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Educating for Virtue

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Baldacchino's Educating for Virtue starts where Nash's Closing of the American Heart leaves off. Like Nash and Bennett, the authors included in this volume believe that our educational system should be teaching character. The book comes out of a 1987 conference, "Content and Character in Our Schools," sponsored by the National Humanities Institute with a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The unifying thread through all the essays is that there is a universal order that transcends the flux of human life and gives meaning to it. Our education should reflect that order, or it will bring chaos to the social order.

Written by some of the heavy weights of the contemporary American conservative movement, the book is predictable though eloquent. Scientism, positivism, rationalism, and literalism are not our guides to truth. Rather, truth is found in symbol, analogy, poetry, metaphor, novel, and moral imagination. Thus, the humanities are a primary means to teach character. Every good therapist and every realistic psychologist knows this intuitively. Our techniques, our reason and our explanations often fall flat when met with the reality of human experience. True healing comes through the communication of a moral imagination, and in the Christian context, through the power of the Holy Spirit transforming individuals from the inside out. Often therapy is mostly a linguistic and symbol-making experience in order to help our clients find meaning, community and hope in a rationally confusing world.