Virtues and Values
Making Every Class Catholic: A Practical Guide, Chapter 2.4
This is a draft of the third chapter of Part II of Making Every Class Catholic: A Practical Guide. The draft Table of Contents is available here with hyperlinks to previously published chapters.
For many of us, the first thing we think of when we imagine infusing Catholic faith into our classrooms is values. It is so common that I often have to coax small groups in my workshops to push beyond it. Most Catholic teachers easily and naturally talk about applying Jesus’s teachings or values in the classroom. And more and more Catholic schools are making an explicit focus on virtues a central part of school life. Having a “virtue of the month” has become common practice, and many schools even sign up for virtue education programming. This is all to the good.
But I put this chapter fourth for a reason. I sense a real temptation to not merely start with virtues and values, but to stop there. This is an example of what is sometimes called “the reduction of religion to ethics,” the idea that religion is basically about regulating human behavior. Within this paradigm, questions about who God is or what God has done for us—the very heart of the Gospel—are seen as idle curiosities or even distractions.
People, we are assured, can believe what they like on such arbitrary matters. What really matters is how they act. But notice that the measure of what constitutes acceptable behavior, then, comes from outside of any particular religious tradition. The secular surreptitiously asserts its right to judge any and all religious values from its own imagined “neutral” perspective.
From there, it is not even ashamed to attribute to Jesus himself the positions of a good modern secularist of one political stripe or another. For years, the left has insisted that Jesus (being loving and non-judgmental) would certainly dissent from the Catholic Church’s views on matters like abortion or same-sex marriage. Recently, one sees more and more examples of the right asserting that Jesus (being a realist, and an especially manly realist at that) would not condone the positions of the Church he founded on matters of immigration or war.
Beyond these dangers, though, what distinguishes religion and religious education, in the minds of many, is that it is “values based.” This is meant as a compliment. We have all met non-Catholics who say that they choose Catholic schools for their children for precisely this reason. But there is danger lurking here as well. When not grounded in a Catholic vision of the human person, generic “values” can easily become cover for undermining Church teaching, a substitute for Catholicity rather than an expression of it.
Everyone can agree that kindness, for instance, is a value we should pursue ourselves and encourage in our students. It is, in fact, a fruit of the Holy Spirit. But what kindness demands in particular, complex situations—as when, for example, a staff member or school family is living in open contradiction to Church teaching—is much harder to discern. Injunctions to simply “be kind” are not enough to resolve such matters and can even indicate an unwillingness to face the complexity of the situation.
That is just one concrete and practical example showing the limitations of pursuing “values” without reference to the particularity of the story that Catholicism tells about God, the world, and the human person. But there is also the more general and pervasive problem that students can easily spend 12 years in Catholic schools and get very little sense of what is distinctive about Catholicism. Even those who appreciate the values that were taught and lived in their Catholic schools may graduate with the impression that a commitment to Christ and his Church is quite optional provided that one is a “good person.”
It is important, then, that we take the time to think about other kinds of questions that inform our Catholic worldview—questions that force us to think about the particularity of Catholicism—before we get to virtues and values. That caveat granted, virtues and values remain an invaluable lens for thinking about making every class Catholic.
Once we have avoided reducing religion to ethics, we should also take care that we are not only talking about virtues and values as far as they relate to personal growth or the relationships in the school community. Of course, these matters are essential. But we also need to be able to show how virtues and values relate to the curricular content that students intuitively understand to be the heart of what school is all about. They are not only about how we treat one another in the school community, or even about who we are becoming; they should also become lenses to help us see the truths we study in math or history or science or art more clearly and, at the same time, turn math or history or science or art into lenses that help us see ourselves more clearly.
This might be most obvious in history or literature. Here we can study characters, whether historical or fictional, and see how their virtues (and vices) and values shaped their engagement with the world. What kind of a person was Christopher Columbus or Bartolomé de las Casas, or Crazy Horse or Custer, or Abraham Lincoln or Eleanor Roosevelt, or George III or Elizabeth I? What did they believe about the world? What were they trying to achieve? What gave their lives purpose? What moral questions did they face and how did they face them? (Values) And what habits of soul had they cultivated that fitted them (or not) for their task in history? (Virtues/Vices) This, notice, pairs up very nicely with the Lives of the Saints, which we will explore in Part III.
And you can do the same with Jane Eyre or Tom Joad or Edmund or Lucy Pevensie or Frog or Toad or Scaredy Squirrel. Scaredy Squirrel is a story about growth in the virtue of fortitude—and about learning to recognize and reject the vice of timidity masquerading as prudence. And students get more out of it when that is made explicit at some point in the lesson. (But not at the beginning! Literature fails to work as literature when the moral comes before the experience of the story itself.)
In short, the easiest way to include virtues and values is when they are to be found in the actual content of the class. English and History are the obvious, but certainly not the only, candidates here.
A second way we incorporate virtues and values is by reflecting on our own engagement with the content. Who are we becoming by the way we participate in Phys Ed, or struggle through a tough concept in math? In this light, students learn very quickly about perseverance. It easily becomes the standard answer: “Math is hard and though I may never use this knowledge or these skills when I grow up, I am at least growing in the virtue of perseverance.”
This isn’t wrong, of course, but it risks becoming almost pro forma and does not necessarily lead to deeper reflection or understanding. It can even reinforce the false and dangerous idea that virtue isn’t much fun.
