Virtues and their role in education

Each human being comes into the world with natural properties that may be described as the state of natural characterlessness. This is why the educational process should lead to the situation where these diverse and individualized predispositions work as a homogenous and harmonized prime mover of man. The way to achieve this state is through forming moral character which may be understood as the development of individual moral virtues. The origin of ‘virtue’ is Latin ‘virtus’ which means ‘strength’ or ‘skill’. This potential of the virtues is necessary for man because he constantly struggles with imperfection of his nature. In this case we talk not only about natural virtues (intellectual and moral) since the true and full dimension of human character may be formed only in the light of the supernatural virtues. This is why we should take these two categories of virtues into account: natural (attainable by human natural powers) and supernatural (which exceed the capacity of unaided human nature). Regrettably, the idea of virtue and character is underestimated or even intentionally ignored in contemporary education. This could be the result of mental laziness of certain educators or intellectual currents in philosophy. Still there is hope for change in this area since present-day education theorists call for the return to classical methods of education.

Piotr Tomasz Nowakowski