Answering the Virtuecrats

School Administrator, Jan, 1999 by Dan Woll

What K-12 administrator has not been frustrated by the rhetoric of William Bennett, William Kirkpatrick and others who argue that if public schools would do a better job of teaching virtues and morality, the putative American cultural decline could be reversed? Answering the Virtuecrats by Robert Nash promises a rebuttal.

Nash, a professor at the University of Vermont, draws heavily on his teaching experiences in applied ethics and moral education. He begins with an incisive analysis of the shortcomings of today's character educators, who he categorizes as neo-classicists because of their longing for a return to the traditional virtues of Western civilization. He exposes the hypocrisy of those who clamor for a moral curriculum they cannot define. Nash reinforces many educators' beliefs that the intellectual underpinnings of the character educators are an inch deep and a mile wide.

At the core, this book is about talking our differences. All educators, K-12 or college, would benefit from reading Nash's guidelines for moral conversation. Although the author's prose is arcane and his practice of making points through sample conversations with his students is distracting, he has written an honest book that is a testament to his dedication to democratic dialogue.

(Answering the Virtuecrats: A Moral Conversation on Character Education, by Robert J. Nash, Teachers College Press, 1234 Amsterdam Ave., New York, N.Y. 10027, 1997, 208 pp., $18.36 softcover)