You wrote to me once, listing the four chief virtues: Wisdom, justice, fortitude and temperance. As I read the list, I knew I had none of them. But I have other virtues, father. Ambition. That can be a virtue when it drives us to excel. Resourcefulness, courage, perhaps not on the battlefield, but… there are many forms of courage.
Commodus to Marcus Aurelius, ‘Gladiator’.
“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
There is a wonderful connection between these two quotations and the current debate over character education, SRE and PSHE. The moral compass that Church and religion once monopolised has largely passed into the hands of the State and it is via Schools that the transmission of values is most likely to succeed so the current thinking goes. If that is the case, then Schools need to be clear on the relationship between talking and doing. Schools also have to work closely with parents and experts to ensure that the messages of how to live a good life and how to act responsibly are clear. Far too many parent consultations are about the minutiae of grades and targets; every School should dedicate time each term to communicating its values and expectations with the parent body, and as much CPD time spent on improving the quality of PSHE within the curriculum as is spent on improving pedagogy. Developing virtues in conjunction with subject knowledge and thinking skills is one magic bullet: why duplicate a teacher’s workload when it is perfectly possible to explore character virtues and the nature of living a good life within the context of subject specialisms?