Virtue Can’t Be Learned from Devices

From The Public Discourse.com (Sept. 25, 2022):

The COVID pandemic forced schools to manage the most rapid transformation of classrooms in our lifetimes. School administrators contended with lockdowns, quarantines, barriers, masks, distancing, and fear. The most consequential transformation was so-called “distance learning,” which sought simultaneously to impose and overcome physical absence from the classroom, substituting electronic networks and screens. Some schools have considered permanently adopting online tools and digital devices that were acquired during the pandemic. But before we accept screen-mediated schooling as inevitable or convenient, we should consider how this digital transformation might undermine schools’ educational missions.

If a core purpose of education is to help students become virtuous—intellectually and morally—then we must ask whether virtue can be learned virtually. We are not aware of any studies that even ask this crucial question. But if virtue cannot be acquired virtually, then the technological changes rationalized by the pandemic ought to be rejected.

Schools predictably adopted digital technologies to set up virtual classrooms because the standard crisis management playbook prioritizes operational recovery—i.e., restoring some version of the status quo ante. But amid the scramble for operational recovery, the educational mission and values of many schools were lost in the fog. With all the pressure to get back to delivering educational content, and to keep children occupied so parents could work from home, some schools lost sight of their core purpose—fostering intellectual and moral excellence, that is, virtue.

Cultivating Virtue

The development of virtue has long been the avowed purpose of education across public and private schools. According to a 2011 report, published by the Leonore Annenberg Institute of Civics at the University of Pennsylvania, “the role of schools as conduits for civic knowledge and virtue is deeply rooted in the American tradition.” Another report on the purpose of public education recognized the importance of developing civic character to American democracy: “A nation committed to democratic freedom requires citizens with the knowledge, skills, virtues and commitment needed for active engagement in public life.” In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.”

Private and charter schools often explain their educational missions by identifying the specific virtues they cultivate and esteem. If you survey prominent preparatory schools, you’ll notice a common aspiration that their graduates acquire through their education and exemplify in their lives such virtues as courage, generosity, wisdom, selflessness, humility, simplicity, honesty, and integrity. Similarly, the largest charter school network in the United States, KIPP Public Schools, lists “Focus on Character” as one of its five differentiating commitments, which includes an emphasis on gratitude.

Understanding Virtue

But is this central aim of schooling—helping students cultivate virtue—achievable in a virtual environment? To answer this question, first, consider the nature of virtue, which is an excellence of the soul. Specifically, following Aristotle, virtue is a state of the soul “which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well.” Cultivating virtues in children involves developing habits and dispositions to perceive, feel, judge, and act in the world in an honorable way. The foundation of any virtue, as a form of excellence, is discipline—restraining impulses, discovering and developing capabilities, and practicing behavior modeled on how a wise person acts.

We first learn virtue by developing a “kinship to excellence,” which requires guidance to recognize certain acts as noble and others as base. We learn not only by being told, but by feeling pleasure in performing noble acts and feeling shame when our actions are base. The teacher’s responsibility is to help us learn to recognize these natural feelings, and remember them, so that we can eventually use them in our own moral reasoning.

In order for students to learn these disciplines of the soul, they need a school environment in which a wide range of interactions can be practiced in a natural environment. This allows teachers to observe and interact with the students and help the students see and evaluate the natural consequences of their actions. The learning environment should also allow teachers to model virtuous behaviors to their students and, thus, to serve as exemplars. [read more]