Why teach with virtues?

Posted by admin on December 8, 2009 under Teaching With Heroes | Be the First to Comment

Perhaps the school experience for some is supposed to be about facts and figures, nouns and numbers, you know – the things we can easily measure. Certainly we need to know these things. But perhaps, in this age of information and computer networks, we have come to a point when we need to know how to obtain the information that we don’t know. Passing knowledge by teaching information isn’t quite as necessary today as it was before. Well this isn’t a new concept and isn’t really the result of the “information age.” It has been expressed long before in great teaching traditions: “It’s not what you know, but how you learn that matters.” (I’m thinking now about the “…, but who you know..” version of that statement – and how I might introduce why teach with heroes?. But that is a different topic).

So back to “how you learn.”  What we need are the tools to find out for ourselves the answers to questions we don’t know. For example, someday you may be looking for a reference about the author of a book. Most likely, you’ll discover that the way you go looking is the way you learned in school, or another time in the past. If it worked once, try it again. Most likely, if the information is out there, you’ll find it. That is, if you learned how to find information before.

Simply said, we learn by experience. And, here’s the answer – Why teach with virtues? – it gives us the experience that we need. We do more than just learn about something, we experience the learning. Okay, there’s a leap forward here, I admit. So let’s explore that. The leap is that virtues are an important part of the experience. Maybe if you are a computer, a worldwide web software service, or ink on paper, that may not be true. Language defines all you would need, in that case. But we are more. We make our choices, like how we search for a fact, based on our feelings too. Saying we use the method that worked before is only partially true. We also choose the method that felt how we wanted it to feel. We choose the method that had a positive experience.

Virtues are positive character traits that we are all capable of experiencing. They are part of the human experience. They apply to everything we do, and how we do it. I said earlier that teaching in schools might be about nouns and numbers, but learning is all about who we are. If we teach our kids that who they are is not only measured by what they know but how they learn and apply it, then the lessons they learn will repeat for them the rest of their lives. If kids learn virtues this way, their actions in the future will be reinforced with the same virtues. Eventually, the kids who learn virtues through their own experiences, will be the adults who are fulfilled repeating them.

A big leap? A supposition? Perhaps – and what a fantastic possible outcome it offers.