"Can you tell me, Socrates -- is virtue something that can be taught?"
As early as 450 BC, the ancients puzzled over the same questions that trouble educators today. No subject is more important than the nurture of our children as good people--people we'd like to be around in our old age, people we'd be proud to say we raised.
How does one become "a good person"? Sociologists have surprisingly little to tell us about the family background and socioeconomic origins of "good people". We know from experience -- and from any brief look at history -- that they seem to come from all parts of the world and all walks of life.
Philosophers have more to say on the question. Aristotle stresses that one becomes a good person principally by cultivating good habits. One becomes "courageous," for example, by doing brave deeds. Sometimes we succeed; sometimes we fail. We plod along, fall down, go off the path of virtue, and then return to it. If we return to the path of virtue often enough and decisively enough, then eventually, the ancients tell us, we become "virtuous."
But what pushes any of us back to the hard path of virtue? What inspires any of us to do the right thing for the right reason? This is a critical question and one that demands an answer.
Learning to Love the Good
We live at a time when moral indifference -- particularly among our youth -- has taken center stage in our public life. In his book Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong, William Kilpatrick, professor of moral education at Boston College, notes that moral apathy is as large a problem among the young as the delinquency is spawns. "Many youngsters have a difficult time seeing any moral dimension to their actions... An increasing number of brutal crimes... are committed 'just for kicks.' Police say that juveniles are often found laughing and playing at homicide scenes." Juvenile crime is the act to be feared, but it is moral indifference that spaws the crime.
Why are so many young people oblivious to the moral significance of their actions? Or, as Craig Dykstra asks: "How do children come to care?"
The Greeks had an answer to this question and it was a good one. Children learn to care and come to "see" through the telling of stories. According to the Ancients, virtue cannot be taught, but it can be learned. Children can, through stories, catch a glimmer of the good. When cultivating virtue in the young, Plato said, we should be concerned with awakening a love of the good. One does this through the telling of stories.
In the Republic, Socrates urges us to choose our stories well. We are told to choose for our students those poems and stories which "will strike their eyes and ears like a breeze that bring health from salubrious places" (401d). We should do this, becuase stories which bring "rhythm and harmony permeate the inner part of the soul, bring graciousness to it, and make the strongest impression." Plato notes that with the proper sort of nurture, one bred on such stories, "will praise beautiful things, rejoice in them, receive them into his soul, be nurtured by them, and become both good and beautiful in character" (402e)....
Reading Our Way to Virtue
The stories we tell in our youth help shape the adults we become. This is an ancient insight, as old as Socrates, but as relevant today as the contemporary research of psychiatrist, Robert Coles, and moral educator, William Kilpatrick. Stories help children make sense of their lives and draw them to the heroic. If our childhood stories are self-consumed and violent, our children will become self-consumed and violent. If our stories treat of those who seek only their own pleasure, our children will become relentless seekers of their own pleasure. If our stories showcase those who jeer the weak and sneer at labor, our children will learn to jeer the weak and scorn labor. For that reason, Bart Simpson, Beavis and Butthead, and The Ninja Turles are not innocuous vacationers in our children's imaginations. They are residents to be feared.
Alternatively, with great literature we can awaken other sentiments and offer the young finer company. William Kilpatrick notes "children are always acting out the dramas that are taking place in the theaters of their imaginations." We can populated those theaters with true heroes. In so doing, we can lead children to delight in the courage of St. George without reveling in the pain of the dragon. In a more modern setting, we can teach them to love the compassion of Jumping Mouse without sneering at the weakness of Buffalo. We can inspire them with the faithfulness of Esther, the mercy of Buddha and William Tell's love of liberty.
With fine literature we can lift hearts and light lamps for the spirit. This is not "indoctrination." This is "education" in its truest sense -- we are supposed to lead students to care about the right things and help them to discern qualities worth emulating.... We must not leave the education of the young to chance, Socrates says. We are supposed to mold good character and cultivate good vision with the right stories and the best examples...
The task of moral education at the elementary school level is two-fold: to cultivate the desire to act rightly and to help children discern the virtuous. To act rightly, one must first care about doing right. To act virtuously one must have a vision of the virtuous. The Core Virtues literature-based program attempts to meet these needs by introducing a vocabulary of virtue and a wealth of stories to inspire a love of the virtues. In time, it is hoped, a love of virtue will inspire the emulation of virtuous acts.
Excerpted from the Introduction.
