Running head: EDUCATE
Education Centered on Intellectual Virtues
Jeremy Dunford
Loyola Marymount University
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Education Centered on Intellectual Virtues
On Back to School Night each fall, most high school teachers walk parents through
syllabi, inform them of classroom rules and procedures, or introduce them to a class website.
While all of these are certainly useful discussion topics, I take a slightly different approach.
After just five short minutes, parents leave my room with a deep understanding of my philosophy
of education and are excited for their children to come to my class the next day (or so they tell
me).
My contract says that I teach Algebra I and Theology III, but these are not really what I
teach. In fact, every good teacher is tasked with delivering the same education to his or her
students, even if the packaging looks a little different for each subject and in each individual
classroom. We all have the responsibility to not just transmit information to our students, but to
help them grow and become more intellectually virtuous. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
posits that the way to become more virtuous is by acting virtuously. Accordingly, I encourage
students in theology to think critically through analytical discussions and synthesis-driven essays
about why bad things happen to good people, the nature of human nature, or the existence of
objective morality and meaning, and I teach students how to collaborate and innovate to solve
complex and relevant word problems in math. My hope is that by developing these high-level
Depth-of-Knowledge skills (Webb, 2007), they will become not just better thinkers but better
people.
At its core, I believe that is the true goal of education, building good people. I love
seeing students discover the same passion for knowledge that I found in high school, and I want
to fuel that fire, cultivating intellectual virtues like diligence, critical thinking, and openmindedness and helping them to grow mentally, personally, and spiritually. This Cura Personalis
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mindset is a direct result of my own experience as a student in Jesuit schools, and I am
determined to educate my own students as whole persons as well.
In order to achieve this end, I engage in this growth and learning alongside my students
as an exemplar of critical analysis, always pushing my students and myself to peel back another
layer of intellectual rigor. Palmer (1998) encourages teachers to take a communal approach to
inquiry, wherein teachers do not pretend to know the answers to unanswerable questions and are
not afraid of learning with their students in the classroom. Given my experience and higher
education, I am obviously more knowledgeable about my curriculum than are my students, but as
a teacher I often take more of a facilitator role, asking questions of my students instead of
answering them. This strategy of dialogue, whether in the form of solving systems of equations
or debating the origin of the cosmos, is much more likely to lead to the formation of
intellectually and, in effect, morally virtuous students than simply assessing students’ abilities to
regurgitate information that I told them (Baehr, 2011).
I am a life-long learner. Reading works by Augustine, C.S. Lewis, and Dennis Prager for
pleasure has given me the insight to ask the toughest of questions and consider a number of
rational responses. My job as a teacher is to be the Virgil to my students’ Dante, guiding them
through intellectually rigorous curricula that can sometimes feel more stressful than the Inferno
itself. I am a firm believer that it is the journey of considering questions, not necessarily the
finding of answers, that builds good people and thus holds the true meaning of education. I have
found my true vocation in accompanying my students on this journey, constantly building
intellectual virtues and knowing that we will never arrive at our final destination.
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References
Baehr, J. (2011). The inquiring mind: On intellectual virtues and virtue epistemology. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Palmer, P. (1998). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher's life. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Webb, N. L. (2007). Issues related to judging the alignment of curriculum standards and
assessments. Applied Measurement In Education, 20(1), 7-25.