This is the third article in the Formations Series. Read “Part 1: From Parish to Public School: The Rise of a Civic Orthodoxy” and “Part 2: Schools Teach Subjects. Families Form People.”
What should institutions of public education teach? It is a question that appears deceptively simple. Reading, writing, mathematics, history, and science quickly come to mind. Yet contemporary educational frameworks increasingly ask schools to accomplish far more. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) argues in The Future of Education and Skills: Education 2030 that education should prepare students not only with knowledge and skills, but also with the attitudes, values, resilience, responsibility, self-regulation, and agency necessary to become “active, responsible and engaged citizens.”i In the first article of this series, we discussed how modern public education emerged from the transfer of educational authority from the parish to the State.ii In the second article, we explored how families and communities bear responsibility for a person’s formation.iii As the momentum to discern the relationship between public education institutions and the family continues, a natural question arises: if public education increasingly assumes responsibility for developing character, resilience, and citizenship, can virtue itself be cultivated by these institutions?
Expanding the Mission of Public Education
This expansion is not unique to the OECD. Educational frameworks increasingly define the mission of public education in terms of character formation and personal development alongside academic instruction. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), whose framework has been adopted or adapted by school districts and states throughout the United States, defines education as the process through which students develop healthy identities, manage emotions, establish supportive relationships, demonstrate empathy, and make responsible decisions.iv Likewise, North Carolina’s Portrait of a Graduate identifies empathy, personal responsibility, learner’s mindset, adaptability, collaboration, and communication as essential competencies every graduate should possess.v Together, these frameworks reflect a significant shift in educational expectations. Schools are no longer asked merely to teach what students should know, but increasingly to cultivate the dispositions, habits, and character traits that shape who students become.
The concept of shaping future citizens through public education is not new. Horace Mann’s common school movement envisioned compulsory education as essential to preserving the American republic by preparing informed and responsible citizens.vi Nearly a century later, progressive educators at Columbia Teachers College, including John Dewey, George Counts, William Heard Kilpatrick, and Harold Rugg, expanded that vision beyond civic preparation.vii Through the Lincoln School, an experimental laboratory for educational reform, they sought to demonstrate how compulsory education could shape not only what children knew but also how they thought, behaved, and ultimately understood their role in society.viii
What Is Virtue, and Can It Be Taught?
Few would argue that these qualities are undesirable, and some would rightfully ask why this is a topic for a blog on education independence. Isn’t teaching and cultivating virtue good? Respect, honesty, courage, responsibility, and compassion are virtues every healthy society hopes to cultivate in the next generation. The debate, however, rarely centers on whether these virtues matter. Instead, it focuses on whether schools are doing enough to teach them. Perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Before asking whether schools should teach virtue, we must first ask more fundamental questions: Can virtue be taught by an institution at all? Who has the primary authority to teach what virtue is, and who reinforces the behavior?
Before discerning upon whom rests the authority to impart virtue, it is imperative to understand and define virtue. The ancient Greeks understood virtue (aretē) as excellence, the pursuit of fulfilling one’s purpose to the highest degree. The Latin virtus emphasized moral courage, strength, and excellence of character.ix Aristotle understood aretē not merely as goodness in the abstract, but as the excellence of character that enables a person to fulfill his proper function well.x Christianity did not discard these ideas but redirected them toward their highest end: a life rightly ordered toward God. The Catholic tradition further distinguishes between the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance and the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity.xi Together they provide not merely a list of admirable qualities, but a framework through which a person continually measures and orders his life. Virtue, therefore, is not an achievement. It is the lifelong practice of moral conversion. Human beings are called to pursue excellence, knowing that complete perfection remains beyond them. The virtuous life is not measured by the attainment of excellence, but by the continual practice of it. Like the athlete who trains every day despite never being guaranteed victory, the virtuous person continues striving toward excellence because excellence itself is worthy of pursuit.
Institutions Establish Principles; Persons Cultivate Virtue
This distinction fundamentally changes how we think about compulsory public education. If virtue is not a body of knowledge but rather a habit of life, then it cannot simply be transferred from one person to another. Virtue requires mindset, routine, repetition, discipline, and action. One does not become prudent by merely studying prudence. One grows in prudence by repeatedly making prudent decisions. Likewise, justice, fortitude, and temperance are not mastered through lectures alone but through countless opportunities to practice them until they become habits of character.
At this point, an important question emerges. Can public institutions cultivate virtue? If so, what is the role of public education institutions in the cultivation of virtue? Public institutions are composed of people, and people can act virtuously. Such institutions may establish virtuous principles, encourage honorable conduct, and hold members accountable to shared standards. The United States Army, for example, articulates virtuous principles through the Army Leadership Requirements Model.xii These principles establish expectations that shape daily conduct and help build trust within the profession. Public institutions, therefore, can encourage virtue and reinforce virtuous behavior, but they cannot practice virtue apart from the people who comprise them. Public institutions establish principles, and persons cultivate virtue.
Compliance Is Not Virtue
This distinction becomes even clearer when we distinguish virtue from compliance. The word compliance originates from the Latin complere and later complire, carrying the sense of coming together to fulfill an obligation.xiii Over time, the word has evolved to emphasize conformity with established standards or requirements. Compliance defines excellence according to external requirements. Virtue defines excellence according to the moral conversion of the person. Compliance asks, “Did you meet the standard?” whereas virtue asks, “Who are you seeking to become?”
This difference is important because compliance is often a requirement. A person can choose to act virtuously, but must comply with regulations, rules, laws, and other forms of authority. Institutions of public education necessarily depend upon standards, policies, procedures, and accountability. These are not weaknesses; they are necessary features of organizations. Yet human dignity must never be reduced to compliance alone. A child who tells the truth only because punishment awaits has complied with a rule. A child who tells the truth because honesty has become part of his character has practiced virtue.
The Family Cannot Outsource Formation
This is why the family remains the primary institution of formation. Long before children understand words like prudence, justice, or fortitude, they observe them, or fail to observe them, within the home. A child raised in a peaceful household often learns peace long before it can be defined. Likewise, chaos, gratitude, honesty, generosity, patience, and love are first encountered not as abstract concepts but as lived realities. Children imitate before they understand.
Institutions of public education can reinforce these lessons through their various approaches to applying standards of success, but families must introduce virtuous actions. Institutions of public education can encourage honorable conduct. Families cultivate the habits that make honorable conduct possible because familial relationships are built on trust and love. Institutions of public education may require honesty through rules and accountability. For this reason, virtue cannot truly be outsourced. Families may invite schools, churches, coaches, mentors, and communities to reinforce the virtues they seek to cultivate, but they cannot delegate the responsibility itself. Virtue is formed through daily practice, repeated observation, and enduring relationships. It is lived before it is understood and practiced long before it is perfected.
i Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, The Future of Education and Skills: Education 2030: The Future We Want (Paris: OECD, 2018), https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/about/projects/edu/education-2040/position-paper/PositionPaper.pdf.
ii Joshua S. Pierson, “From Parish to Public School: The Rise of a Civic Orthodoxy,” Choose Education Independence, May 18, 2026, https://chooseeducationindependence.com/blog/from-parish-to-public-school-the-rise-of-a-civic-orthodoxy/.
iii Joshua Pierson, “Schools Teach Subjects, Families Form People,” Choose Education Independence, July 20, 2026, https://chooseeducationindependence.com/blog/schools-teach-subjects-families-form-people/.
iv Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, “Fundamentals of SEL,” accessed August 19, 2026, https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/.
v Hannah Vinueza McClellan, “Report Looks at the Future of ‘Portrait of a Graduate’ in North Carolina and Beyond,” EdNC, June 17, 2024, https://www.ednc.org/report-looks-at-the-future-of-portrait-of-a-graduate-in-north-carolina-and-beyond/.
vi Lawrence A. Cremin, The Republic and the School: Horace Mann on the Education of Free Men (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1957).
vii Robert Bortins and Alex Newman, Woke and Weaponized: How Karl Marx Won the Battle for American Education, and How We Can Win It Back (Charlotte, NC: Classical Conversations MultiMedia, 2026).
viii Columbia University Teachers College, The Lincoln School of Teachers College.
ix Douglas Harper, “Etymology of Virtue,” Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed August 19, 2026, https://www.etymonline.com/word/virtue; “Virtue,” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, accessed August 19, 2026, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/virtue.
x Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.
xi Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 23, a. 1.
xii U.S. Department of the Army, ADP 6-22: Army Leadership and the Profession (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 2019).
xiii Douglas Harper, “Compliance,” Etymonline, accessed August 19, 2026, https://www.etymonline.com/word/compliance.
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