Does history as a whole have meaning, structure, or direction, beyond the individual events and actions that make it up?
Fifth response
Read the file below and answer this question (why do we neglect virtues in school? ) the answer should be add anything your own or your opinion and what do you think about it and do you agree with what you read or not and why agree or disagree
National Society for the Study of Education, Volume 112, Issue 1, pp. 22-40
Copyright © by Teachers College, Columbia University
The Neglect of Virtue
HUGH SOCKETT
George Mason University
This chapter argues that schooling neglects virtue through the dominant quest for right answers. This is not only intellectually disreputable in presuming the correctness
of what is taught, but it undermines the development of necessary intellectual virtues, such as open-mindedness, impartiality, and accuracy in the school curriculum,
and it fails to create the intellectual and moral framework for the democratic
citizen, specifically in the development of tolerance, social responsibility, and prudence. This neglect of virtue in schooling is primarily visible in the intellectual characteristics and attitudes of the college freshman.
INTRODUCTION
In a paper designed to articulate the terrain of the scholarship of teaching,
Lee Shulman (1999) addressed the question of what it was to take learning seriously. He diagnosed three common failings when learning does not go well: we forget, we dont understand that we misunderstand, and we are unable to use what we learned. I have dubbed these conditions
amnesia, fantasia, and inertia (p. 11), to which he added nostalgia:
the belief that what worked for us as professors will work for them. In contemporary schooling, amnesia suggests that the curriculum can fail to become part of the intellectual fabric of the minds of students in schools: they memorize, forget, but do not embrace. Fantasia suggests that students fail to develop self-knowledge, to develop a prudent view of their ambitions, temperament and aptitudes, and what they might be
The Neglect of Virtue 23
and become. Wishes escape from the discipline of careful thought. Inertia
indicates that, although many teachers no doubt want to treat what is being taught as alive and vital, structures of testing and grading among other things degrade the intellectual puzzles in the curriculum by making
them inert, so that countless students never encounter serious intellectual
challenges.
These pathologies point to a neglect of moral and intellectual virtue in teaching the young in schools, a neglect that fails to prepare them for a moral and intellectual life and leaves them inadequately prepared for college or for life as a democratic citizen. As college students, these so-called products of the schools manifest these inadequate moral and intellectual capabilities, attitudes, and dispositions. In Section One of this chapter, I use three studies of the undergraduate condition to support
this claim on the weaknesses of schooling, specifically the neglect of moral and intellectual virtue. In Section Two, I articulate a claim that the strong focus in schools on memory and on getting the right answer
(the paradigm in multiple-choice testing) gives the learner what is thought to be objective certainty. Such objective certainty is epistemologically
unsophisticated, if not simply wrong. There are important subtle and substantial differences within and between objectivity and subjectivity
to be understood. To combat objective certainty, I argue, teaching and learning will require intellectual virtues, such as open-mindedness, impartiality, and accuracy, at all grade levels, but notably in history and science. Finally, in Section Three, I frame citizenship education within the development of a person, emphasizing the need to embrace participation
in the wider civil society and in its matters of governance, which are threatened, in different ways, by each of Shulmans pathologies. The teaching of those virtues essential for life in a democratic political order can be couched within the education and the development of the self, specifically in terms of tolerance, social responsibility, and prudence. Children are too often cast as performers in curriculum roles and rituals, which continues into their student-hood, smothering serious attention to their selfhood and their identity, both as the personal self of individual identity and as the social self of the citizen. Individual virtue, as philosopher
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