Russell Kirk once asked, “Can virtue be taught?”
Dr. David Hein’s new book, Teaching the Virtues, is an unsurpassed reflection on that ancient question, one capable of renewing education in our time.
Educational renewal requires both tradition and innovation. Teaching the Virtues is uniquely valuable because it presents practical approaches that are both ancient and contemporary. Even very good schools, religious and secular, can do better at teaching students virtues such as faith, hope, love, prudence, justice, courage, temperance, gratitude, patience, and piety.
Education in the virtues must move students from what John Henry Newman called notional assent to real assent, as virtues become rooted in heart, mind, and will for life.
Join University Bookman editor Luke Sheahan on July 23 at 7 PM Eastern Time as he discusses with David Hein how we might better teach the virtues to the next generation.
David Hein is Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal and the author of Teaching the Virtues (Mecosta House, 2025). He is a trustee of Saint James School (Hagerstown, MD), a trustee of the George C. Marshall Foundation (Lexington, VA), and a former trustee of his alma mater, St. Paul’s School (Brooklandville, MD). He has also served as a boarding-school master in Virginia and a college professor in Maryland. In 2011, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK). His publications include 5 other books and more than 75 articles in the New Criterion, Modern Age, the Journal of Military History, ARMY magazine, the Mississippi Quarterly, the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, and other periodicals.
