"Real Education" Starts Early

What a gratifying post by Michael Toth. At the end, he raises an important point: Everyone should experience rigor in thinking about virtue and the Good, not just people who are acquiring a traditional liberal education at the college level. Absolutely right. But we shouldn’t wait for college to do it. All of K–12 education used to be, and still could be, suffused with the kind of moral content that goes into thinking about virtue and the Good. Take a look at any of the McGuffey’s Readers that used to be the standard reading textbooks in elementary school. Here are some of the readings in a typical edition: “The Greedy Girl,” “The Honest Boy and the Thief,” “On Speaking the Truth,” and “Decisive Integrity.” If that is what you are constantly exposed to during your most formative years, then you are likely to absorb a lot of it into your way of looking at the world.

Here’s the sad part: If you are not exposed to that kind of extended, bone-deep moral instruction as a small child, taking a college course on the Nichomachean Ethics isn’t going to remedy the situation. You are likely to read the Ethics as you would read any other assignmentÑtext to be mastered for purposes of answering test questions, not as a profound resource for thinking about what a life well-lived means.

There are K-12 curricula out there that would accomplish much of what I want (see pages 76–81 of em>Real Education<). But the real problem is getting parents to focus on the reasons that their little darlings come home from college earnest and well-meaning and good-heartedÑbut as innocent of any hard thinking about virtue and the Good as they were when they entered kindergarten.