David Hein’s 2025 book titled “Teaching the Virtues“ looks at the important topic of civic education and its priorities between building an “ academic mind“ or a moral character. Reforming civic education is a central question in the American youth and education policy space, especially on the eve of the 250^th anniversary of the birth of the United States. Interestingly, it has recently become a focal point in Hungarian policy discussions as well as a part of reshaping the National Youth Strategy for the next ten-year cycle. This book review by Luke Sheahan offers insight into an American point of view. 

Citizenship requires mastery of a body of knowledge necessary for self-government, this includes knowledge specific to a citizen’s home democracy. Saying that the point of education is to impart a body of knowledge or “critical thinking” skips an important step: teaching the habits that make possible the acquisition of knowledge and the formation of a critical and inquiring mind. Proper and effective education must include education in the virtues, especially those virtues so essential to living well that we dub them “cardinal” and “theological.” Good citizens require the qualities of good men, the virtues that make them reliable friends, neighbors, and family members, which constitute the habits and practices that make them reliable denizens of a republic.

Of course, this begs the perennial question: can such virtues be taught? Knowledge can be taught. We know that. But can we teach the virtues necessary to the acquisition of knowledge and its humane employment? Or are these qualities something innate, to be discovered only when those lucky few enter the educational realm? The greatest minds of our species pondered that question over the millennia. Let’s sum up that conversation by saying that the conclusion is qualified: the virtues can be taught—if taught correctly, with particular concerns in mind. Chief among them is the sheer difficulty of the task for teacher and student. Attempts to teach the virtues fail more often than not. Virtue education requires teaching with intent, strategic engagement with historical material, and imaginative assignments calibrated to inculcate in students’ minds and hearts the habits that constitute virtuous living.

Learning the virtues is even more difficult. The student must eradicate his own vices. The smoker doesn’t quit smoking unless he acquires the cardinal virtues of fortitude and temperance to overcome the urge to indulge and the theological virtue of hope in taking the long view of his healthspan. Acquiring virtue means denying the passions, one’s own indulgences, and extirpating the vice of cowardice, and doing so repeatedly so that such self-denial becomes fixed in one’s character. None of this is easy. On its face it isn’t clear how teaching such habits or the disposition from which they arise is even possible.

Enter: David Hein’s Teaching the Virtues. Hein, Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, writes that virtues can be taught, if taught rightly. A storied teacher himself, having worked in both higher education and as a boarding-school master, Hein brings the teacher’s experience and perspective to his book. Telling us what to teach about the virtues and how to incorporate such teaching into the classroom doesn’t make the concrete acquisition of virtue any easier, but at least the educator with a mind to teaching the virtues has the outline of a program.

First, Hein is concerned that we don’t confuse education for virtue with schooling for virtues. This is the difference between riding a horse cross country and being led on horseback around the track. Our schools can be a prime source of virtue education, but they have to get it right. Teaching the virtues is not instruction in definitions. If only education in virtue were as easy as regurgitation on the midterm. Halfway decent teachers have been making students do that for ages. Teaching the virtues requires something more deliberate in the classroom. The teacher must implement practices that inculcate in students’ moral dispositions, rather than learning in the academic sense.

Speaking largely, although not entirely, to the realm of religious education, Hein encourages religious educators to identify and adhere to their values, while understanding that a liberal education is indeed liberal. It requires an openness and engagement among inquiring minds, which means permitting and even encouraging questions put to the reigning dogmas, whatever they are. Christian schools do well when they have a clear mission with well-defined dogmas. The danger is that the school’s mission is often disconnected from the actual practices in the classroom. Students may be told to recite the dogmas, but are they taught how to incorporate them into their thinking and living? The substance of virtue education is the practices that link the dogma of the faith to the drama of life. They bridge the chasm between the principles of religious mission and the ineradicable freedom of students to think and to act on their own.

Hein offers a metaphor drawn from the physical world to make his point: ball bearings. The way ball bearings work is that there is an outer metal ring and an inner metal ring. A machine requires that these rings turn independently yet stay connected. If the rings touch, there will be prohibitive friction and the machine will either grind to a halt or the rings will wear out. Small balls are placed in grooves between the two rings. This arrangement permits the rings to move freely while maintaining permanent contact between them. The outer ring is the school’s religious or philosophical commitments. The inner ring is the vast collection of classes, chapels, sports programs, field trips, and the sundry educational endeavors through which education traditionally takes place. The balls are the virtues that mediate between the plethora of activities that make up an educational program and the philosophical and religious commitment of the educational institution. The virtues permit free movement of the practices of education while maintaining permanent and constant contact with the founding principles. These “habits of moral and spiritual excellence” (p. 20) link the sphere of particular doctrinal commitments to the general educational program.

Hein sees that a liberal education, the education of a free man for a free society, can only ever thrive if it is conservative, if the liberalism it advances is rooted in the soil of Athens, Rome, London, and Jerusalem. Liberal education really is liberal, it does require freedom of students and teachers to inquire, to freely act in the sundry circumstances of the world. Liberal education will only ever succeed in freeing the mind if it grows the soul, if it is rooted in the soil of Athens, Rome, London, and Jerusalem. The virtues are what constrain liberal inquiry to the principles of Western and Christian civilization.

An educator himself, Hein knows the history of his profession and the misfires of those well-meaning but poorly performing educators of times past. He tells the story of the Reverend Dr. Henry Coit, founding rector of St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. A devoutly religious man, he sought to educate students in the truths of his Protestant faith. But he did so in a didactic manner that did not make the truths of his faith the substance of his students’ beliefs and practices. Coit treated “students as passive receptacles” of religious truth, “not active inquirers.” (p. 31) He thought the teacher need only know the truth and impart it. He tended toward a domineering disposition and would not suffer students to question his assertions. The substance of education was for students to receive what the teacher supplied.

Hein sympathizes with the goals of Coit’s pedagogical program, but not his pedagogical method. Students must not be merely taught, but brought to engage with the truths of the pedagogical program. Here, we must admit, John Dewey, the bogeyman of traditional educationalists, had a point. Dewey believed that “[t]eaching, to be fully effective, ought to bring together the great tradition and students’ passions.” Students cannot be merely told, they “must be attracted by and involved in the process of discovery and exploration, as well as in the experience of reflecting on what they’ve found.” (p. 34) Most of what Dewey said of education is toxic, but “dosage makes the poison.” Just “a dash of Dewey may be just what the doctor ordered.” (p. 33)Rather than rejecting Coit’s project, Hein would improve it by preserving the goals of his program, the outer ring of the ball bearing, through the ball bearings of virtue education, pedagogical practices that combine the substance of what is taught with the practice of living that substance out.

How might the educator go about this? Hein provides a brief overview of the disciplines and what ought to be taught on the virtues in each discipline before turning to the how, the pedagogical practices that make those virtues a living reality in the student so taught. Teaching history according to the great man theory, or something like it, provides an opportunity to demonstrate what courage and cowardice look like at important historical moments. It likewise provides ample opportunity to discuss and define justice—and injustice—in history as well as the role of prudence and temperance in advancing national interests. The natural sciences raise questions of the relationship between the virtues of faith and scientific discovery as well as the role of religious adherence to truth-seeking in great scientific discoveries. Other disciplines, mathematics and the like, require fortitude and moral excellence to do well. Athletics provide ample opportunity for “applied ethics,” for acting out of courage, cultivating self-mastery, developing friendship, and the willingness to sacrifice for the good of the whole.

Two basic pedagogical tools across the disciplines provide ample opportunity to teach virtues: reading and writing. Reading “nurtures abstract thought, empowers creativity, fosters imagination, generates new insights, and builds empathy.” (p. 38) The execution of every reading assignment provides this for students. Writing, Hein tells us, “is a moral act.” (p. 41) Teachers have the opportunity to infuse their writing assignments with an education in virtue. How do we do this? First, set high expectations. Encourage students to engage with the material in a serious and insightful way; no mere summary is adequate. This requires the exercise of judgement in students. What is important? Why is it important? What is good and right in the reading? Why is it good and right? Second, the teacher must require effort. Excellence in writing is closely connected to excellence in thinking. Both come hard to most of us. Students must learn the value of effort in the acquisition of excellence. This requires perseverance. In turn, perseverance requires temperance which enables delayed gratification. Students will need to miss out, to put off the fun and easy things they could be doing to do the hard things they should be doing. The acquisition of excellence and true freedom, the freedom of a citizen, knows no other way. “Self-mastery enables a person to be truly free: free because now equipped to meet all the challenges that life—or at least a professor or coach—throws at you.” (p. 49)

Through all this, the teacher must inculcate a sense of honor. Sure, AI can write this for you, but it may not think for you. Only the student can think for himself. Students must have a sense of honor. The grade each student earned was in fact due to their own work, and not that of the robot. Only in this way can a teacher truly assess student effort and help the student rise toward excellence. Furthermore, use of AI would be unfair to students who put in the effort, but earn a lower grade because they did not avail themselves of the advantage of the machine. Only a student’s sense of honor, of expecting to be graded on his own merit and not that of a robot, keeps him from seeking this advantage.

Finally, Hein turns to historical exemplars of the virtues: George Washington, the great American general and President, Hannah More, the eighteenth-century educator, playwright, novelist, abolitionist, et al., who wrote extensively on the acquisition of virtues, and Booker T. Washington, the ex-slave who not only wrote about virtue, but lived out excellence in his civic, economic, and educational ventures. Hein also includes a list of books and films to teach the virtues, classics such as All the King’s Men (1946) on integrity, Ride the High Country (1962) on loyalty, and Darkness at Noon (1941) on faith. Each of his recommendations helps the educator to imaginatively engage students with the virtues through great stories told in films and novels.

Finally, the book closes with a discussion of General George C. Marshall and the virtue of piety. The practices of a religious life go a long way toward the cultivation of the plethora of virtues discussed here. Piety as carrying out one’s duties toward family, country, and faith is essential to citizenship. It is also a virtue that requires for its completion other virtues, including prudence to determine a proper course, courage to defend, and humility to understand the faults of one’s own communities.

Virtues are “good habits conducing to good ends.” (p. 167) Teaching the good ends isn’t enough. We must teach the good habits that will make those good ends achievable. Teaching the Virtues provides the beginning of a program toward that good end.  

Luke C. Sheahan is Associate Professor of Political Science at Duquesne University, Senior Affiliate in the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society (PRRUCS) at the University of Pennsylvania, and Editor of The University Bookman. He is author of Why Associations Matter: The Case for First Amendment Pluralism (2020) and editor or coeditor of several books on freedom of speech and freedom of association.