Education and the Virtues
The difference between being educated and being schooled is the difference between being equipped to ride a horse across open country and being led on horseback around a ring.
Merely being schooled can take place in any academic institution. The core problem of this limited—and limiting—experience is its failure fully to engage heart and mind. The reason for this deficiency is schooling’s muddled mission, coupled with self-deception: its practitioners’ conviction that they know what they’re doing, and what they’re doing is “best practices.”
Both school leaders and their constituents need to step back from strategic plans, assessment devices, external reviews, competitive rankings, diversity definitions, and formulaic mission statements for the sake of posing straightforward questions about vision and effectiveness.
Imagine that a mother and a father, looking out for the best interests of their son or daughter, are attracted by a church school, one established by Roman Catholics or by oldline Protestants, such as the Episcopalians. Appreciating this school’s commitment to nurturing each child’s whole self, these parents seek answers to the following questions: Given that this institution’s raison d’être is the development of each student’s body, soul, and intellect, are this school’s promises being realized? Do its programs, including required chapel services and classes in religious education, not only meet high standards but also enable all students to reach their full potential? Are young scholars sparked by what’s on offer, finding their way in widening fields of knowledge and endeavor, or are they simply going through the motions, performing acceptably or even admirably, as they are led around the academic ring? Is sound moral and spiritual formation likely to occur? In brief, are intentions and processes in synch?
Most honest observers of schools—both secular and religious—would acknowledge a gap between what’s sought and what’s regularly accomplished. It’s a fault that cannot be put down solely to adolescents’ invariably incomplete, distracted natures or to teachers’ inevitable failure to reach all of their pupils all of the time. No one is demanding academic utopia, but even very good schools can do better.
Which is where those of us who care about raising up young people as beneficiaries and trustees of the treasures of Western civilization might proffer a notion: In thinking about these little educational platoons, consider invoking some concepts from the world of political theory. Which balance of individual, community, and nation is best for the commonweal? Which arrangement of order, justice, and liberty is most propitious both for the good of each citizen and for the general welfare?
Conservative liberalism
For solid reasons requiring no extended rehearsal in this space, many of us who share the perspective of this journal would affirm that “conservative liberalism” is a phrase that connotes both a realistic appraisal of human nature and a hopeful approach to human possibility. At its center, this political outlook or framework incorporates a liberal understanding of fundamental human rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of religion. It stands for equality before the law and equality before our Creator. It embraces equal opportunity and basic fairness; it acknowledges—indeed it celebrates—the right of all citizens to rise and to make something of themselves.
Conservatives grasp the truth that liberal values and policies, expressing individual liberty, are best understood not as abstractions derived from a theoretical social contract but as commitments and practices rooted in the rich cultural soil of Athens and Rome, of Jerusalem and London. Moreover, in the United States, we can see how—to cite two significant cases—freedom’s distinctive character has been forged not only by the realistic hopes of eighteenth-century Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but also by the annealing tragedies of twentieth-century Philadelphia, Mississippi.
If the latter Philadelphia, a town of 7,000 residents, is not as well known today as the northern city of brotherly love, then this fact can remind us to comprehend liberalism—both its historical origins and its contemporary existence—not only in connection with famous cities of the Western world but also in relation to the tens of thousands of more modest communities spread across this land. In conurbations and towns and hamlets, as well as in families, schools, and civic enterprises, our experiences teach us that liberty flourishes when joined with forbearance.
Habits of moral excellence are necessary if a free republic is to prosper. As Benjamin Franklin famously declared, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” Freedom succeeds when influenced by habits of the heart that incline citizens toward temperance and patience, toward justice and mutual respect, rather than toward selfish opportunism, wilful violence, or the divisive ideologies of race or class. Conservative liberalism is bounded and informed by tradition, which comprises the accretions of practical wisdom and worthwhile experience over time; and prescription—long-established, authoritative custom—is ever open to prudent reform.
The imagination of the conservative liberal, therefore, is enlivened by virtue, not deadened by vice; and this moral imagination is nurtured by the best that has been thought and written in ethics, literature, and theology. It is a historical imagination, tethered to reality, to lived experience in community, rather than a fancy that drifts off in clouds of wishful thinking or heedless egocentrism. Notwithstanding manifest differences between them, the following thinkers may be taken as representative of this political outlook, for they bear at least a Wittgensteinian family resemblance to one another: Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Michael Oakeshott, Raymond Aron, Russell Kirk, and Roger Scruton.
The most salubrious option for the polity at large, conservative liberalism is also the most fitting and helpful, the most workable and inspiring, stance for schools today. Developmentally, boys and girls are still molten creatures, their judgment unsteady and their opinions unsettled. Within the limits of civility, students must be free to raise questions and to voice doubts. As Professor Caroline Breashears asserts in a recent issue of Law & Liberty (April 10, 2023), “it is essential to allow challenges to the truth so that it can be supported rationally.” Pupils should enjoy the freedom of expression necessary for academic inquiry and for forming reasoned positions.
Not only state schools but also traditional church foundations omit religious litmus tests in order for applicants to gain admission; they believe in freedom of religious belief. Neither at my alma mater, St. Paul’s School in Brooklandville, Maryland, nor at the school I am honored to serve as a trustee, Saint James School in St. James, Maryland, are students required to be Anglicans. Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and even Baptists have happily attended both institutions. In no school is militant woke fundamentalism or militant Christian fundamentalism desirable as either policy or practice.
In a church school, if a student wishes to raise questions about the role of a loving God in the face of a devastating natural disaster such as an earthquake, then good for her. If a student feels compelled to confess that, following the death of his little sister to bone cancer, he is having trouble believing in an active, benevolent Creator, then he should be supported in admitting this fact. If a student has questions about the Trinity—about how God can be three Persons (hypostases) in one divine essence (ousia)—then, unabashedly, she should ask them. If her senior-year colleague wants to know how in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word, one Person can exist in two natures, human and divine, without either confusion or separation, then he should calmly put his question, and in consequence not be made to feel an outcast. These students’ teachers might assure their charges that learned theologians have been pondering these mysteries as well and for quite some time. As Professor Breashears observes, “if we never discuss a doctrine, we lose its meaning.”
By the same token, if a student feels led to question the ethics or theology surrounding gay marriage, then she should be allowed to speak up, without facing accusations of “hate.” If another student desires to challenge the wisdom of prescribing puberty blockers for children, he should not be scorned. If his classmate wishes to dispute the moral and historical reasoning behind demands for “reparations,” she should not be ostracized. If her conscientious peer feels compelled to express skepticism in response to claims of “systemic racism,” he should not be branded a racist for voicing his doubts.
Within the shared setting of intellectual inquiry, the atmosphere should be conducive, as Oakeshott says, to conversation, which needs to be respectful, charitable, patient, nonviolent, noncoercive—and free. Hence each school—like the best colleges—must have a liberal grounding.
At the same time, each school should make it clear what it holds to be true belief and right conduct. Church schools—such as Saint James—strike me as the freest of all. Within their walls, students and teachers may openly affirm both Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and the writings of C. S. Lewis. At the best schools, no ideology is imposed, no rigid conformity enforced.
The problem that arises, however, is the poor fit—sometimes appearing as friction, sometimes as disconnect—between inner freedom and outer structure, between individual liberty and institutional tradition. Church schools in particular have much to offer, but they have trouble meshing church and school. How can an academic community integrate the two? Required chapel segregates Christianity in one time and space. A theology or church history course can be valuable, but it is only one class—and typically not viewed as the most important one—in a rich schedule comprising academics, athletics, and the arts. Courses in world religions are informative, also, but they can imply a relativistic attitude toward all faiths, according to which nonjudgmental pluralism (testified to by the COEXIST bumper sticker) is not viewed as a problem but as the ideal. The opposite position, dogmatic religious exclusivism, would strike most teenaged students as epistemologically impossible and downright unfriendly.
Ball bearings
The political analogy of conservative liberalism is useful, but it takes us only so far in our thinking toward the best scholastic constitution within a highly competitive and pluriform educational environment. Therefore, we might weigh the merits of another intervention: a complementary analogy borrowed from the world not of political theory but of mechanical efficiency. Such metaphors are fairly common. The postwar European Recovery Program—the Marshall Plan—was conceptually hard to grasp. For many ordinary citizens, the images of pump primers and industrial lubricants made this program’s economic purpose and function more intelligible.
Keeping in mind the sticking points mentioned above, imagine a traditional church school. Now picture a rolling-element bearing, in which the hub rolls around an axle. The axle represents the students, always at the center. The two concentric bearing rings are the interior race that the shaft rides in and the outer race. Each race contains a groove in which the metal balls rest; they keep the bearing rings separated. The result is a mechanism that reduces friction across moving planes. By limiting surface contact, the bearing rings ease motion. Otherwise, too much rubbing against moving parts would impede the device’s action.
In a church school, the inner ring is the whole panoply of classes and required chapel, games and the arts, extracurriculars and outings, rules and punishments, papers and labs and exams, together with correction and encouragement, all of which enhance learning within an environment conducive to ordered freedom and thus to moral, intellectual, artistic, athletic, and personal development.
The outer ring should be the school’s most profound commitment and character, its ethos as an orthodox Christian institution, its participation in the sacraments, and its trust in and loyalty to Christ, not idols. This outer, conservative ring is a bulwark against faddism. While contributing to the institution’s forward movement, it steadies the school, keeping it true to its heritage and to its essential nature as—to borrow the education historian W. L. Prehn’s phrase— “the Church in her scholastic mode.”
Without the balls in their races, were the outer ring to bear down too hard on the inner ring and axle, free movement would be imperiled. The balls separating the two rings work to prevent this breakdown from happening. At the same time, they maintain good contact all around the inner ring.
What are the metal balls in a church school? Where may be found the necessary parts that the conservative-liberal analogy leaves out? Discovering answers to these questions requires exploration by way of curiosity, humility, and affinity: a course of thought and action that goes beyond participating in workshops on “best practices.”
Scholastic ecumenism
Within our highly variegated culture, traditional schools must negotiate the inclines, dips, and curves of multilane academic highways. Families have numerous options to choose from: public charter schools, progressive schools, specialized schools in the arts or in science and technology, classical academies, traditional boarding schools, historic day schools, evangelical Christian schools, homeschooling, Roman Catholic schools, Quaker schools, and others. On behalf of their children (a school’s clients), parents (a school’s customers) avidly seek the largest return on their investment.
The choices are many and various—and all schools want to flourish. In this milieu, how can a tradition-oriented school discover its crucial interactive components and its path to prosperity? The answer lies along a route marked by those who have thought about the aims and approaches of ecumenism.
The species of ecumenism that most of us are familiar with strives toward agreements between theologically aligned communions on such matters as baptism, justification, the Lord’s Supper, and the historic episcopate. This approach typically has as its ultimate aim settling differences of faith and polity so that full communion can be effected.
In an article in First Things in December 2007 (“Saving Ecumenism from Itself”), Cardinal Avery Dulles discusses an appealing alternative—or complement—to this convergence model: receptive ecumenism, which does not seek full communion or even agreement. Rather, its aim is reform within: listening to and learning from another ecclesial body so that positive change—spiritual renewal—can occur within one’s church. In a similar fashion, leaders of traditional church schools might benefit from being receptive to developments beyond their home institutions, particularly where meaningful affinities exist.
For example, many schools represent their understanding of mission by way of the Head’s public statements and through general letters to the larger community from leading administrators such as the dean of students and the assistant head for academics. But what is usually missing is the involvement of all of an institution’s faculty in interpreting their school’s ethos through each participant’s thoughtful comments on his or her work and goals. An upper-school classics instructor might reflect on how his teaching of Plutarch’s Lives offers a compelling story- and character-driven way to study history.
In fact, that’s just what you’ll find at The Heights, a Roman Catholic boys’ school in Potomac, Maryland, near the nation’s capital. In a podcast interview for his school’s online Heights Forum, Tom Cox, a veteran humanities teacher, enthusiastically discloses how “boys come alive” when they confront the difficulties faced by great leaders, such as Cicero, and discern the influence these figures had on our country’s founders. Through the examples of these heroes, students learn about human beings who were flawed but still inspiring; pupils grapple with the challenges faced and the choices made by persons who displayed virtue in the midst of their struggles.
By means of this teacher’s thoughtful take on his work—his elucidation of “why and how we teach Plutarch”—listeners augment their understanding of The Heights, its goals and methods. Experiencing a purposeful academic enterprise, they recognize what this school is attempting to achieve in the education of “young men fully alive in the liberal-arts tradition.”
More broadly, classical Christian schools (CCSs) offer much that the rest of us should assess carefully with an eye to reforming our enterprises. In fascinating ways, the CCS movement is stirring the educational pot. In the spirit of receptive ecumenism, those of us associated with much older schools should be open to learning from those we do not want to unite with but that we do not want to be left behind by either. We ought to keep scanning the horizon for institutional practices that not only dovetail with our convictions but also flesh out our principles in ways we might have overlooked. Certainly, CCSs have borrowed from traditional educators: they love the works of Dorothy L. Sayers (paying close attention to The Lost Tools of Learning) and C. S. Lewis (particularly The Abolition of Man).
Two features of the CCS program are particularly relevant to our concerns in this essay: integration and virtues. The CCS literature notes that academic subjects are too separated in most schools, not only in the state schools but in independent schools as well. Each discipline is a smokestack by itself, and the religion program occurs almost exclusively in chapel apart from the academic life of the school or in one theology class apart from the other classes.
“The basis of contemporary education is that truth is individualized and compartmentalized,” writes Jackson Yenor for the Association of Classical Christian Schools. “The Trivium as practiced in classical Christian education emphasizes writing, reading, logic, and speaking across all subjects.” And, in another part of this article, the author comments on the distance between the regular academic subjects at most independent schools and any theological convictions the school has: “Other subjects [apart from religion class or chapel] are seen as neutral or disconnected” from faith and ethics. Thus, Yenor furnishes one important feature of the answer we are looking for: the need to address the connection in church schools between ecclesia and academia.
The other key element is that CCSs, with their classical and Christian commitments, heavily emphasize the virtues, sharply distinguishing them from merely subjective values, especially the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance, and the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. A leading text for CCS educators is The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education, by Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain (3rd ed., 2021). Its authors see the school as “a community of belief and practice that is striving toward virtue.”
Truth, goodness, and persuasion
Like both The Heights and classical Christian schools, traditional church schools, which have always stressed the will and conscience, could be much more thorough and focused in teaching about the virtues. The metal balls that enable the best interaction between institutional identity and diurnal activity are these habits of moral and spiritual excellence. They represent ways to bring transcendent norms into contact with teaching and coaching right across each institution and in a manner that preserves freedom, enhances ease of motion, and propels personal growth. They are particularly appropriate for conservative-liberal schools, for, as a recent president of the Catholic University of America, John H. Garvey, points out, “The virtues are habits that channel our freedom in the direction we ought to go.”
Schools have to make a concerted effort to build and maintain this mechanism, a rolling element bearing with the ancient virtues mediating between students’ freedom and the institution’s faith. And schools must do so in the face of a popular culture in which such traits as temperance, patience, humility, and gratitude are not the popular virtues. Instead, young people are bombarded with encouragements to salute creativity, individual expression, health and fitness, personal happiness, and some vague notions of social justice.
The rudiments of the traditional virtues should be apparent, however, to anyone who sets foot on the campus of a church school that honors what Russell Kirk calls “the old ways.” Visitors to a school chapel will still hear these virtues preached. But outside of chapel, this deliberate stress on the virtues is not conspicuously present—although attention to them is undoubtedly implicit in almost everything that takes place, from classroom to dining hall to playing fields. But typically, there is no explicit underscoring and integration of virtues in the curriculum.
Church schools would benefit from being intentional and systematic in unpacking and analyzing both the cardinal and the theological virtues, as well as patience and humility, duty, and gratitude. They should make it clear from the start and at regular intervals thereafter what “virtue” means—for otherwise their charges and most of their faculty will have no clear and consistent idea of what this word denotes: Virtues are good habits conducing to good ends.
Through concrete examples, teachers and coaches can make the traditional virtues come alive. In his classic work The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953), Richard M. Weaver limns exactly what this effort involves. In his opening chapter, he interprets Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus. Weaver distinguishes the different functions of dialectic and rhetoric. Dialectic is an inquiry that establishes the truth concerning some question. The good rhetorician is a lover of truth and therefore will present no rhetoric without dialectic. But neither will the honest rhetorician persuade others to love what is true unless rhetoric completes dialectic. As Weaver observes, the result of dialectic on its own tends to be overly dry and abstract, too airy and disconnected from our ordinary lives, and so the rhetorician who depends solely on dialectic cannot incline his or her listeners toward a demonstrably true claim, such as the worth of justice.
Robert Penn Warren provides a memorable example of such a breakdown in his novel All the King’s Men (1946). At the beginning of his career as a political stump speaker, the protagonist, Willie Stark, tries to convince his listeners by delivering addresses full of facts and figures and logic. Failing to connect with these local farmers and merchants, he cannot move them to support him and his cause, which is right and just. Eventually, he does learn how to make this connection, rousing audiences with his dynamic speeches, and his political career is launched, even as his relationship to justice becomes more tenuous.
Although rhetoric incorporates dialectic, rhetoric must go beyond dialectic, for, as almost everyone realizes and conservatives, in particular, have stressed, the complete person does not subsist in the land of theory alone but unites in his or her life thought, feeling, will, and action. Yes, the concept of justice is hard to grasp, but providing an audience with a practical illustration— “If someone owes you a debt, is it good for that person to pay you back?”—will, by analogical association, provide a stepping stone to the larger truth. As Weaver points out, because dialectic is abstract whereas rhetoric “has a passion for the actual,” rhetoric can realize the ends of dialectic and, as it were, close the deal, which is why Plato himself often follows his conceptual analysis with a striking story.
Weaver observes that the human being “is a creature of passion and must live out that passion in the world.” Surely, well-adjusted teenagers are eager to discover their passions and look forward to living them out in the world. Through sound rhetoric, their teachers can spark their interest by helping them to picture this future, where virtues, which bridge being and acting, do not detract from life’s true enjoyment but rather lie at the heart of a flourishing existence. Rhetoric may help a listener to look beyond a troubled present toward a brighter future—as Prime Minister Winston Churchill did during the darkest days of the Second World War. The reality was that Britons were struggling through, in Weaver’s phrase, “a valley of humiliation.” But Churchill addressed His Majesty’s subjects and likened the future of Europe to “broad sunlit uplands,” thus moving his countrymen’s hearts and accomplishing through his rhetoric the most significant act of his premiership.
A little effort and imagination, responsibly deployed, can incite real commitment. Rhetoric grounds dialectic, relating it to the diurnal round. Teachers and coaches, therefore, should directly link the virtues to what students are doing and studying and thinking about, to their passions. Schools can do better than touching on these topics for some of their students some of the time and instead reach all of their students nearly all the time. Then the substance of the virtues will become not bare, boring theoretical truths but instead truths to live by, and the school’s liberal and conservative planes will move together with greater ease.
Virtues in the curriculum
Almost every activity in the school day presents an occasion not only to teach the definitions of the virtues but also to sink their meanings, implications, and pertinence into the manifold tasks and interests of busy students. The best primer on this subject—and one that will efficiently transmit to the entire corps of instructors, regardless of specialty, all that they need to know to get started—is Craig A. Boyd and Kevin Timpe, The Virtues: A Very Short Introduction. Throughout the weekly schedule, opportunities for virtue-teaching abound, and individual instructors and department chairs are far better able to discern teaching moments than any outsider can. But here are some suggestions, with examples:
History: Courage is a constant element in both political and military history, as well as in social history—think of Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and others. Why not raise this subject directly? Infusing virtues in the curriculum will add intellectual and moral depth to each course. Distinguish courage from both cowardice and rashness. Analyze its relationship to justice and hope. Discuss a military conflict in relation to just-war theory. When, if ever, does justice require fighting to prevent injustice to the innocent? What is the role of prudence in looking after the national interest? How does a nation avoid the sin of pride—arrogant self-righteousness—in the conduct of its foreign policy? How did the postwar European Recovery Program balance increasing freedom and justice for other nations with safeguarding the U.S. strategic interest? Can nations be morally selfless?
Look at major historical figures in light of their virtues—or, more likely, their combinations of virtues and vices. Students will receive fresh insights into General George C. Marshall’s life and career if teachers insert a lens for his religious and ethical beliefs. Pedagogically, this move is perfectly legitimate. Marshall is known as much for his character as for his contributions to statecraft and military strategy, but without an added filter for his Christian convictions and conduct, no observer will be able to grasp in any depth either his appealing traits or his concrete achievements. Marshall embodied the virtues of faith, courage, humility, prudence, temperance, hope, justice, and gratitude. If instructors neglect to bring these stable dispositions into the discussion, then they will fail to develop what’s most illuminating about Marshall and what might be most valuable in the formation of their students.
Natural sciences: Is there room for just one class during the term which is interdisciplinary, which brings in a guest conversationalist on the topic of scientific discoveries and natural phenomena in light of the virtue of faith? What is the relation between Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and divine creation? Where was God in the tsunami? How is the suffering of innocent children dysteleological—that is, a problem for theodicy, for comprehending natural evil in the face of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent Creator? What about moral evil? Is selfishness hardwired in our genes?
Writing: Consider what Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Richard M. Weaver examined as the ethics of rhetoric, but keep in mind that doing so will require more than a quick trip to the Internet. The ethical biases and lacunae of our present era are obvious on the World Wide Web, where, if diligent students seek material on “writing and ethics,” they will find many sources on inclusive language and avoiding the charge of plagiarism but almost nothing on the virtues. Persistence, however, will yield a payoff that is worth the extra effort, for crucial to good writing are such virtues as temperance and fortitude. Why not explicitly name and talk about these character traits in class? If teachers do, then students will become more aware of themselves as moral actors, responsible selves, and they will also become better writers.
Good writing incorporates first-rate analysis, which requires vision sharp and sensitive and comprehensive. But we shall not see clearly if we do not, so far as possible, accomplish a temporary “unselfing of the self,” in Evelyn Underhill’s phrase, attempting to perceive with others’ eyes, according to perspectives different from our own. This entire effort lies at the heart of the ethical life; it is a work of the moral imagination. In other words, excellent writers balance a healthy confidence with a practical humility.
Writing a respectable paper—or successfully completing any homework assignment on time—requires the virtue of temperance. Self-control refers to an internal action less dreary and passive than mere abstinence—renouncing parties during Lent, for example. Temperance means disciplining oneself in order to realize one’s greatest potential. Therefore, freedom is the close, not the distant, relative of temperance. Self-mastery enables a person to be truly free: free because now equipped to meet all the challenges that life—or at least a teacher or a coach—throws at you.
Scorning self-discipline leaves a person not freer but weaker, more likely to succumb to momentary desires and transitory drives, lacking impulse control, less a master than a captive: what Saint Augustine of Hippo means when he refers to that liberty which is not true self-possession but merely its simulacrum, “the freedom of a runaway slave.” Temperance, therefore, is a positive character trait more exciting than it sounds: it stands for the discipline of the self which produces excellence, and for the self-command which liberates for good.
In The Shelf (2014), Phyllis Rose makes a statement that I like to explore when I talk with students about writing: A “writer [must] fight against every sentence, resisting the pressure of convention and conformity, resisting his or her impulses toward banality and the easy way.” That’s not primarily a statement about grammar or even style. It’s first of all tough moral tutelage implicitly in praise of fortitude: be of stout heart, decline the easy way, be courteous but not pliable, and stand firm against commonplaces of either thought or expression.
Mathematics: My training in mathematics, peaking with algebra and geometry, was so minimal and occurred so long ago that at first, I doubted that I could produce a single useful example applying any of the virtues to this major field of study. Often stymied, frustrated, and bewildered, sometimes angry and dejected, in math courses, I did the best I could and was thrilled when I no longer had to take another one.
But, regardless of the subject matter, isn’t my student experience a common one and therefore useful to think about? Almost all students, in their assignments as scholars or athletes or artists, sometimes feel like throwing the textbook or playbook or score against a wall, heaving a bag of golf clubs into a water hazard, or stalking out of a rehearsal studio forever. Prone to totalistic thinking, according to which a C- on one short paper may throw its adolescent author into a tailspin of shame and runaway self-doubt (“I’m just no good at this and never will be”), a student may need encouragement: a gift of courage, hope, and confidence. Through this oft-repeated act by teachers and coaches, any number of key virtues come into play: loyalty (rooted in a kind of professional friendship), perseverance (a form of patience), prudence (perspective), realistic hope (not fantasy), temperance (self-mastery), and most of all a particular form of courage.
Courage was so vital to the ancient Romans that virtus came to signify not only manliness and valor but also virtue—moral excellence—itself. In its most basic form, courage means fortitude, from fortis, strong, brave: hanging tough, remaining sturdy. Fortitude is the virtue of a soldier who holds his ground, keeping his post against powerful opponents, like the dashing airborne commander Jumpin’ Jim Gavin during the problem-plagued assault on Sicily in 1943. On July 11, gathering his troopers and their underpowered weapons to confront the soldiers and Tiger tanks of the Hermann Göring Division at the top of a slight rise known as Biazzo Ridge, Gavin launched attack and counterattack. Like Ulysses S. Grant at Shiloh, Tennessee, in 1862, he refused to fall back, and he eventually prevailed “by simply refusing to give up the battlefield.” That’s how he put it years later in his memoirs. In the midst of this bloody encounter, his words to his men were more forceful and direct: “We’re staying on this ridge no matter what happens!”
It may sound ridiculous to compare anxious students who persist in Advanced Calculus, say, with parachute infantrymen of the celebrated 82nd Airborne Division in World War II. But it may seem less absurd when we take into account the suicide epidemic among young people today, the erosion of traditional authorities, the morale-suppressing impact of social media, and the fact that airborne troopers made up an elite body of mission-focused men carefully selected, trained, hardened, and tested. Each student faces his or her unique challenges, and on some days just refusing to give up the battlefield is a victory that should be acknowledged in light of the virtues it represents.
Athletics: Outside of chapel, the field house and the playing fields are the places in a school where the virtues are most likely to be referred to on a consistent basis. A friend of mine who played football in college many years ago told me about a sign high up in the rafters of his university’s gymnasium: “We supply the equipment; you supply the courage.”
For fifty years, one of my best friends at St. Paul’s School was Mitch Tullai, a renowned coach, athletic director, history master, and Abraham Lincoln impersonator. When I was in lower school, he—although also engaged that fall as head coach of the varsity football team—coached our little fourth-grade squad. I shall never forget who gave me my first formal lesson in applied ethics: Coach Tullai, before our single interscholastic competition, an away football game against Baltimore’s famous Calvert School, whose players we had heard were unusually big and strong and well prepared. Anticipating this momentous contest, I was excited but also a mite apprehensive.
At our practice the day before the game, as if he could read our minds and hearts, Mitch Tullai, a wise man, told us exactly what we needed to hear: “A courageous person is not someone who is never afraid. Courage doesn’t mean not being afraid. It means overcoming your fear and doing your job anyway.” What might sound trite to a nineteen-year-old is a revelation—and a relief—to a nine-year-old.
Although I did not know it at the time, Coach Tullai was talking about self-mastery as well as courage. The virtues work together. Their involution is a fascinating characteristic worth probing with students. This coinherence is especially noticeable in the theological virtues. Faith, hope, and love abide together. We can distinguish one from the other, but in the end, we cannot separate them.
Reading: Our final example cuts across all the disciplines. It’s a leading concern of educators today: students’ limited attention spans, especially their waning ability to focus in-depth on written material of any sophistication. Adam Garfinkle has a well-researched article on this topic in the spring 2020 number of National Affairs (“The Erosion of Deep Literacy”).
He discusses the findings of experts in cognitive neuroscience and developmental psycholinguistics who have identified a declining capacity to engage in “deep reading,” which occurs when readers actively interact with an extended piece of writing. They meet the author’s words in a dialectical process, bringing to the text what they know and then responding to new meanings derived from the text. Deep reading of both nonfiction and novels pays huge dividends. Garfinkle notes that it nurtures abstract thought, empowers creativity, fosters imagination, generates new insights, and builds empathy.
Deep literacy has been in decline since 1949. From that year to the present day, one distraction after the next has drawn our gaze: television, the Internet, and the smartphone. Feedback loops reward human brains for losing focus and for repeatedly searching for new stimuli. Garfinkle comments that the scattered superficiality represented by the noun “multitasking” together with reduced capacities to grasp and employ abstract reasoning have produced dire consequences in realms ranging from the personal (“social autism”) to the political (shallowly rooted but passionately held hyperpartisan opinions). Online, many people contribute poorly supported opinions on all sorts of subjects that they barely understand. Too often we have failed to follow General George C. Marshall’s prudent advice to each graduate of the Virginia Military Institute in 1956: “Don’t be a deep feeler but a poor thinker.”
With weakened powers of sustained concentration, readers no longer slow down long enough to give robust consideration to a substantial essay. They lack what the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, in Reader, Come Home (2018), calls “cognitive patience.” And indeed, a close relative of patience is attention, a word illuminated by the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. In her well-known essay “Attention and Will” (in Gravity and Grace, 1952), Weil affirms that truly paying heed to the other person “presupposes faith and love.”
Her reflections prompt the thought that the problems teachers face in our era include not only students’ reduced capacity to read challenging material with sufficient care and insight but also the way the computer itself turns education toward vocationalism, as knowledge is reduced to technique. Desired pedagogical “outcomes” of an undergraduate’s required first-year seminar typically incorporate each student’s learning how to undertake an “active search process” on the Internet in order to “find information on your topic,” which the student then assembles to compose a “research paper.” Current trends suggest that over the next decade or two, this activity will be increasingly assisted by the “learning tools” made available by the aptly designated Artificial Intelligence.
Fortunately, traditional church schools can continue to teach the liberal arts, because these institutions are in the business of preparing their graduates for higher education, not the job market. They can also limit students’ time on electronic devices. Thus, Weil’s understanding of education is particularly relevant to the academic settings we’ve been thinking about. Her approach to learning is not so much to view education as an active search process as to see it as a rather different sort of undertaking, one that invokes the ancient virtues. “Teaching,” she says, “should have no aim but to prepare, by training the attention,” so that students can yield full attention to the object of study. Prayer, she believes, is “attention in its pure form.”
From Simone Weil’s perspective, participating deeply and carefully in the educative mission is more aligned with what we discussed under “receptive ecumenism”: a humble openness to receiving what others have to offer so that we might be transformed. For Weil, education has more to do with waiting than with searching. In other words, whether Weil was speaking of waiting for God, waiting for European war refugees, waiting for a text to disclose its meaning, or waiting for the beauty of a work of art to penetrate our being, true attention requires patience. Patience signifies attentiveness to the initiative—receptivity to the gift—of others. It is a crucial habit for attaining knowledge and wisdom, and yet its value is not primarily instrumental.
In sum, engaging with others’ challenging arguments, searching for answers from an appropriate array of sources, and formulating thoughtful responses are all proper intellectual skills that we should strive to develop in our students. But Simone Weil is on to something good when she says that education first of all solicits an attentiveness that is receptive, not intrusive and manipulative. True learning is not au fond utilitarian. Rather, it begins with an attitude that is more like thankfulness for a gift than a seeking after rewards.
Intellectual patience, whether manifested in active deep reading or in simple attention, is a critical virtue to have and to reinforce, both for our own good and for that of society at large. Virtues, we know, are good habits, and the word habit comes from the Latin habere, to have. Virtues are good traits to possess. But what we as a people have today, we can easily lose tomorrow.
The natural necessity of deep roots
Is there anything arbitrary about choosing the traditional virtues to play the crucial interactive role between the interior (liberal) bearing ring and the outer (conservative) ring? Might metal balls of a different composition serve just as well? The answers to these questions are no and apparently not.
When I told one of my intelligent and well-educated neighbors that I was doing some work on the virtues, his reply featured a characterization of these traits as “lofty.” Certainly, the virtues have a transcendent dimension, but they are not ethereal. Essentially, they are quite down to earth, as the philosopher Philippa Foot establishes so well in her book Natural Goodness (2001). The virtues aim at realizing the good for each person. An oak tree has a good, which is survival and propagation. To achieve its purpose, the oak tree must have deep and sturdy roots. If it has the shallow root system of a creeping vine, then, if a strong wind comes along, the oak tree will be uprooted and will perish, for it cannot bend like a reed. For human beings, the virtues are like the oak tree’s deep sturdy roots. They enable survival, propagation, and the realization of our distinctive ends.
Philippa Foot writes that men and women, in order to live, must be able to house, clothe, and feed themselves. And they need to be able to form ties with family, friends, and neighbors. Therefore, they cannot do without habits of industry, perseverance, love, friendship, and so forth, not only to meet their basic needs but also to find companions, raise families, make friends, and live and work in community. Within the larger society, they need laws. “And how,” Foot asks, “could they have all these things without virtues such as loyalty, fairness, kindness, and in certain circumstances obedience?”
The virtues are what enable human beings to achieve their good ends: living in society, loving others, being reliable contributors. Within their own microcosms, students can infer the meaning and contribution of virtue from the fact that they can leave personal items like laptop computers lying around and no one will steal them. The more pervasive integrity is, the more both individuals and their companions can relax and flourish: freedom and forbearance growing together.
In The Virtues (1977), the philosopher Peter Geach provides an arresting analogy: “Men need virtues as bees need stings.” Both virtues in the lives of human beings and stingers in the lives of bees are natural and necessary. As Cicero says in On the Laws (ca. 50 BC), “virtue is nothing other than [nature] fully developed and taken all the way to its highest point.” Put that way, what student could resist the challenge? Who would want to turn down the adventure the virtues offer?
Piety
Even more unfashionable than humility and temperance is the virtue of piety. And yet if, in a traditional church school, the virtues need to venture beyond the sacred precincts of Matins to enter into the hustle and bustle of the academic environment in all its variety, at the end of the day they must return to the chapel, to its altar and Bible, its pulpit and pews, to receive their orientation and to renew their distinct purpose. The meaning of the virtues for members of the school community begins and ends in the chapel, for without their embeddedness in the narrative of creation, fall, and redemption, the virtues lack context, or they end up hanging out with the wrong gang. In different ways, they can turn into clumsy or misleading guides.
Piety represents justice toward the true God and realism about both ourselves and the false gods of this world. Piety is a defense against the seven deadly sins—the capital vices—that the demonic realm aids and abets: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.
Within the freedom of a church school lies a cornucopia of opportunities to learn to exercise rights and to embrace duties. But all persons, young and old and in between, fail and fall short again and again: “For all have sinned…” (Romans 3:23). Thus, the liturgy provides an occasion for contrition and repentance, mercy and healing, thanksgiving and new strength. The chapel is the place where students, faculty, and leaders can learn and relearn how to give attention where attention is due.
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