Educating young people in a mass democracy proves no easy task. Variations in location, the abilities and interests of the students, the role of the parents, and conceptions concerning the end(s) of education create much confusion that aggregated metrics fail to capture. A young person must be forgiven for not knowing what the point of it all is, particularly if the demands rub up against nature. The crisis of boyhood results in no small part from the unreasonable expectation that a boy sit still for eight hours a day without any clear idea why.
The failures of our system of public education are well-documented and surely connected to its lack of clarity about purpose while making attendance compulsory. In the last 30 years or so, we have witnessed a dramatic rise in “alternate schooling.” Granted, the super rich have long been able to opt out of the public school system, sending their progeny to Choate and Sidwell Friends and the like, but middle- and lower-class families pursuing alternatives is of more recent vintage. The number of students homeschooled jumped from around 93,000 in 1983 to over 3.7 million in 2021. In the fall of 2011, the percentage of students attending public schools was 87%, and by 2022 it was 83%. The percentage attending charter schools in that time rose from 4% to 7%. “Between 2019 and 2023, 264 new classical schools were started. This occurred with an average 4.8% growth rate of new schools per year.”
A defining feature of these alternatives is that these schools have not only a clear mission but also a concrete one. When surveying the goals pursued by our public schools, one can’t help but be struck with how abstract they seem, while those of the non-public schools are comparatively specific. This gives those schools a leg up not only with parents who pay tuition on top of their taxes but also with students. Perhaps the most decisive feature of the impulse to create new schools is that it typically occurs bottom-up. Unhappy with the monopoly exercised by state-sponsored schools, parents create their own. The skill and knowledge required to run a school, however, may prove more demanding than the mere initiative required to start one.
David Hein’s Teaching the Virtues attempts to step into that gap. Having served as a boarding-school master in Virginia as well as on the boards of two private schools, Hein knows well what makes a classically minded curriculum work. The book is intended as a primer for parents and teachers at these private schools and approaches its topic not as a treatise on either virtue or teaching but as one on teaching virtue, an impulse not without ambition, for philosophers have long wondered whether virtue can be taught.
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What dynamics occur in a classroom? Emphasizing the humanities (but not neglecting STEM fields, even if they do get short shrift), Hein takes seriously the interaction between three parties: the student, the teacher, and the material presented. Primacy is given to the world of the students, for “everything will depend on the motivation and effort of the individual student.” A good teacher will appeal to the student’s imagination, engaging that student deeply in a morally complex world the student already experiences as real. The challenge for a classical Christian school is balancing this inner life of the interest and freedom of the student with the stated mission of the school. How might any conflict between the two be best managed? “Teaching, to be fully effective, ought to bring together the great tradition and the student’s passions.”
Hein suggests we see the interests of the student and the mission of the school as a ball bearing with an inner and an outer ring. The outer ring would represent the mission of the school while the inner ring, separated by but also connected to the outer ring by the bearings themselves, possesses its own freedom of movement. In this way, the school balances “inner freedom and outer structures,” which harmonizes “individual liberty and institutional tradition.” Here’s the rub: One can’t assume that what is good for the outer ring is good for the inner one. Experience and individualized attention alone can get the two working in tandem. This balancing ensures a student’s greater commitment to his or her own education while respecting the authority of the teacher.
So how do these bearings stay properly lubricated? What keeps friction at bay? Here the reality of the virtues comes into play, for a focus on the virtues extends the teacher’s authority while engaging the moral imagination of the student. The purpose of the classical school is to make the young person a fully integrated and virtuous adult, but anyone who has stood in front of a classroom knows what a tall order this is. Indeed, anyone with children of his or her own has found it a daunting task. Socrates may have regarded the possession of virtue “a gift from the gods,” but such grace may prove too arbitrary and unreliable a source for those committed to the task of cultivating virtue.
Virtue cannot be taught deductively, starting from general and abstract principles and applying them situationally. Hein’s approach operates more in the tradition of moral casuistry: looking at particular cases and figuring out how rules might apply or develop from those cases. Hein argues that we need to give young people examples of moral conduct. True to his word that the book is not an examination of virtue itself, he assumes the existence of the classical virtues and looks for exemplars. This elevation of practical reasoning over theoretical reasoning may irritate a philosopher or a thoroughgoing nihilist, but it acknowledges the reality that virtues arise within our practices. This is especially true for children.
It also corresponds to common sense. “Do as I do and not as I say” has moral purchase for a reason. Parents can recite all the nostrums concerning right conduct, but in the end the child will imitate the parent’s actions. Our sense of right and wrong emerges from observing right and wrong and connecting it to our intuitive sense. Hein thus insists, in a mode similar to Aristotle in his reflections on “the mature man,” on sharing with students the stories of people who exemplified either one particular virtue or a range of them. Furthermore, Hein attends to the ways in which fiction may stoke the student’s imagination in constructive ways, for the imagination integrates thinking, willing, and acting.
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The bulk of Hein’s book involves either stories about historical figures or a retelling of movies and novels that a teacher could use in the classroom. In the former category, he offers figures such as George Washington, George Marshall, Booker T. Washington, Hannah More, Frederick Robertson, and Henry Coit. The juxtaposing of famous and unknown figures has the salutary effect of making the right thing seem achievable. It also allows Hein to highlight specific though often neglected virtues such as patience, courage, prudence, temperance, and honor.
I found the lengthy digressions into books and movies less interesting and satisfying, even though he did discuss one of my favorite novels, Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men. Both the summaries and the interpretations don’t fully hang together, in part because Hein stitched those sections together from previously published work. Hein recognizes this, I think, because he concludes this section with a suggestion to the reader (teacher) that he or she might want to substitute a different book or movie. Fair enough. I can say from my own experience teaching political philosophy at the college level that I sometimes got more traction with a novel than a work of philosophy (having them read Camus’ The Plague, for example, instead of Foucault) or with a movie (such as Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy along with Machiavelli). How can one best use preciously scarce class time to appointed ends? All too often when my children were in school, teachers used movies as a way to avoid preparing for class. When my high school junior came home and discussed spending two class periods watching Finding Nemo, I knew something was afoot. I fear Hein’s lengthy digression may send the wrong message to some teachers.
Along with his emphasis on the moral imagination (borrowing from Burke and Kirk), Hein reminds teachers of the importance of attentiveness. I think this is the strongest part of Hein’s argument, but also in some ways the least satisfying because he doesn’t spend as much time on it as he could or should have. We live in a technocratic world designed to attenuate our powers of attention, and young people in particular suffer from this. In an age when attention gets directed inward, causing all sorts of pathologies, we have an imperative to figure out how to direct that attention outward.
This begins with the teacher, who must be attentive to both the student and the curriculum. The school may be the outer ring and the student the inner one of the bearing, but teachers are the balls themselves. Great teachers are attentive to students and their world and to the idiosyncrasies of each of them. This is why parents are almost always better teachers than public employees who have too much demanded of them.
As importantly, the student’s attention must be directed outward. Hein gives us little guidance as to what this means practically speaking, and I suspect his emphasis on literature and movies might distract here particularly. I’m more sympathetic to curricula that supplement classroom instruction with “hands-on” learning and outdoor activities. We, and children especially, are not Cartesian minds but embodied creatures whose imagination can be well-stoked by engagement with the natural world. Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a fantastic reflection on attentiveness, but I would supplement reading it by taking the children to an actual creek.
In sum, Teaching the Virtues attends to the relationship between ordering the classroom and ordering the soul, recognizing that this involves loves and allegiances that necessarily transcend those in the public school system. Hein’s emphasis on training in piety, one of the stronger parts of the book, shows how only a spiritual capping of the student’s experience can prevent that student from being “misled.” The moral imagination and the emphasis on attention congeal into character that displays “unity and focus.” “This integrity—or wholeness—does not make them perfect and it does not exclude further growth.” It does, however, put them on the path to being good. If a school can do that, it will have done enough.
