papers from think tanks and reduce them down to one or two pages for state lawmakers. I also wrote the scripts for a popular radio show called "Point/Counterpoint" on a very large network in which two people made their case for and against some question and then rebutted each other―all in ninety seconds. In the course of doing these things I developed my own format wherein I wrote a brief introduction to the issue, stated the facts about the issue, formulated what the issue really was, gave the argument for my own position on the issue, refuted the common arguments against my position, and then stated a conclusion. I thought my format was quite clever and took comfort in how smart I was to have invented it. Only later did I realize that, as it turns out, Cicero had come up with this format about two thousand years before the thought had occurred to me. Cicero laid out a six-part arrangement1 for an argumentative essay. Arrangement (dispositio or taxis) is the term we use for how one orders a speech or an essay. In ancient rhetoric, arrangement referred solely to the order to be observed in an oration, but the term has broadened to include all considerations of the ordering of discourse, especially on a large scale. In addition, Cicero aligned certain rhetorical appeals articulated centuries earlier by Aristotle with specific parts of the oration. In the introduction, it is necessary for one to establish his or her own Martin Cothran is the editor of The Classical Teacher and author of Traditional Logic Books I & II, Material Logic, and Classical Rhetoric. [1] Definitions of Cicero's terms have been adapted from rhetoric.byu.edu.

How to Argue

authority. Therefore, here one employs ethical appeals (ethos). In the next four parts of the oration— statement of facts, division, proof, and refutation— one chiefly employs logical arguments (logos). In the conclusion, one finishes up by employing emotional appeals (pathos). It is in the first part, the Introduction of a speech (exordium), where one announces the subject and purpose of the discourse, and where one usually employs the persuasive appeal of ethos in order to establish credibility with the audience. Ethos names the persuasive appeal of one's character, especially how this character is established by means of the speech or discourse. Aristotle claimed that one needs to appear both knowledgeable about one's subject and benevolent. Are you able to communicate with your audience that you know what you are talking about, and that you are honest? For example, Socrates, in his defense of charges of atheism and corrupting the youth of Athens, opened by humbly admitting he had never argued a case in court, and that the wisdom attributed to him by the Oracle at Delphi was only his own realization that he was not wise (and in knowing his own lack of wisdom, proving it). In the Statement of Facts (narratio) the speaker provides a narrative account of what has happened and generally explains the nature of the case. In Division (partitio), the speaker outlines what will follow, in accordance with what has been stated as the stasis. Stasis is both the procedure within rhetorical invention by which one asks certain questions in order to arrive at the point at issue in the debate, and the point at issue in the debate itself. Four such basic kinds of conflict were categorized by the Greeks and Romans: conjectural, definitional, qualitative, and translative. MemoriaPress.com

QUESTIONS TO FIND STASIS

KIND OF QUESTION

KIND OF STASIS

Did he do it?

of Fact

Conjectural Stasis

What did he do?

of Definition

Definitional Stasis

THE OUTLINE OF AN ARGUMENTATIVE PAPER Introduction: Statement of Facts: Division: Proof: 1.

Was it just/ expedient? Is this the right venue for this issue?

of Quality

Qualitative Stasis

3. Refutation:

of Jurisdiction

Translative Stasis

The Proof (confirmatio) is the main body of the speech where one offers logical arguments. The appeal through logos is emphasized here. Logos names the appeal to reason. It is accomplished in rhetoric through the use of argument, which involves giving the reasons for your conclusion, and example, in which you offer analogies or anecdotes that allow your audience to see why you are right. Logos was famously practiced by Odysseus in arguing with Achilles in the Iliad that he should come back to the battle in order to preserve his honor. Refutation (refutatio), as the name connotes, is the section of a speech devoted to answering the counterarguments of one's opponent. Logos is again emphasized here, but used now to show not how your argument is right, but how the contradictory argument of the person who would disagree with you is not rational. 1-877-862-1097

Conclusion:

The Conclusion (peroratio) usually sums up the case made in the entire speech, and makes it appeal through pathos. Pathos names the appeal to emotion. This involves putting your audience in the right frame of mind, thereby making your hearers want to believe you. This is done by knowing the states of mind in which certain emotions are felt, the people by whom they are felt, and the grounds on which they are felt. In Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the president appealed to the honor of those who had died in that great Civil War battle to enroll his audience's emotions in his cause. Once I realized that it was not I but Cicero who thought up this format, I was able to gain a deeper understanding of why I was doing what I was doing, and in consequence, was able to argue better. How to Argue

all want our children to become virtuous, so we naturally shop around for the schools and communities that have the best results. Upon inspection, however, we find that the graduating classes at even the best schools are not infallibly filled with saints. Parents eventually complain. Teachers complain too. "Perhaps we should include more hard physical labor," one will say around the break room table. "Perhaps we should devote more time to memorizing Scripture," another will muse. "If only we could balance all these elements into a perfect harmony with the right leadership, sufficient funding, and ample buildings," an enterprising third will wonder, "perhaps then we could finally teach virtue." In the world of classical education, we have these kinds of conversations on a daily basis, but the classical tradition bears clear witness that virtue cannot—at least not straightforwardly—be taught. The standard classical answer goes like this: Virtue, by its very essence, requires the free cooperation of our will. There is no sequence of steps that the teacher can take that will guarantee that the student chooses virtue for himself. If there were, the virtue would no longer be virtue; it would be the mere programming of a computer or the conditioning of a pet. The virtue would not proceed from the student himself (a condition the medievals call "aseity" from the Latin a se, or "from oneself"). Instead, the student would be a mere instrument in the hands of the teacher, a mere extension of the teacher's own virtue. Conceding all this, however, we may still observe that the same logic applies to nearly every other area in school. For a student to really understand mathematics he must grasp the notions of arithmetic and algebra for himself. This involves the student's freedom and he can always dig in his heels (as I am sure some of you are aware). We ordinarily think, however, that algebra can be taught.

Curing the Disease of the Soul

MemoriaPress.com

Why is it, then, that we do not have a virtue class in the same way that we have an algebra class? Furthermore, why do we have the sneaking suspicion that many of our teenagers would fail to become paragons of virtue by the end of the term even if we had such a course? We can note right away the apparent failure of all such attempts in the past. Granting that there will always be a handful of recalcitrant or incapable students, we nevertheless have reliable methods for instilling the knowledge and skills of algebra in the minds of most students. We can see that these methods work because the history of algebra education includes: (1) the desire to teach algebra, (2) many attempts to teach algebra to a large number of students over a long period of time, and (3) the success of these attempts in the overwhelming majority of cases, allowing always for sheer inability in some and that pesky free will in all. When we similarly survey the history of virtue education, however, we find parallels for the first two but not the third. Parents have always been eager to instill virtue in their children, and many, many attempts have been made over thousands of years with an abundance of capable teachers—and yet, even in the most thoroughgoing of these attempts we do not see the kinds of consistent, widespread results that we see in the case of algebra. To be sure, we see a few good men. We see a handful emerge from our schools with Fortitude and Temperance, Justice and Prudence. A few become true saints, radiating Faith, Hope, and Love. Would that I could say in truth "all," or even "most." When these few reflect on their lives and give us autobiographical testimonies, they often credit their education, their teachers, and their parents. It would be a drastic mistake, therefore, to think that our efforts to teach virtue have no effect or that it would be better just to give up. Still, we must squarely confront the track record of our attempts at virtue education, whether they be Christian or pagan, classical or progressive, ancient or modern. The truth is that no one has invented a virtue factory that reliably cranks out nobility, and it is reasonable for us to doubt that anyone ever will. Dr. Dan Sheffler is a professor of philosophy with Memoria College and has taught philosophy, logic, Latin, and history at the University of Kentucky, Georgetown College, and Asbury College.

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In the first place, virtue is not a kind of information to take in or even a kind of skill to master. Once the algebra teacher has transmitted certain facts and skills to the students, his job is done. Virtue, by contrast, refers to a student's fundamental character disposing him toward the Good. Certain pieces of information may be invaluable in the process of developing this character, such as a knowledge of the mechanisms behind temptation or the ability to define the word "prudence." This knowledge, however, does not by itself constitute virtue. Certain skills may also be taught that make virtue easier to acquire, such as the skills of reading literature, philosophy, and Scripture. One can master all these skills, however, without becoming virtuous. Even if the teacher is himself deeply virtuous (and many are not), there is no direct way for him to extract the character from his own chest so that he might drop it into the chests of his students. At best, he can mold what virtue they may have, inspire them onward, point them in the right direction, warn them of the dangers should they fail, open doors of opportunity, reward virtue when it appears, and make available all the ancillary knowledge and skill that support it. He can water and weed the little garden, but he possesses neither the initial seeds nor the power of their growth. In the second place, we may observe something deep inside us that militates against virtue where there is no such antagonistic force in the case of algebra or other disciplines. We carry about within us a disease of the soul that tends ever toward pride and pleasure, toward disorders of mind and emotion, toward greed, anger, lust, fear, arrogance, and malice. Virtue stands as a direct challenge to the empire of this disease and all its effects, while algebra challenges at most a little of our sloth, leaving the rest unchecked. The core of virtue, then, involves a deeply interior war against these passions that requires a fundamental conversion of the soul toward the Good and a commitment to persist in this conversion in the face of future temptation. We call this conversion "repentance," and it comes by the grace of God. As teachers, we can hope to be channels of the grace of God into the lives of our students, but we would do better to pray for their conversion than complain to our fellows about their failures. Curing the Disease of the Soul

This article was originally published in The American Scholar in 1984.

hat do students in our nation's schools do all day? Most of them are clearly not spending their time reading the classics, learning math, or studying the physical sciences. It is likely that, along with photography workshops, keeping journals, and perhaps learning about computers, students spend part of their day in moral education classes. But these classes are not, as one might expect, designed to acquaint students with the Western moral tradition. Professional theorists in schools of education have found that tradition wanting and have devised an alternative, one they have marketed in public schools with notable success. The leaders of reform are convinced that traditional middleclass morality is at best useless and at worst pernicious, and they have confidence in the new morality that is to replace the old and in the novel techniques to be applied to this end. One gains some idea of the new moral educators from the terminology they use. Courses in ethics are called Values Clarification or Cognitive Moral Development; teachers are "values processors," "values facilitators," or "reflective-active listeners"; lessons in moral reasoning are "sensitivity modules"; volunteer work in the community is an "action module"; and teachers "dialogue" with students to help them discover their own systems of values. In these dialogues the teacher avoids discussing "old bags of virtues," such as wisdom, courage, compassion, and "proper" behavior, because any attempt to instill these would be to indoctrinate the student. Some leaders of the new reform movement advise teachers that effective moral education cannot take place in the "authoritarian" atmosphere of the average American high school. The teacher ought to democratize the classroom, turning it into a "just community" where the student and teacher have an equal say. Furthermore, the student who takes a normative ethics course in college will likely encounter a professor who also has a principled aversion to the inculcation of moral precepts and who will confine classroom discussion to such issues of social concern as the Karen Ann Quinlan case, recombinant DNA research, or the moral responsibilities of corporations. The result i s a s yst e m of mora l education that is silent about virtue. The teaching of virtue is not viewed as a legitimate aim of a moral curriculum, but there is no dearth of alternative approaches. From 10 the time the

Ethics

WITHOUT

Virtue BY CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS

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values education movement began in the late 1960s, its theorists have produced an enormous number of articles, books, films, manuals, and doctoral dissertations; there are now journals, advanced degree programs, and entire institutes dedicated exclusively to moral pedagogy; and for the past several years, teachers, counselors, and education specialists have been attending conferences, seminars, workshops, and retreats to improve their skills in values processing. At present, two opposing ideologies dominate moral education: the values clarification movement, whose best-known proponent is Sidney Simon of the University of Massachusetts School of Education, and the cognitive moral development movement, whose chief spokesman is Lawrence Kohlberg, a professor of psychology and education, and director of the Center for Moral Education at Harvard. Values clarification, according to Sidney Simon, is "based on the premise that none of us has the 'right' set of values to pass on to other people's children." Its methods are meant to help students to get at "their own feelings, their own ideas, their own beliefs, so that the choices and decisions they make are conscious and deliberate, based on their own value system." To help students discover what it is that they genuinely value, they are asked to respond to questionnaires called "strategies." Some typical questions are: Which animal would you rather be: an ant, a beaver, or a donkey? Which season do you like best? Do you prefer hiking, swimming, or watching television? In one strategy called "Values Geography," the student is helped to discover his geographical preferences; other lessons solicit his reaction to seat belts, messy handwriting, hiking, wall-to-wall carpeting, cheating, abortion, hit-and-run drivers, and a mother who severely beats a two-year-old child. Western literature and history are two traditional alienating influences that the values clarification movement is on guard against. Simon has written that he has ceased to find meaning "in the history of war or the structure of a sonnet, and more meaning in the search to find value in life." He and his colleagues believe that exposure to one's cultural heritage is not likely to be morally beneficial to the "average student." The values clarification theorist does not believe that moral sensibility and social conscience are, in significant measure, learned by reading and discussing the classics. Instead Simon speaks of the precious legacy we can leave to "generations of young people if we teach them to set their priorities and rank order the marvelous items in life's cafeteria." Christina Hoff Sommers is the author of Vice & Virtue in Everyday Life and Right and Wrong: Basic Readings in Ethics, as well as a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

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As a college teacher coping with the motley ideologies of high school graduates, I find this alarming. Young people today, many of whom are in a complete moral stupor, need to be shown that there is an important distinction between moral and nonmoral decisions. Values clarification blurs the distinction. Children are queried about their views on homemade Christmas gifts, people who wear wigs, and whether or not they approve of abortion or would turn in a hitand-run driver as if no significant differences existed among these issues. It is not surprising that teachers trained in neutrality and the principled avoidance of "moralizing" sometimes find themselves in bizarre classroom situations. In a junior high school in Newton, Massachusetts, a teacher put on the blackboard a poster of a Hell's Angel wearing a swastika. The students were asked to react. "He's honest, anyway. He's living out his own feelings," answered one. "He's not fooling," said another. When the students seemed to react favorably to the Hell's Angel, the teacher ventured to suggest that "an alienated person might not be happy." The student has values; the values clarification teacher is merely "facilitating" the student's access to them. Thus, no values are taught. The emphasis is on learning how, not on learning that. The student does not learn that acts of stealing are wrong; he learns how to respond to such acts. The values clarification course is, in this sense, contentless. Lawrence Kohlberg, the leader of the second major movement in moral education, shares with values clarification educators a low opinion of traditional morality. In his contribution to Theodore and Nancy Sizer's anthology, Moral Education, he writes, "Far from knowing whether it can be taught, I have no idea what virtue really is." Kohlberg's disclaimer is not a Socratic confession of ignorance; he considers the teaching of traditional virtues to be at best a waste of time and at worst coercive. Kohlberg's authority derives from his cognitive developmental approach to moral education. Following John Dewey, Kohlberg distinguishes three main stages of moral development (each of which is partitioned into a higher and lower stage, making six in all). The first stage is called the premoral or preconventional reward/punishment level. In the second stage, morals are conventional but unreflective. In the third stage, moral principles are autonomously chosen on rational grounds. Kohlberg's research applies Piaget's idea that the child possesses certain cognitive structures that come successively into play as the child develops. From the assumption of innateness, it is but a short step to the belief that the appropriate external circumstances will promote the full moral development of the child. It then becomes the job Ethics Without Virtue

Young people today, many of whom are in a complete moral stupor, need to be shown that there is an important distinction between moral and nonmoral decisions.

of the educator to provide those circumstances, "facilitating" the child to his moral maturity. The deprecation of moralizing common to values clarification and cognitive development theory has been effective even in those schools where the reforms have not yet penetrated. Increasingly nowadays, few teachers have the temerity to praise any middle-class virtues. The exception is the virtue of tolerance. But, when tolerance is the sole virtue, students' capacity for moral indignation, so important for moral development, is severely inhibited. The result is moral passivity and confusion and a shift of moral focus from the individual to society. The student entering college today shows the effects of an educational system that has kept its distance from the traditional virtues. Unencumbered by the "old bag of virtues," the student arrives toting a ragbag of another stripe whose contents may be roughly itemized as follows: psychological egoism (the belief that the primary motive for action is selfishness), moral relativism (the doctrine that what is praiseworthy or contemptible is a matter of cultural conditioning), and radical tolerance (the doctrine that to be culturally and socially aware is to understand and excuse the putative wrongdoer). Another item in the bag is the conviction that the seat of moral responsibility is found in society and its institutions, not in individuals. The half-baked relativism of the college student tends to undermine his common sense. In a term paper that is far from atypical, one of my students wrote that Jonathan Swift's "modest proposal" for solving the problem of hunger in Ireland by harvesting Irish babies for food was "good for Swift's society, but not for ours." In one discussion in my introductory philosophy class, several students were convinced that the death of one person and the death of ten thousand is equally bad. When a sophomore was asked whether she saw Nagasaki as the moral equivalent of a traffic accident, she replied, "From a moral point of view, yes." Teachers 12

Ethics Without Virtue

of moral philosophy who are not themselves moral agnostics trade such stories for dark amusement. It is fair to say that many college students are thoroughly confused about morality. What they sorely need are some straightforward courses in moral philosophy and a sound and unabashed introduction to the Western moral tradition—something they may never have had before. But few teachers will use that tradition as a source of moral instruction: The fear of indoctrination is even stronger in the colleges than it is at primary and secondary schools. How, finally, is one to account for the ethics-withoutvirtue phenomenon? A fully adequate answer is beyond me, but clearly there is a great deal more to the story than the national disenchantment with a system of education that "failed to prevent" moral lapses such as Watergate. A historian of ideas would probably take us back to romantics like Rousseau and to realists like Marx. George Steiner has written of this theme in Rousseau: In the Rousseauist mythology of conduct, a man could commit a crime either because his education had not taught him how to distinguish good and evil, or because he had been corrupted by society. Responsibility lay with his schooling or environment, for evil cannot be native to the soul. And because the individual is not wholly responsible, he cannot be wholly damned.

The values clarification theorists can find little to disagree with in this description. For social-minded reformers, justice is the principal virtue, and social policy is where ethics is really "at." The assumption is that there is an implicit conflict between the just society and the repressive morality of its undemocratic predecessors. The fate of those societies that have actually succeeded in replacing personal morality with social policy is the going price for ignoring the admonition of Max Weber: "He who seeks salvation of the soul—of his own and others— should not seek it along the avenue of politics."

Virtue and Discipline in the Arts by Dr. Carol Reynolds

ew people recognize engagement in the arts as an intrinsic element of spiritual virtue. To use the words of Pope John Paul II from his "Letter to Artists," penned in 1999, [T]rue art has a close affinity with the world of faith, so that, even in situations where culture and the Church are far apart, art remains a kind of bridge to religious experience.

While Discipline is not included in the list of cardinal virtues enshrined in classical philosophy and Christian theology (Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance), the practice of discipline plays an undeniable role in the cultivation of these virtues. Principles of discipline and order are undeniable bedrocks of Western culture. Plato spoke about the "virtue of each thing, whether body or soul, instrument or creature" developing "not by chance but as the result of the order and truth and art which are imparted to them." The quality of a child's life will be shaped by his or her capacity for self-discipline. Not long ago, children routinely learned lessons in self-discipline from exposure to ancient legends and classical myths. Great stories of the Bible (such as Jacob disciplining his emotions to labor for Rachel) shaped societal values. Daily conversations would be peppered with maxims like "A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step." Admired figures spoke winsomely about discipline, including the legendary coach Vince Lombardi, who called it "a state of mind you could call 'character in action.'" Think how far our popular culture has lurched from such insight! Living in a society where false winds blow the praises of instant gratification and superficial achievement, where can we turn to foster selfdiscipline in a child? What about a study of the arts, undertaken not only as an acquisition of skills or a search for creative expression, but as a disciplined path that unites us with critical elements of our Western heritage? Until recent decades, a methodical study of the arts formed a routine part of nearly every child's education. As recently as my youth, music filled the air of our neighborhood on any given day after school. Perhaps the tinkling of scales on a piano floated through a window, or maybe the blast of a trombone scared off the birds; such musical sounds documented the effort of young people to master the intricacies of an instrument. These same children likely would have absorbed a systematic program in music and art Dr. Carol Reynolds is a widely acclaimed author, speaker, and educator. She regularly leads arts tours throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, recently in partnership with the Smithsonian Institute.

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appreciation during the school week, as well as some exposure to dance and theater. Was the goal to put more virtuoso performers on the stage? Absolutely not. The goal was to establish paths to the cultivation of virtuous qualities like patience, diligence, persistence, and steadfastness. There was a general recognition that the discipline and reward of studying the arts laid the groundwork for whatever avenues the child pursued as an adult, be it academic, technical, or a venture requiring craftsmanship. So let's consider some examples of how this cultivation looks in practice. A child who studies an art form must master a roster of impulses early on: the impulse to wiggle or lose focus; the impulse to be weird ("Hmmm, what happens if I hold the recorder with my feet?"); the impulse to slither off or throw a fit when the task gets tricky. The study of any art moves i n a met hodical process using baseline methods such as "copying the masters." T hat is why st udents of painting set up their easels in galleries and repeatedly copy the masterworks. That too explains the exhausting routine dancers follow daily at the barre underneath the watchful eye of the instructor. Modeling oneself after something exemplary instills moral, ethical, and spiritual discipline. It supports our g r ow t h i n t he c a rd i n a l virtues, mentioned above, as well as the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love. Educators and parents desiring to teach these precepts do not always realize how readily the arts support their efforts, helping a child control the ear, eye, mind, and body, as well as discipline the emotions. Thus, music appears in the ancient structure of learning called the Quadrivium not as an elective, but as a cornerstone. A disciplined exposure to the arts also disproves the unfortunate belief that "creativity" is a free force sweeping us along, with minimal effort, toward a laudable accomplishment. How often have you heard: "My neighbor plays piano so great, and he doesn't even read music!" Or: "You should see how well my granddaughter draws, and she's never had the first lesson." My answer is to counter: "Just think what Neighbor A or Granddaughter B would achieve with 14

Virtue and Discipline in the Arts

some training!" Disciplined pedagogy and the selfdisciplined acquisition of artistic skills do not diminish self-expression; rather, they are the best means to attain it. Today's children are also fed the drivel that anything they do is "creative" as long as it fulfills a loose definition of self-expression. This naïve notion may apply to toddlers, but once a child hits the age of five or six we must take a disciplined approach to learning the arts. There are fixed principles in every art form—"Turn the brush gradually like this to make this kind of line"—and a good teacher nurtures selfdiscipline—"I know you'd rather dive in, but let's first figure out the mix of colors for the results you want." Discipline is needed not only to do an art form, but to appreciate it. For example, most children (and adults!) are brought up listening to music that lasts approximately three minutes (or, in the case of snippets from film scores, less). The focus necessary to absorb the non-verbal language of music requires a much longer attention span. The capacity for such aural understanding needs to be developed. We can look at other art forms and discover these same principles. Dance cannot be appreciated fully until the observer realizes, for example, that a ballerina's "delicate" feet are muscular weapons, calloused from years of physical pressure, that bleed under the stress of pointe shoes. A child's understanding of a painting changes when she finds out how many times the artist sketches a face, even when it seems inconsequential—one of dozens in a crowd. To return to the letter of John Paul II (himself an actor and playwright in youth), the real significance of the arts lies in their link to God: "the Divine Artist passes on to the human artist a spark of His own surpassing wisdom, calling him to share in His creative power." How differently we would embrace and teach the arts if they were more widely understood as a reflection of the Divine Creation! Administrative discussions of their "extra-curricular" nature would disappear. Instead, the arts would be embraced for their unique power to prepare a child for the challenges of adult life through the strengthening of the most virtuous qualities. MemoriaPress.com

SIMPLY CLASSICAL

TENTATIO: A TEACHER OF VIRTUE by Cheryl Swope

ne Latin word encapsulates suffering: tentatio. Wrapped with adversity and affliction, tentatio depicts trial and temptation, the intense internal struggle from the crosses we bear and the crosses we cause others to bear. Tentatio can make us writhe and groan, tremble and doubt. With good reason we pray: "Lead us not into temptation" (ne nos inducas in tentationem). Might tentatio be a teacher of virtue? In Psalm 119:71 the psalmist writes, "It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes," and in Psalm 119:67, "Before I was afflicted I went astray: but now have I kept thy word." Through tentatio God drives us to know our frailties and face our helplessness with singleness of purpose: that we may turn to Jesus. "I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord" (Psalm 122:1). This is not intended to be on an ad hoc, crisis-by-crisis basis. This is eternal. "And I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever" (Psalm 23:6). Though undeniably painful, suffering and sorrow become neither futile nor fatal in the heart of the Christian. Through the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of our Good Shepherd, our sins are forgiven, our burdens are His, and His righteousness is ours. We bring up our children "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord" (Ephesians 6:4) not that they might become merely moral and upright in character, but that they might have eternal life in His name. From this mystery comes fruit: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such things there is no law" (Galatians 5:22-23). Cheryl Swope is the author of Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child and Memoria Press' Simply Classical Curriculum, as well as editor of the Simply Classical Journal.

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In our home our children bear burdens. They suffer from delusions, obsessions, and loneliness due to mental illness. Much could be said about this, especially because bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia seem neglected topics in education and in the church, yet tentatio is nothing new, nor is the remedy. Consider words from a hymn stanza written by Sigismund Weingärtner in 1609: In God, my faithful God, I trust when dark my road; Though many woes o'ertake me Yet He will not forsake me. His love it is doth send them; And when 'tis best will end them. My sins assail me sore, But I despair no more. I build on Christ, who loves me; From this rock nothing moves me. To him I all surrender, To him, my soul's defender.

I trust when dark my road. My son composes music to ease his mind and my daughter writes poetry to unburden her soul. In the evenings, both young adults often sing hymns with me at the piano. This is not to be virtuous, but to know mercy. "He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul" (Psalm 23:2-3). My children's life expectancy is shorter than most. In life as in death our confidence cannot be in the flesh. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me" (Psalm 23:4). From this merciful consolation comes a desire to give consolation to others. Perhaps this is virtue. As Gene Veith often writes, "Our moral action in the temporal realm should not be primarily focused on our interior self-improvement but should be directed outside ourselves to benefit our neighbor." This can become the focus of teaching, singing, and praying with our children: We do not seek virtue for ourselves. "He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake" (Psalm 23:3). Tentatio: A Teacher of Virtue

The burdens our family faces may not be your precise trials, but we know you have trials. Jesus tells us: "In the world ye shall have tribulation." But in the same breath He assures us abundantly: "But be of good cheer; I have overcome the world" (John 16:33). "He giveth power to the faint; and to them who have no might he increaseth strength" (Isaiah 40:29). No matter our burdens—the ones we bear for a short time or the ones we bear every day—we pray for peace and joy, confidence and strength amid tentatio, as we turn away from our own perceived virtue and to the One who restores our souls. Through Christian studies, hymns, and prayers in our home we have often spoken openly about suffering. One day, during the semester we studied God's presence in our struggles, Michelle retreated to her bedroom and emerged with words written on a page. I helped turn a phrase or two, but otherwise the thoughts and words are hers. In her collection Through Time's Looking Glass she included this poem to share. We all live in, with, and under tentatio. May this understanding lead us to serve each other as we receive the beneficent lovingkindness of the One who suffered on our behalf.

Tentatio: A Teacher of Virtue

Ballad of the Suffering One Little Beth lies all alone, on her bed awake. Prayerful minded, "God alone, Jesus for my sake, Thou wilt save me, God most high, from all without, within. My darkest, most depressing thoughts, all I ever did…." Through the night, I mourn, I weep. "Jesus, answer; care." Daylight shall be gone to grave, Jesus still is there. Though I lie and some may place stones atop my head, Jesus answers yet again. Jesus answers prayer. "At your portal, at your door, I am listening. I hear your cry; I hear your plea. With light and airy footsteps tread, Gladly follow Me." At the throne before the Lamb my journey here be done. He looks me up, he looks me down, says "Unto Me, child come." "Fellow sufferer," He says, "I bid thee, welcome Home." So here I am, and here I'll stay, within the court of God’s own Lamb. At His table He has called me to Himself again. He picks me up; He cradles me in His tender arms. He brings me home; He makes me His, The Sufferer for the suffering one.

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JUST

TEMPER

CE N A

by Jon Christianson

IT F

UDEN

ITUD

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is the prerogative of the Christian to reach for unreachable things. The Christian teacher seeks to guide others toward a life of virtue. That virtue can be taught, or for that matter, that it cannot be taught, presupposes how our efforts relate to it. What is virtue, then, such that we may strive for it? To the Greeks, virtue was arete, moral excellence—a predisposition to act rightly. No good thought or good action is virtue on its own, but in concert, arete is evident in the cyclical reinforcement of the potential and the actual: A man who knows the good does better, and a man who does good knows better, and so on. Before Christ, this was evident in four forms known as the cardinal virtues. Like the cardinal directions—north, south, east, west—the cardinal virtues are the simplest forms of virtue to which all other more particular virtues, like civility or chastity, can be reduced. They are not the binary opposite of equivalent vices, but rather a moderation between two equally undesirable extremes—the Golden Mean. The first cardinal virtue, Prudence, judges the right course of action; it moderates between our opposing impulses to consider our choices carelessly (that is, in ignorance) or too carefully (with scrupulosity). The second, Fortitude, is doing what one ought to do; it moderates between our inclination to do nothing (cowardice) or too much (rashness). The third, 17

Temperance, is not doing what one ought not to do; it moderates between our inclination to deny nothing to ourselves (profligacy) or to deny everything to ourselves (austerity). The fourth, Justice, seeks the right relation to our fellow man; it moderates between prejudice for the self (selfishness or vain pride) and prejudice for the other (selflessness or vain humility). These cardinal virtues are certainly learnable; they do not seek some spiritual infinite, but rather a Golden Mean between two finite and therefore achievable, if vicious, extremes. They are essentially worldly virtues, good insofar as the world can be good, and as we define them solely as ideals within merely human operations, human operation is enough to reach them. Therefore, if any man can instruct another to grow in habitual excellence of any kind, such as mathematics or artful speech, then so too can a teacher afford for his students an ever greater predisposition to act rightly. The question, then, is how. Teaching the cardinal virtues has no formula, as their only object is the Golden Mean, which by definition has no distinct quantity but whatever is appropriate. Therefore, like learning the use of a word, whose definition emerges as it is applied again and again to countless objects with common traits, the image of these virtues takes shape with exposure to their exercise in the stories of others. The distinction of these virtues grows with the difficulty of their application; a child recognizes temperance and fortitude in the simple parables of fair play evident in storybooks, while the adolescent seeks temperance and fortitude in the impossible plights of classical tragedy. In time, the classical student does not merely recognize virtue in prudent Odysseus or just Orestes, but in real-world quandaries sees a glimpse of Odysseus' prudence and Orestes' justice, which will lead him to the Golden Mean. What, then, of those virtues that touch the infinite? The gift of Easter morning was the promise of eternity; whereas the cardinal virtues govern the finite excellences of mortal men, what sort of virtues belong to immortal men, the consequences of whose virtue and vice now extend beyond their worldly lives? Such virtues must predispose man to a good beyond his own terrestrial means. These, set down in the earliest years of the Church, are the theological virtues—Faith, Hope, and Love—which have since become inseparable from the cardinal virtues in Christian classicism. Whereas the cardinal virtues seek moderation between the evils of deficit and excess, the theological virtues point ever toward an infinite good and away from an infinite evil. Jon Christianson is the Latin director and editor at Memoria Press. He teaches Latin for the Memoria Press Online Academy and has taught Latin and classical literature at Highlands Latin School.

18 Reaching for Infinity

As a virtue, Faith is not mere belief; it is a gift of spiritual assent to the truths of Revelation on the merits of God's own authority. While our natural faculty of reason may imperfectly comprehend the revealed truths of the Christian event, that we can affirm with perfect confidence its supernatural truth is a product of divine grace. As a virtue, Hope is not mere optimism in the face of an imperfect world; it is a supernatural assurance of one's salvation and everlasting life. The cardinal virtues alone make no assurance of eternity; it is only with this assurance that the Christian can await the resurrection with confidence. As a virtue, Love is not mere desire for the good of others for their own sake, but a will to cherish God for His own sake, and man for God's sake. Faith, hope, and love are not virtues on their own; they are only good with a good object, and they are only divine with a divine object. Faith in a mortal teacher, hope in a worldly leader, or love of any good person or thing can be good insofar as those things direct us closer to God; an excess of such faith, however, leads past God into apostasy; of hope, into futility; of love, into idolatry. Of Faith in God, of Hope in God, and of Love of God, there is no excess. We cannot overreach when reaching for infinity. How can one dare, much less achieve, an infinite quest? If the theological virtues are infinite predispositions to the good—that is, moral excellences that by definition exceed our own finite natures—how can we possibly learn them, much less teach them to others? Faith, Hope, and Love as theological virtues must be divine operations if they are infinite; therefore, if they should dwell within us in any way, it is not our own finite operation but the grace of a divine and infinite operator that makes it so. However, lowercase faith, hope, and love—not as infinite virtues with an end that is endless, but as finite human operations with terrestrial objects—are quite available to man as such. Dante saw in the beauty and goodness of Beatrice an imperfect reflection of the divine, and through love of Beatrice grew in love of God. Practicing these things in the merely human degree, within the auspices of the cardinal virtues—prudent faith, courageous hope, temperate love—are acceptable domains in which we can grow, and help others to grow, in those finite excellences that, when imbued with the infinity of God's grace, might express with greater effect the virtues engendered in us by divine operation. No man can roll his stone all the way to Paradise, and yet, with the assurance that Christ will save us from our toil, we roll our stones as best we can. As Dante turned to Beatrice, we turn to the moral exemplars of antiquity, and by their example we can learn and teach the Golden Mean of mortal things while growing in our capacity for the things of God. MemoriaPress.com

Moral Illiteracy and the Case for Character Education by William Kirk Kilpatrick

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Why Telling Stories to Our Children Is the Best Kind of Character Education

This article was originally published in Policy Review as "Storytelling and Virtue" in 1983.

After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre observes that in all classical and heroic societies, "the chief means of moral education is the telling of stories." In a real sense the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey were the moral tutors of the Greeks. Likewise Aeneas was the model of heroic piety on which young Romans were nurtured. Icelandic and Irish children were suckled on sagas. And the Christian world, which reaped the inheritance of both classical and heroic societies, carried on this tradition of moral education with Bible stories, stories from the lives of saints, and stories of chivalry. To be educated properly was to know of Achilles and Odysseus, Hector and Aeneas, and later to know of Beowulf and Arthur and Percival and the Christian story of salvation. The telling of stories does not seem to hold a place of much importance in contemporary attempts at moral education. In most American and Canadian schools, the favored methods for developing moral awareness are the moral reasoning approach of Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg and the values clarification approach developed by University of Massachusetts psychologist Sidney Simon and his colleagues. These models rely heavily on group discussion, analysis of competing claims, and the development of decision-making skills. The closest approximation to a story is the presentation of a moral dilemma: a man contemplates stealing a drug for his dying wife; passengers on a foundering lifeboat decide whether to toss their fellows overboard and who should be sacrificed; survivors in a fallout shelter debate whether to admit outsiders to their sanctuary. It will be apparent at once that there are important differences between these modern "fables" and the old ones. And the differences give us a clue to the differences in thinking that animate the modern as opposed to the classical and Christian approaches to moral education. The first difference is that no attempt is made to delineate character in the moral dilemma, whereas character is everything in the heroic story. In the saga or epic, everything revolves around the character of the hero— whether he exercises, or fails to exercise, the virtues. But the characters in the dilemmas have no characters, only decisions to make. Both Heinz (the man in the purloined drug dilemma) and Ulysses must aid their wives, but there the comparison ends. Heinz is no Ulysses. He is a blank, a cipher. He is there because he is needed to William Kirk Kilpatrick is the author of several books including Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong. His commentary on cultural and educational topics has appeared in First Things, American Educator, The Los Angeles Times, and various scholarly journals.

Moral Illiteracy and the Case for Character Education

present a dilemma. We have no interest in him, only in his case. One cannot imagine parents passing down to their children the saga of Heinz and the stolen drug. The second difference is this: The actors in the dilemmas are not tied to any social particularities— traditions, loyalties, locations, or histories. True, Heinz is attached to his wife, but there is no indication why he should be. We know why Ulysses is eager to return to Penelope, since her virtues are carefully enumerated. As in all the old stories the hero's deeds are rooted in loyalty, not only to homeland and tribe, but also to hearth— essential details that are absent from the dilemmas. What is implied in this approach is that particular loves and loyalties—the kind that make for a good story—are largely irrelevant to moral issues. One can somehow dispense with the prelude of moral particularities and leap right into the arena of universal principles. The assumption is that the kernel of good moral judgment lies in abstract devotion to abstract principles. In Kohlberg's scheme, where justice is the sole guiding principle, one must leave mother and father, wife and husband, and cleave to the principle of Justice with a capital J. Moreover, there is the suggestion that devotion to father and mother or attachment between wife and husband may have nothing to do with the pursuit of justice. As in so much contemporary psychology, the central concern is with the autonomous individual. The third difference between the old stories and the new dilemmas is that the new stories, properly speaking, do not have endings. They are open-ended, unfinished. They await your judgment. What should the shelter survivors do next? You decide. Was Heinz right to steal the drug? You decide. There is, in short, no sense that the story is ever complete or definitive. It's up for grabs and will be again next year with the next class. You can do what you want with these stories; you cannot with the Odyssey. There is no sense in these stories of a life fully lived or a mission completed. All of which amounts to saying that they are not stories after all. The old storytelling approach to moral education has been replaced with something new. The new approach is one from which the concepts of character and virtue are entirely missing. From its point of view, the life of a man is envisioned not as a personal story in which accumulated habits and actions may eventually harden into virtue or vice, but as a disconnected series of ethical and other dilemmas—all amenable to rational solution. If we return to the heroic, classical, and Christian stories, we can see how stark this contrast is and how radically novel the new approach is. And although the current techniques of moral education are largely the offspring of psychologists, we may note that the ancients had a more profound grasp of the psychology underlying moral education. MemoriaPress.com

to point to examples of moral wisdom and moral courage The telling of stories—as opposed to the presentation beyond themselves. Hence the reliance on heroic stories of open-ended dilemmas—implies first of all that adults as the embodiment of cultural ideals. When virtues have something to pass on to children, a valuable have fallen into desuetude, the need for stories about inheritance that children might not come by on their virtuous and courageous men, women, and children own. This is easy enough to accept about other cultures. becomes more acute. Aware of this, Lewis created in The "If we were anthropologists observing members of a Chronicles of Narnia literature of virtue of the type that tribe," writes Andrew Oldenquist, "it would be the most can be considered both exemplar of and preparation natural thing in the world to expect them to teach their for a mature morality. They certainly seem to embody morality and culture to their children and, moreover, Aristotle's dictum that the aim of education is to make to think that they had a perfect right to do so …." If the pupil like and dislike what he ought. we observed, he continues, that a society failed to Stories of Virtue, Fortitude, and Justice can and do these things, we would conclude that they were should play a central part in the formation of good "ruined, pitiable, alienated from their own values, and habit, that is, in the formation of character. Stories on the way out." As I say, this is easy enough to see for provide a way of habituating children to virtue. They other cultures, but when it comes to our own, a certain help to instill proper sentiments. They reinforce inhibition against cultural transmission sets in. A indirectly the more explicit moral teaching of family, pervasive mentality of nondirectiveness and subjectiveness dictates that we don't have the right to impose our values on our children. And consequently, we are forced to create the fiction that each child Stories of Virtue, Fortitude, and Justice is in his own right a miniature Socrates—a moral philosopher, can and should play a central part in as Kohlberg would have it. the formation of good habit, that is, in T he t rad it ion a l v iew i s that adults do possess a moral the formation of character. treasure, and that to deprive children of it would in itself show a lack of virtue. We do not, to draw a rough analogy, wait until our children have reached church, and school. They provide also a defense against the age of reason before suggesting that they brush their the relentless process of desensitization that goes on in teeth. But sooner or later children will be able to figure modern societies. And they provide a standard against out for themselves that brushing is a prudent practice. which erosion of standards can be measured. This is not necessarily true of moral practices. The moral In addition, stories expand the imagination. Moral treasure can be acquired only in a certain way. And if it development is not simply a matter of becoming more is not obtained in that way, it is not possessed at all. This rational or acquiring decision-making skills. It has to do is why Aristotle said that only those who have been well with vision, the way one looks at life. Indeed, moral evil brought up can usefully study ethics. And why Plato and sin are sometimes described by theologians as an maintained that the well-bred youth is nurtured from inability to see rightly. Conversely, moral improvement his earliest days to love the Good and the Beautiful "so is often described as the result of seeing things in a that when Reason at length comes to him, then bred as different light or seeing them for the first time. "I was he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and blind but now I see" is more than a line from an old recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her." hymn; it is the way a great many people look at their What, then, is the proper form of education in moral growth. The transformation of the moral life is regard to morality? It is, necessarily, an initiation, "men rarely effected without a transformation of imagination. transmitting manhood to men," as C. S. Lewis puts It follows that one of the central tasks of moral education it. And this is best accomplished not by direct moral is to nourish the imagination with rich and powerful exhortation but indirectly through example and practice. images of the kind found in stories, myths, poems, One cannot have classes in moral education. It is, rather, biography, and drama. If we wish our children to grow more like an apprentice learning from a master. up with a deep and adequate vision of life, we must Yet, even in the most virtuous of societies, adults, provide a rich fund for them to draw on. recognizing their own shortcomings, have seen the need 1-877-862-1097

Moral Illiteracy and the Case for Character Education