The deadline for submitting this essay coincided with moving to a new house after thirty-five years of living in the previous one. The books I have needed to refer to in writing it have been among the thousands I have had to sort in readiness for the packing crates about to arrive. The books by bibliophiles I have read in recent years have all warned me that for someone with a large personal library, accumulated over many decades, the experience of handling each book individually, whether in packing or unpacking, was likely to overwhelm one with a ‘chaos of memories’.
The phrase is Walter Benjamin’s, whose essay Unpacking My Library describes how, moving into a Berlin flat following a divorce, he spent from midday to after midnight late in 1931 unpacking the 2000 books he had not seen for two years. More recently, bibliophiles Alberto Manguel and Theodore Dalrymple have been inspired by similar experiences to write about them, in Manguel’s case when downsizing the huge library of his house in the Loire Valley to what would fit into a small apartment in Manhattan (in Packing My Library), and in Dalrymple’s case in cataloguing his own library in the hope he will finish doing so before he dies (in These Spindrift Pages).
What convinced me that I was right to have proposed to write on the theme of ‘education for virtue and the common good’ was finding, amidst my collection, three tiny pocket books that I had had for sixty years or more. The oldest, The key of heaven, is ‘a selection of prayers and devotional exercises for the use of Catholics’, undated, but judging from the names of those who granted it its Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur, early twentieth century. The second is a ‘Preparation and Companion’ to Holy Communion, which I was given when preparing for confirmation into the Church of England in the 1950s. It includes questions for regular moral self-examination in advance of receiving the sacrament. The third is a Spanish edition of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, leather bound and with 765 pages of bible paper, given me at the sceptical age of 21, with the words Que Dios te ilumine (may God enlighten you), by a formidable middle-aged woman with searing memories of the Spanish Civil War who was a private pupil to whom I taught English in Spain in the 1960s.
All three books are tiny in size but huge in intention: to guide readers on how to live a life of virtue and save their souls. They are both devotional and educational, requiring constant reflection and self-examination with a view to making one a better person. They reminded me of my early childhood – long before I acquired these three books – in which my daily task was to open a small box full of minute paper scrolls each with a biblical text, one of which it was my task to select at random and to read out to my Victorian grandmother (born 1882). Educational injunctions about a life of virtue – ‘Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you’, ‘Be thou strong therefore, and shew thyself a man’, ‘Bear ye one another’s burdens’ – were part of my everyday routine throughout my childhood.
Finding these books – and my grandmother’s box in the attic with most of its scrolls now crumbling to dust – has not just brought back episodes in my past life. It has left me, as someone who has spent his life working in education, with the questions I am keen to address in this essay: what have been the influences shaping this ‘education for virtue’ over the last two and a half millennia? How pervasive has this kind of education been? Has it now disappeared altogether along with its dated vocabulary, or are ‘non-judgmentalism’, ‘respect’ and ‘inclusivity’ just new ways of talking about virtues and vices, sin, evil, and conscience?
For much of the Graeco-Roman world, out of which Christianity emerged, the guiding principles for a good life were the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and courage. These were defined in the fourth century BC, first by Plato in The Republic and then by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. They were key principles of stoicism which, along with other stoic influences, particularly via the writings of Saint John and Saint Paul, were absorbed into Christianity, itself already centred on the pursuit of virtue via its origins in the Hebrew Bible.
The convergence of these influences has meant that some of the classic educational texts used by western European Christians over many centuries have been ‘pagan’ ones from Graeco-Roman Antiquity, such as Cicero’s On Duties, Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Some of these, and especially Cicero and Plutarch, continued to be in use right up to the nineteenth century in the education of the mostly male members of European elites, in the case of On Duties continuously for over 1500 years.
Cicero’s On Duties is a call to young Roman patricians to mould themselves into virtuous people, because this is what all individuals should aspire to and what the common good demands. The qualities a self-education in virtue was designed to foster – steadfastness, trustworthiness, integrity, restraint, considerateness, generosity, wisdom – continued to be encouraged in European Christian societies for many centuries, though one hears much less of them now than one did.
Plutarch’s paired lives of Greek and Roman rulers highlighted similar qualities, illustrating them through a cornucopia of case studies of degrees of virtue and vice that, in the words of one of Plutarch’s greatest admirers, Michel de Montaigne, enabled readers to know themselves better and as a result ‘to live well and to die well’. From the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries, these Parallel Lives, read mostly in translation, helped to shape the way many members of elites saw the qualities they should be developing in themselves. These included self-discipline, a curbing of one’s passions, willingness to accept correction, courage, and a commitment to the common good.
Many of these qualities were those associated with knighthood in the pan-European corpus of medieval writings about King Arthur and the Round Table. They are also the stuff of Renaissance guides to conduct such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book of the Governor and Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. They form the moral core of the ever-developing concept of an English ‘gentleman’ which, in attenuated form, is also still with us today.
A similar consistency about the importance of education for virtue can be found among later European philosophers. Most wrote about education and were often themselves educators. Many were emphatic about the centrality of virtue in education, even to the extent of downplaying the pursuit of knowledge, which to Plato and Aristotle had been the summum bonum. In the sixteenth century, Montaigne criticised a badly taught classical curriculum as one which produced ‘donkeys laden with books’, arguing that what mattered was character and wisdom. In the seventeenth century, Locke, defining the purposes of education as ‘Virtue, Wisdom, Breeding and Learning’, placed ‘Learning’ the least important of the four. In the nineteenth century, John Ruskin asserted that ‘you do not educate a man by telling him what he knew not, but by making him what he was not’. None meant that knowledge was unimportant – all these were immensely learned men – just that virtue and character were the primordial qualities.
All had a sense that education, in Montaigne’s words, was about learning how ‘to live well and to die well’, that it was a lifelong task and, even if they might not have used the word, a ‘pilgrimage’ that only came to an end with death (and, maybe, for Christians, if one had lived well, with eternal life). It was a view at the heart of England’s two most widely read devotional and educational texts (other than the Bible): Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying (1650-51), to be found in many literate English homes throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which has gone through over 1300 English editions since first publication in 1678.
When in the 1990s the phrase ‘lifelong learning’ came to be used widely in the educational world, I once commented in a speech that, though an excellent way of looking at education, this was hardly something novel given that it was at the heart of a two-thousand-year-old Christian heritage from which we might wish to continue to draw. The negative reaction from the audience was one of the first occasions on which I realised the extent to which, as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset put it in the middle of the last century, ‘man finds himself facing the future lacking a past tense’.
What is the state of ‘education for virtue’ in England today? We have a national curriculum inscribed in statute which requires schools to ‘promote the spiritual (and) moral … development of pupils at the school and of society’. We have schools that are some of the most moral places in a society that seems to have turned its back on the traditional language of morality, in the sense that they operate on the basis of clear and usually written down rules about what constitutes good and bad behaviour. They cannot survive without these rules and sometimes may not do so with them, as suggested by a 2024 survey in England which found one in five teachers reporting that they had been subjected to violence from pupils: ‘hit, kicked at, and bitten’.
But does this moral education bear any relation to the ‘education for virtue’ recommended over the previous 2,500 years? The language is certainly very different, especially outside faith schools, with ‘respect’ for others and non-judgmentalism more common in school mission statements than the promotion of virtues, ‘passion’ more prominent than self-restraint, and rights outbidding duties. One problem is that every school has its own version of the person one should aim to be. This is hardly surprising, given that, as the twentieth century’s greatest moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out, the assumption within modernity is that one is preparing children not for a conception of the good that is unchosen but for one they are expected to create for themselves.
By contrast, the four cardinal virtues and three theological ones (faith, hope and charity), along with the corresponding seven deadly sins with their associated sense of shame, carry the patina of time and inherited wisdom, are memorable, and define qualities requiring deep thought. They convey a sense that one has a core purpose, which is to better oneself, and that the struggle to achieve this purpose continues until death.
More worrying than the language of school mottos is the wider perversion of traditional Christian and sophistic morality characteristic of contemporary elites and to which education at all levels has been subject. Tom Holland in Dominion has shown how, despite the rapid decline in Christian belief and church attendance, Christianity lives on in the many forms of progressivism committed to the defence of ‘the poor, the mean and lowly’ and to the self-congratulation of their defenders. More radically, the French conservative philosopher Chantal Delsol in Icarus Fallenhas seen contemporary moral life as a fundamental rejection of traditional ideals and centuries of practice. It is a morality of ‘complacency’ which refuses to accept limits on behaviour, stresses rights above duties, prides itself on its non-judgmentalism and evaluates everything in terms of its implications for our own well-being. While rejecting the notion of an objective morality, it is steeped in new certainties and deeply punitive towards anyone who dares dispute them.
The consequences of this in education are all around us: drag queens in nursery schools, ‘sexuality education’, gender ideology, discouragement of patriotism, education about ‘white privilege’, discrimination in favour of ‘oppressed’ minorities, a confusion between tolerance and respect, and censorship and loss of employment for those with different views.
Can any of this be reversed? Schools vary hugely and are some of the places where strong leadership is most capable of bringing about major cultural change, but until the Zeitgeist moves – and it would be a seismic shift – any return to a more wholesome ‘education for virtue’ will be piecemeal and slow.
Dr Nicholas Tate was chief executive of England’s national curriculum and assessment authorities in the 1990s. He is currently Adviser to the Learning Institute, Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Hungary. His most recent book is Seven Books that Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does.
