Teaching virtue

On Character Day, Eagle Ridge students dressed as someone from a book or history who exemplified integrity.

Citizenship, integrity, perseverance, honor, excellence and respect are the code at Eagle Ridge Academy, a classical charter school in a liberal Minneapolis suburb, reports James Traub in a New York Times commentary. Few white families in affluent Minnetonka choose the K-12 school. Two-thirds of students are nonwhite, mostly from East African and South Asian immigrant families who like the school's traditional values and high test scores.

Two students dressed as Thomas Edison.

"Eagle Ridge is one of a growing body of classical schools whose traditional ethos includes both a curriculum based on the great books of the Western canon and a culture founded on the idea of virtue," he writes.

In a ninth-grade seminar, Traub listened to a lively, respectful discussion of Virgil's Aeneid: Was the Trojan hero hyping his story to impress Dido? Could Aeneas have chosen to stay with Dido or was he bound by his fate to leave Carthage to found Rome?

America's public schools were founded to prepare citizens, he writes. States banned religious instruction, but "a typical statute admonished teachers to instruct pupils in 'the principles of morality, truth, justice, temperance, humanity and patriotism'.”

"This moralistic, often heavy-handed pedagogy began to give way about a century ago," when progressives such as John Dewey argued that education should empower children to be independent, Traub writes. Moral teaching was replaced by "a lowest-common-denominator relativism."

Instead of talking about "virtue," educators spoke of "values," writes James Davison Hunter inThe Death of Character. That comes down to "personal preferences," Traub writes. "In our modern therapeutic vocabulary, 'temperance' and 'justice' gave way to 'self-esteem'."

"As the United States conducts a terrifying experiment in just how poisonously angry, distrustful and self-aggrandizing a democratic polity can become without destroying itself," Traub sees "a growing wish for explicit moral instruction," even in traditional public schools. "More than 90,000 middle and high school teachers now use materials from the Bill of Rights Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit that lists nine civic virtues that, it claims, 'promote self-government' and advance 'the spirit of a common purpose'.”

The virtues of wisdom, justice, courage and temperance are classical, not Christian. . . . Classical teachers describe their own concerns as “prepolitical,” arising not from current affairs but from the pursuit of enduring principles — truth, beauty and goodness.

Eagle Ridge's politics seem "very Minnesota," Traub writes. There are lots of "sustainability" posters on the walls. "For their medieval history class, the 10th-graders had produced modern versions of Luther’s 95 theses. Several demanded a reduction in pollution and the use of fossil fuels."

Eagle Ridge’s moral code promotes "civil discourse and mutual respect," he writes. Students are taught to preface their remarks with, “I agree with you” or “I disagree with you.” They can argue, and then shake hands.

Traub is the author of The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy.

Gregory Roper teach students how to argue like a Roman. "Rome was a place of astonishing cultural diversity, stretching from Spain to Gaul to North Africa to Egypt and Asia Minor, and all had to find a way to do business together," he writes. They learned "the art of rhetoric — the technical skill of persuading others with one’s words to think something, to change their minds, and to make something happen."

He teaches his students that "you can’t have a productive argument unless you figure out precisely what the two sides are arguing about."