Who would have thought that a teacher might convince a student that living a virtuous life was both a challenge and an adventure? David Hein apparently has done just that in the classroom, and those classroom teachers who read his book might well come to learn from him and agree with him—and do the same thing.
Teaching the Virtues, by David Hein (205 pages, Mecosta House, 2025)
John Adams and David Hein are right. That should be the starting point and the concluding point, their seemingly separate concerns notwithstanding. Adams’ immediate focus was on the halls of government and the Constitution, while Hein is content to dwell on the classroom and the constitutions of the individual students therein.
Long ago Adams let it be known that he thought that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” A number of presumptions were at work here. This new country was to be a constitutional republic, if we could “keep it” (to borrow from Benjamin Franklin). A republic was only possible with a virtuous citizenry (to return to Adams). A virtuous citizenry was grounded in good morals, and good morals in turn were grounded in religion (to clinch Adams’ original point).
There is nothing here with which David Hein would disagree. Yes, a republic is dependent upon virtuous people. Yes, those virtues spring from religious commitments and beliefs. All of that was at the heart of the original American experiment. And yet for a number of decades now we have been attempting to carry out a very different experiment. We have been trying to maintain our republican structure without its original scaffolding.
John Adams knew that this would not work. So, for that matter, did Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and others among our founders. And so does David Hein; hence his attempt to recall, revive, and rebuild that scaffolding, one student at a time.
Hein’s focus in this wise and valuable little book is on the Christian schools of America. That would include both the Christian schools of early America and the Christian schools of today. Almost all his historical references are to the Christian schools of the 18th and 19th centuries, and their founders. And his targeted audience of potential readers of this book are those who teach in Christian schools today.
This is at once an admirable goal and a limited goal. Teaching the virtues should be the overt goal of all K-12 education, public and private. Our constitutional founders surely knew that as well. To be sure, such was the case during the colonial and early national period of our history. It was also the case throughout the whole of the 19th century and into the 20th century as well. Of course, this education was infused with a generic Protestantism; hence the decision of American Catholics to create their own diocesan school systems. Nonetheless, the practices of both public and non-public schools were consistent with the vision and emphasis of John Adams.
Still, it cannot be denied that there was a time when Catholics fled the public schools because of their overt Protestantism. Just as it cannot be denied that in recent decades both Protestant and Catholic families have left public schools because of their overt secularism, a secularism which is often coupled with an open hostility to all religion. Lost along the way is a great deal. Among those losses, more often than not, is a commitment to, or much of an interest in, teaching the traditional virtues.
A Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, David Hein has had a great deal of teaching experience at both the high school and college levels. To be sure, the vast majority of that experience has been with private Christian schools; hence his decision to write this book for his compatriots in the ranks of private Christian education. This is well and good, but it is also limiting, perhaps even unnecessarily limiting.
Hein’s finished product is at once a “how to” manual and a “what might be useful to use” compilation, coupled with helpful explanations as to possible teaching strategies for imparting and emphasizing the traditional virtues. As such, the book is both very wise and highly eclectic. It might even be characterized as sneakily wise, as in how to guide students toward leading lives of virtue without simply drumming this or that virtue into them.
Hein does not hesitate to emphasize that the immediate goal of an education grounded in virtue is to help each student realize “one’s best self.” At the same time, the public dimension that drove John Adams’ thoughts and priorities is never far removed from Hein’s agenda.
Throughout the book, Hein is also not at all hesitant to borrow from writers who have plowed similar ground, which occasionally provides him with an opportunity to make an additional clinching point. One example ought to suffice. He borrows this single sentence from philosopher Peter Geach’s book, The Virtues: “Men need virtues as bees need stings.” Hein then adds that both are “natural and necessary” before giving a fellow by the name of Cicero a chance to inject these few words: “Virtue is nothing other than (nature) fully developed and taken all the way to its highest point.”
Then comes Hein‘s clincher: “What student could resist the challenge? Who would want to turn down the adventure the virtues offer.”
Who would have thought that a teacher might convince a student that living a virtuous life was both a challenge and an adventure? David Hein apparently has done just that in the classroom, and those classroom teachers who read his book might well come to learn from him and agree with him—and do the same thing.
Along the way Hein provides brief biographical snippets of past educators. If there is a unifying thread running through his selections, they are all educators who have treated students as active, rather than passive learners. Even John Dewey makes the David Hein cut here, but includes him only after conceding that Dewey was “about the last person I thought I’d turn to for wise counsel on education.”
Among others educators Hein gives some attention to are the famous (Booker T. Washington, Simon Weil, and George Marshall) and the not at all famous, including one Henry Augustus Coit (1830-1895), the first rector of St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. Hein praises Coit’s emphasis on teaching virtues, but deems his methods to have been “excessively austere and therefore incomplete.” Whether Coit’s classroom practices were “excessively austere” for his day or ours or both is not addressed.
Prior to tackling the virtues themselves Hein devotes an entire chapter to “Writing as a Moral Act.” At first blush, such a chapter seems tossed in. But Hein makes a good case for its inclusion, not to mention a good case for writing as just that, a moral act, both because a student should always be aware that he or she is writing for others and because good writing is hard work, and hard work requires a great deal of perseverance.
Once again Hein is not shy about calling upon others, especially in this case when the “others” are George Orwell and Samuel Johnson. Here is Orwell: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” And here is Johnson: “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”
Then there is William Zinsser On Writing Well: “Rewriting is the essence of writing well; it’s where the game is won or lost.” And finally there is David Hein: “Good writers do not like to write; they like to have written.”
Where does all of this leave a writer by the name of David Hein? Let’s just say that he doesn’t seem to be inclined to reveal his own likes or dislikes about either writing or having written, but it’s safe to report that he can be read with pleasure.
He can also be read in bits and pieces, which is both a strength and a weakness of the book. Perhaps the weakness is inevitable, given that the book is part history, part mini-biography, part instruction manual, part Hein’s “best of” on what else has been written on virtue, and part serendipity. In other words, the virtue of discipline may not always be on display in these pages, but the virtues (?) of excitement and energy are.
Turning to the virtues, Hein’s excitement and energy are contagious. The best and most important, not to mention most helpful, chapters of the book deal directly with them. Teachers in private–and, yes, public–schools will benefit by reading them.
Here just a few examples will have to suffice. For Hein, the dictionary definition of hope (“a feeling of expectation”) is “rather pallid.” He defines hope as “confident expectation,” which he associates with a trust in God. In other words, there is a clear connection in his mind and heart between faith and hope. And conversely he deems a sign of failure to trust in God to be “a lack of confident expectation.”
Hein on the virtue (italics in the original) of justice ought to be of more than passing interest, since for him it means that “we have become habituated to recognizing the dignity of each person.” Notice what is missing here, namely the so-called dignity or interests–or grievances–of groups. He then makes reference to what’s called “social justice” and suggests that teachers ought to consider asking their students “what exactly the adjective adds to a virtue that is already social.”
Hein also includes a valuable section on the use of novels and films in the classroom. Extended treatment is given to Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness At Noon, as well as two now semi-ancient films, Ride the High Country and The Hanging Tree. He links each work of art with a specific virtue, but in the name of encouraging a wider readership of this book this reviewer has deliberately decided against including so much as a single sneak preview (of which virtue Hein aligns with which work of art).
Finally, while that decision may be deemed neglectful on my part, Hein does not neglect the “unfashionable” virtues of temperance, humility and piety, each of which could–and should–be taught in all schools, private or public. To be sure, each of the three has a clear Christian connection, a connection that Hein is not at all reluctant to state, as unfashionable as that clearly would be in a public school setting today: “Virtue’s ultimate end is the telos of willing the will of God: the alignment of our selfish and often misguided wills with the sovereign, holy will of God.”
One more “finally,” if I might, followed by a hopeful suggestion as well. Any teacher during the lifetime of John Adams–and well beyond–could easily have said those very words to any classroom of students. Not so today. And therein lies a terrible societal problem. We are terribly divided, maybe even hopelessly divided, between secular America and religious America. (Of course, the secular desire to create heaven on earth is a religion of sorts all its own, a religion that Hein debunks, but does not ignore.)
To borrow from a highly “religious” fellow who adopted the surname Lenin, “What is to be done?” Things sometimes do appear to be hopeless. But then, to borrow from G. K. Chesterton, what is hope is not hoping when everything does seem hopeless? This reviewer’s hope is that David Hein might write yet another sneaky book. If his goal here was to help Christian educators instill the traditional virtues in their students without hammering the same into them, perhaps he could write–and painstakingly rewrite–a book for public school educators, a book that would somehow smuggle or slip, rather than hammer, his message in their general direction. Clearly, we need more David Heins, whether that might ultimately mean making the next Great Awakening unnecessary or helping to bring it on.
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