On the lookout for new ways to help kids improve their thinking, I came across the Intellectual Virtues & Education Project (IVEP). And the more I learnt about it, the more I felt like Colonel Cathcart in Catch-22, uncertain about whether to regard the project as a ‘feather in the cap’ or a ‘black eye’.
On the one hand, the project seems a laudable success. It champions important values like curiosity, creativity, and intellectual rigour in education. Chalk one up for better thinking in education: it’s a feather in the cap. On the other hand, in at least one pioneering classroom touted by the IVEP, such noble values are dealt a body blow: the virtues of good thinking are being espoused in a disturbingly unthinking way. And that’s a black eye.
The IVEP brings together a multidisciplinary team of scholars from around the world to reflect on and foster intellectual virtues in education. The project director, philosophy professor Jason Baehr, defines intellectual virtues as “the character traits or personal qualities of a good thinker or learner.” He specifically cites curiosity, intellectual humility, intellectual autonomy, attentiveness, carefulness, thoroughness, open-mindedness, courage and tenacity – the so-called ‘master virtues’.
The IVEP intends to put its educational model into practice in a new middle school. The Intellectual Virtues Academy of Long Beach, California aims to develop critical thinkers and lifelong learners who strive for deep understanding and wise application of their knowledge. In addition to its central focus on fostering the ‘master virtues’, the school will encourage students to develop virtues such as reflectiveness, determination, fair-mindedness, imagination, and integrity.
I did wonder how the schools’ leaders settled on their particular taxonomy of intellectual virtues, and why they included certain virtues while excluding other plausible ones, such as critical thinking, reasonableness and consistency. But it was only when I read a media article about the IVEP’s 2012 teacher training seminars that I began to feel distinctly uneasy. The article describes the efforts of one seminar attendee, a third-grade teacher named Agustin Vieyra:
[Mr Vieyra has been] getting students to think about what it means to be open minded, intellectually courageous, and intellectually humble as soon as they start their day. He shared a video he took of a morning call-and-response ritual that sounds like intellectual boot camp.
The students in the video nearly yell: “Be intellectually aggressive. Be intellectually humble. Be respectful of all people and things. Sit like a scholar. Be an intellectual leader.” Some of them raise closed fists as they recite…
U.C. Irvine researcher Elizabeth van Es says what’s kept this type of classroom approach from taking root on a mass scale in public education is that U.S. public schools have a set of institutionalized routines to educate students that don’t leave much room for such out of the box learning.
There’s a bitter irony in students chanting “Be an intellectual leader” in unison, much like the crowd chanting “We’re all individuals” in Monty Python’s Life of Brian – a classic example of the stupefying effects of mindless recitation. Another irony lies is the bogus contrast between the extolled “call-and-response ritual” and the damned “institutionalized routines.”
Still more disquieting are the political overtones of the clenched fists, which for me are reminiscent of the raised hand salute in ‘The Third Wave’, Ron Jones’ chilling experiment in fascist groupthink at a Californian high school in 1967. To my mind, there are also uncomfortable parallels between the motto “Be intellectually aggressive” and The Third Wave catch-cry “Strength through discipline.”
I wonder how many of the children in Mr Vieyra’s class understand the implications of what they’re saying. Do they sense a dissonance between the praise of intellectual virtues and the expectation of compliant acquiescence? Do they experience the ‘boot camp’ atmosphere as antithetical to free and independent thinking?
It seems to me there’s something authoritarian and quasi-religious* about any class that involves catechistic intonations about virtues – and it doesn’t help that the third-graders’ daily morning routine involves what the teacher describes as “our pledge to our country, our pledge to our school, and our pledge to ourselves and our classroom.”
And yet one of the ‘master virtues’ identified by the Intellectual Virtues Academy (IVA) is intellectual autonomy, which it defines as a capacity for active, self-directed thinking and an ability to think and reason for oneself. In fact, the IVA explicitly mandates that the intellectual virtues (and indeed all academic content)
be pursued in a reflective, intentional manner… teachers will routinely reflect with [students] on why they are learning what they are learning; and they will be challenged to “think outside the box,” generate new ideas and solutions, and consider alternative possibilities.
This, of course, is admirable – a feather in the cap. Equally encouraging is the IVA’s statement that
Students do not become excellent thinkers or inquirers by being passive recipients of tidily packaged bits of information. Accordingly, students at IVA will be expected to take control of their intellectual growth and development. They will be trained to actively engage ideas, ask good questions, demand evidence, and support and defend their convictions.
To deliver on these promises, teachers at the IVA will need to treat intellectual virtues as proposals: tentative, contestable and negotiable proposals about how to think and learn well. And these proposals should remain open to challenge and subject to deliberation and discussion in the classroom.
It would be a mistake for teachers to present a prescribed set of virtues as definitive or impervious to critique. After all, no character trait or thinking strategy is unconditionally virtuous. It’s worth considering examples that challenge our concepts of virtue, such as the polio-stricken Honduran man – a paragon of the ‘master virtue’ of tenacity – who has spent 50 years attempting to build a helicopter out of scavenged bicycle parts. Examples like this provoke us to think in subtle ways about what we value, and why. They suggest that whilst a seeming virtue (like cleaving tenaciously to a goal) is praiseworthy in some instances, it may be foolish or irrational – and perhaps even reprehensible – in others.
Life is full of moral ambiguity and uncertainty. In the long run, it will be vastly more useful for students to cultivate good judgement than to internalise any particular body of received wisdom. And while the cultivation of good judgement is perhaps exactly what teachers of intellectual virtues are seeking to achieve, a doctrinaire and prescriptive approach will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
* The IVEP is funded by the John Templeton Foundation (JTF). This organisation has been widely criticised both for its conservative and religious ideological bent, and for its funding of research that seeks a scientific basis for non-scientific phenomena. While there is nothing to suggest that the JTF exercises intellectual control over the projects it funds, one critic of the JTF – philosopher Massimo Pigliucci – notes that it is common for researchers to be unconsciously influenced by the agenda of their funding source.
The Philosophy Club runs co-curricular and extra-curricular workshops for children in Australia.