Against the Expertise Model of Education One of the first questions I typically get when I tell people outside the academy that I teach philosophy is “Graduate or undergraduate?” It’s a perfectly reasonable question. These are quite different modes of education, after all, one devoted to specialized study in a discipline, the other part of a broad course of studies with many paths branching out from it. But if you teach graduate students in the traditional disciplines at a typical American research university – unless you are
Menand’s essay made me want to throw the NYer across the room, so it’s good to read your response -- much friendlier and more open that my own!
Your intellectual virtue / moral virtue distinction is helpful in explaining what humanist education does and doesn’t achieve. But are you saying that education in intellectual virtue is *no* part of education in moral virtue? If friendliness and knowing ourselves as human aren’t themselves moral virtues, don’t they at least share a blurry border with the moral virtues? Maybe intellectual virtue is a possible path toward moral virtue, but not the only such path? Or a path toward some of the moral virtues, but not all of them?
I’m not sure. But I want to get the relationship between the two kinds of virtue-education right, partly because how we draw that distinction will also inform how we think about who gets to go to college and about what college can offer to students who struggle to be "intellectual" (in the usual and obvious senses of the word). And I'm sure there's *some* relationship between them.
Menand’s essay made me want to throw the NYer across the room, so it’s good to read your response -- much friendlier and more open that my own!
Your intellectual virtue / moral virtue distinction is helpful in explaining what humanist education does and doesn’t achieve. But are you saying that education in intellectual virtue is *no* part of education in moral virtue? If friendliness and knowing ourselves as human aren’t themselves moral virtues, don’t they at least share a blurry border with the moral virtues? Maybe intellectual virtue is a possible path toward moral virtue, but not the only such path? Or a path toward some of the moral virtues, but not all of them?
I’m not sure. But I want to get the relationship between the two kinds of virtue-education right, partly because how we draw that distinction will also inform how we think about who gets to go to college and about what college can offer to students who struggle to be "intellectual" (in the usual and obvious senses of the word). And I'm sure there's *some* relationship between them.