Teaching the Virtues
By David Hein.
Mecosta House, 2025.
Paperback, 222 pages, $16.95.
Reviewed by Thomas Griffin.
Aristotle famously began his Metaphysics with a foundational principle: “All men by nature desire to know.” This leads to two further questions: What should men know? How do they come to know? The desire for knowledge immediately generates conversation on the nature of education.
As technology increases exponentially and artificial intelligence threatens to replace human thinking, these questions are ever-relevant. They have always been important, but the landscape of education is changing. Students are less and less interested in learning for learning’s sake. Schools are increasingly more interested in the idols of college acceptance and job preparation making; beefing up resumes, not cultivating virtuous students, has become the summum bonum.
The remedy we need is a return to virtue education, the contours of which David Hein skillfully outlines in his thought-provoking Teaching the Virtues. “Education,” writes Hein, “is more about developing the habits—in particular, the moral traits—of a good life than it is about delivering content, as important as knowledge is.”
Education’s primary mission is to form a person’s character. One unnoticed element of this formation is how a school approaches academic integrity and how its students live it out. “More important than grades is intellectual honesty,” Hein argues.
This means that students ought to know that the process of learning and putting in the time to obtain the knowledge of the truth is the key element in school. When a student’s “roommate or ChatGPT” earns a student’s grade, it short-circuits the educational process. Cutting corners and then hiding the truth in the submission of one’s work is not good for the human person because it erodes integrity and learning.
Education is not about the production of shiny content, but about the formation of a person who must come to grips with what it means to obtain ownership of the truth. This process requires, as Hein notes, many virtues. Patience is needed in order to sit and digest the reading. It also takes time to formulate sentence structures and an entire essay that best represents a student’s own thoughts as well as incorporates analysis on truth claims.
The virtue of temperance is needed to withstand the temptation to take shortcuts. Fortitude is required to complete assignments and perform in front of a class—a feature Hein requires. Prudence discerns topics to explore in the classroom—and later in life.
Ultimately, being virtuous means knowing and doing what is good for the human person. For example, “an oak tree has a good, which is survival and propagation.” In order to accomplish this, the tree must gain deep roots. “For human beings, the virtues are like the oak tree’s deep, sturdy roots. They enable survival, propagation and the realization of our distinctive ends.”
Virtues must be the centerpiece of education because they form the foundation of a person’s life. How one thinks, acts, and lives flows from one’s habits—and virtues, as classically defined, are good habits. Learning how to think and act for one’s good requires not just knowledge of the virtues, but an awareness of how to apply them as well. For this reason, not every graduate is truly educated. Hein specifies: “The difference between being educated and being schooled is the difference between being equipped to ride a horse across open country and being led on horseback around a ring.”
Education is meant to set us free, not simply bring us past a graduation date. It ought to place us on a path to further explore the wonder and truth about the world around us. To have knowledge is to live in the truth of real freedom. “Freedom,” Hein writes, “succeeds when influenced by habits of the heart that incline citizens towards temperance and patience, justice and mutual respect, rather than toward selfish opportunism.”
To be formed in moral and spiritual excellence means that one is oriented towards realities that are bigger than oneself. Namely, the service of truth, others, and God. To learn is to know thyself and the true nature of things. This process occurs when students are encouraged to ask the actual questions that most concern their being. Even in religious schools, students ought to raise authentic questions. Hein offers the following examples:
In a church school, if a student wishes to raise questions about the role of a loving God in the face of a devastating natural disaster such as an earthquake, then good for her. If a student feels compelled to confess that, following the death of his little sister to bone cancer, he is having trouble believing in an active, benevolent Creator, then he should be supported in admitting this fact.
Human beings are not empty receptacles for receiving facts. Rather, they are “active inquirers” when it comes to obtaining knowledge. Grappling with the truth leads them on the path to truly come to understanding. Therefore, effort and imagination are required from teachers. They should link the virtues not only to what students are studying but also to their passions. Schools ought to be ingraining these habits into their daily business. “Then the substance of the virtues will become not bare and theoretical but instead truths to live by.”
This process and goal is paved with virtues. Since education is about formation, virtue and character development must be a part of everything a school does. Unfortunately, Hein notes that disciplines are too separated and lack cohesion. “Each discipline is a smokestack by itself.”
Departmental seclusion is the result of a school that lacks the perspective of virtue learning. For instance, we are human persons who cannot separate morality from the study of World War II. For another example, we cannot study a literary figure without asking ourselves, “[W]ould I act in the same wretched or heroic way?” When education is plastic and concerned with worldly accolades, it produces smokestack disciplines. When it is imbued with virtue formation, the school comes alive with the spirit of truth and intellectual curiosity.
If Aristotle was right in saying that we all desire to gain knowledge, then we ought to truly reflect on how the schools in our communities cling to virtue—or don’t. Doing so will better our children and our society, because the virtues still matter.
So let’s strive to learn them, teach them, and live them. The reform of education depends on it. Hein’s probing book is an excellent place to begin.
Thomas Griffin teaches in the Religion Department at a Catholic high school and lives on Long Island with his wife and son. He has a master’s degree in theology and is currently a master’s candidate in philosophy. He is the author of Let Us Begin: Saint Francis’s Way of Becoming Like Christ and Renewing the World.
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