Project Step 1: Moor Your Child in Virtue
Teach your children to recognize what is Good and you'll provide safe anchorage from which they can adventure widely and learn to live well.
You are one of your child’s teachers, certainly, but your most important role is that of project manager of her education. This series is meant to both encourage you and teach you how to complete project steps that will result in an education for your child, the goal of which is not just financial success, but what the Greeks called eudaimonia: a fulfilling and meaningful life, lived in accord with reason and guided by purpose. Eudaimonia is the end one achieves when education moves her to strive toward the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
Your goal for your child is an education. The goal of state-run schools is to produce a populace that supports the end goals of the State. A government’s goals can be good or bad, depending on who holds the reins of power, but they are probably not the same as your goals for your children.
Most parents want their children to achieve well-being, ideally, flourishing, and certainly contentment. Schools pretend those goals will be met through financial prosperity. If you’re reading this, you probably don’t think that’s true. I’m writing for people who want more than just financial success for their children, for people who understand the greater ideal of eudaimonia, are aware the schools rarely, if ever, produce it, and are willing to put in some labor to guide their children toward it. (Bonus: in teaching your children, you’ll move closer to eudaimonia too.)
To get to eudaimonia you need moral virtue. Our schools have largely abandoned the teaching of moral goodness because the one principle they do hold fast is that there is no objective moral truth, just you doing what feels good to you.
I'd hazard that the vast majority of teachers, especially in elementary schools, agree that children must be explicitly taught to be good, even if only for the most pragmatic of reasons: classroom control. When you get to middle and high schools though, most teachers have been fully indoctrinated into the moral relativism necessary to adhere to a standard of “Equity” defined by the politicians masquerading as Principals in and Superintendents of our public schools.
American kids are adrift, academically and morally, because the public schools in which they spend the majority of their waking hours refuse to teach virtue in the first place and fail to hold anyone accountable for patently unvirtuous behavior in the second. This has huge downstream effects on learning and, thus, human growth.
You need a desire to be and do Good in order to show self-discipline in a system where the standards are laughably low, to stay honest in classrooms that reward cheating, to take responsibility when you fail rather than blaming others, and to persevere when things get tough. Without that, and with no consequences for failure, quitting is the thing that feels good.
How did we get here?
The state requires that all children attend school so the public schools take all comers. Prioritizing Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, Taoist or any other morals in the presence of non-believing minors is a fearful prospect for most principals; they see it as a lawsuit waiting to happen. Teachers incentivized to be empathetic in order to effect equity and justice, shy away from teaching virtue in fear of making one student feel “less-than” another. The way teachers have been trained over the last twenty years has taught them they should either teach no virtues or give equal time to the virtues of every belief system. If the schools wanted to give fair shrift to all belief systems they’d have to have (A) teachers who know them all, which they don’t, and (B) a ton of time, which they can’t spare because the priority is to teach new curriculum every year while also attempting to remediate huge disparities in knowledge and skills among students.
While I still think you could teach moral virtue in our public schools, I totally understand why weak school leaders are afraid to allow teachers to touch it. I also understand why newer teachers have been taught that if they can’t do it equitably, they shouldn’t do it at all.
Schools have abdicated the teaching of any moral truth because the curriculum materials we have that might effectively teach such principles, i.e. literature and most primary source documents, is Bible-based. The state of educational “leadership” is now fully political. I have yet to meet the principal with the guts to say, “Go ahead and go hard teaching virtue; I’ve got your back.” I did it anyway — oddly, most often through economics — and managed not to anger too many parents, but I’m also excellent at my job so I had wiggle room that mediocre or bad teachers wouldn’t have. I was also tenured. The principals on-site generally avoided my room, probably largely because it was one of the best learning environments on campus where even the most recidivist kids controlled their own behavior — which had a lot to do with my explicit teaching of what it means to be Good in a classroom.
Currently, many on the political right are clamoring for schools to place “American values” at the forefront of schooling. Everybody else who isn’t a hard leftist wants school to be a weird kind of agnostic that understands teaching kids the Why of things is risky because it requires moral judgment. Instead, the public claims to want teachers to approach each subject divorced from its telos, its Why. Instead, we reduce knowledge to an entry on an accountant’s ledger, i.e., its effect on individual lifetime earnings. School has excised eudaimonia from education and made it all about GDP. While that certainly makes sense for the state, it doesn’t make sense for your family.
Could the state use force to bring education in virtue about? Sure, but it can never do it well. Let me explain.
In my classroom, literature is the material, but examples of virtue (and non-examples) are the course content. Parents choose our school, and I'm transparent in my teaching, but other than providing a clear structure and working like a dog to get every kid up to speed in the content through reading and writing, there's only so much I can do in 45 minutes a day. Besides, the kids don't know ME, so any moral authority I have comes through giants like Golding and Bradbury and Melville and Hawthorne and Shakespeare, as it should. Anything beyond pointing out the actions of characters in literature and of the men and women who shaped history and asking students to analyze not just the consequences of their actions and their overall effectiveness in achieving their goals, but also whether or not they did the Right thing would feel like indoctrination to me, blurring the line between schooling (what I am paid to do at scale) and education (which is a parent's moral obligation and rightful responsibility.)
You parents, on the other hand, have all the moral authority required to help your own child live a Good life. You know your child. You know what she’s been through. You know what she loves and hates. You learned, at some point, how to get her to eat her broccoli. You love her, warts and bad habits and all. You will never fully give up on her. No matter how hard the road gets, her path is partially yours.
The schools will never have such influence. Even if they did, they lack the motivation to see it through to the end. In fact, they can and do lie to parents, pretending to instruct students and using grades to “prove” they did what they said they would. Not only that, the school will gladly suborn your child’s lies —should she lie — in cheating her own education by asking others to think for her, whether a classmate or an LLM like Gauth or ChatGPT. The school benefits from student cheating because it reduces the labor of the adults profiting off the system.
None of those things is true for you, the parent. You need your child to actually be educated or you will have to carry her, to some extent, for the rest of your life. You have no interest in her lying and cheating, because that increases the difficulty of her life down the line. You carry all the responsibility, but are also on the direct receiving end of the enormous benefits of securing a real education for your child. Being the parent of a good, kind, tough, funny, story-loving nerd, and/or whatever else you facilitate her growth into, is an unparallelled reward. Money cannot substitute for it. All one has to do is look at Elon Musk’s obvious pain over his relationship with his son to know that’s true. The richest man on earth can’t buy back time; he can’t buy back being present to teach his son. You, on the other hand, if you’ve read this far, probably still see an opportunity to grab hold of time and build something priceless: a Good human being.
Finding the Telos for Your Child’s Education
To start, you have to answer three questions:
What moral virtues are your cornerstones? In other words, by what principles do you live your life?
What spiritual path have you trod, and what beliefs and practices do you want to inculcate in your children?
What does success mean in your family?
The picture below is what I designed for my family. You can see that at the base I placed honesty, courtesy, and self-government. My husband and I started with these because they are the virtues that help young children move easily in society which helps them work on the next level of virtue: respect, courage, responsibility, and perseverance. At the top, as my kids get into their teenage years, we’ll be working carefully on developing temperance, prudence, and fortitude, centered around humility (because we must remember no matter how well-educated we believe ourselves to be, we are flawed, frail humans). All of this training points upward to our ultimate family goal: to serve each other and our community well throughout our lives.
Before you go thinking I’m about to drop a mostly inoffensive Christian-lite, Americana ethic that I believe schools (and you) should force on all children, you should know that while I grew up in a hard-line fundamentalist church and have read the Bible (both the Hebrew and Greek scriptures) many times over, I am not a church-goer. What I am hard-line on is the United States Constitution, particularly the restrictions placed on government by the Bill of Rights. The state has no right to interfere in your religious beliefs or in how you raise your children, so long as you respect the inalienable natural rights of your fellow citizens.
I have had the children of Satanists in my class whose writing required intense, thoughtful care when correcting. I have had to correct strictly conforming Mormon children who didn’t hesitate to loudly shame caffeine drinking in their classmates and me (coffee is a helluva drug, though) during class. While I don’t practice Santería and don’t have a crystal ball, I’ve had the children of multiple families come through my class who did. Worship of la Virgen de Guadalupe played a major role in many, many of my students’ lives.
And that’s why you have to figure out what you want for your kids. The schools can’t provide it because if they were to try, there’s a very good chance they’d step on some other parent’s toes, and the First Amendment makes that a dicey proposition when the state is funding the schools and forcing all children into them through compulsory attendance laws; a practice I’m almost certain America’s Founding Fathers would not have condoned.
So step 1 of your new job as Project Manager is to figure out the telos of your child’s education by answering these questions:
What moral virtues do you want to develop in your children?
Which religious beliefs and/or spiritual practices do you hope to inculcate in your children?
What would you consider success as a parent? What about for your child?
Once you answer these questions, or at least begin to hone in on the answers (it can take time to nail them down), the path forward for your family will become much more clear. Every book you read, every lesson you teach, every skill you practice will be anchored in these answers. And in taking the time to deal fairly with these questions, to think about your ultimate goals for the rearing of your children, you’ll begin to provide safe mooring for them no matter how turbulent our world becomes.
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