Virtue is trained

The question opens one of the oldest dialogues we preserve. Meno, a young aristocrat passing through Athens, blurts out to Socrates point-blank: can virtue be taught? Or is it acquired through practice? Or does it come by birth? Twenty-four centuries later, we are still debating the exact same thing, only now, for the first time, we have data.

It is best to start with the answer given by the star student of that school, because time has proven him right in a way he could never have anticipated. Aristotle argued in the Nicomachean Ethics that ethical virtue is born of habit — and he liked to point out that in Greek, the two words, ethos and ēthikē, are nearly the same. No one is born just or brave. One becomes just by practicing justice and brave by practicing bravery, just as a lyre player becomes a lyre player by playing the lyre. Virtue is neither a talent nor a syllabus: it is a second nature, and second natures are crafted through repetition, over time, and with someone standing before you to correct you.

Notice what Aristotle described without intending to: content, practice, duration, teacher. The specifications of a program.

The century that washed its hands

For most of history, universities embraced this program as their own. Shaping character was not an extra: it was the point. The word itself betrays it — formation, to give form to someone, not just to fill them up.

The 20th century changed the deal. And for reasons that were far from frivolous: pluralistic societies, fresh memories of indoctrination, and respect for individual conscience. The university decided that character was a private matter — belonging to the family, the parish, the individual — and focused on what it knew how to measure: knowledge. The result was an institution magnificent in its domain and mute in all else. It could certify that its graduate understood thermodynamics; as to whether they were capable of keeping their word, it had nothing to say. Nor did it want to.

The retreat seemed prudent. What no one calculated was the cost of leaving the field vacant, because the character of young people did not stop forming when the university withdrew. It began to be shaped by something else: the algorithm, the peer group, inertia. The question was never character yes or character no. It was always who shapes it, and with what.

Birmingham and Oxford

In 2012, the University of Birmingham decided that this retreat had lasted too long and founded the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, today the world's leading reference center in the field. Its founding principles deserve mention because they dismantle, one by one, the usual misgivings. Virtues are present in all major traditions, but they do not belong to any religion. Character can be taught, learned, and reinforced, and it must lie at the heart of education. And educating character does not restrict the young person: it empowers them — giving them the judgment to make sound decisions about their own life, which is the very opposite of deciding it for them.

Upon this foundation, they built a framework of openly Aristotelian inspiration — habituation as the path, phronesis or practical wisdom as the virtue that guides all others — which is now used by hundreds of schools across four continents. And in 2020, together with the Oxford Character Project, they extended it to the field we are concerned with through a document on character education in universities, whose diagnosis we have already shared here: almost all universities promise character traits in their graduate profiles; very few have a method. Even rankings have taken note — four questions regarding growth in wisdom, justice, and contribution to society were incorporated into the Wall Street Journal's college rankings through that very Oxford project.

In short, serious conversation about virtue no longer takes place in the self-help section. It takes place in Birmingham and Oxford.

What the evidence says — and its fine print

There remains Meno's question in its hard version: does it work?

In 2023, the Journal of Moral Education published the largest meta-analysis conducted on character education programs: 214 studies involving over three hundred thousand participants. The overall result is positive and statistically robust, with a modest effect size — in technical terms, a g of 0.24. Modest is not insignificant: it aligns with what educational interventions we deem valuable achieve. But the real headline is not the average. It is the moderators, the conditions that distinguish the programs that move the needle from those that do not.

The first condition has a proper name: mentor. Programs with formal mentoring showed larger effects than those without. The authors add the crucial nuance: trained mentors, rigorous follow-up, and defined objectives. Ambient good example is not enough; it requires a specific person looking at a specific person.

The second condition emerges when examining which formats yield the most: the guided discussion of dilemmas and cases — the ancient method of discussing the difficult — multiplies the effect of passive formats. The values poster in the lobby, as we all suspected, does not appear among the winners.

And the fine print, which is always told here: the effects decay over time once the program ends — from 0.26 at the conclusion to 0.17 in follow-ups — and the published literature has a selection bias, so the corrected estimate is lower, though it remains positive and significant. Read what that decay says carefully, because it is not an argument against character education. It is an argument against weekend workshops. Virtue, like muscle, responds to training and atrophies without it: exactly what Aristotle had said of habit. The effects last when the program lasts.

The three conditions

Combine all of the above, and the entire field fits into a single sentence: virtue is trained, provided the training features conversation about reality, a mentor with a name, and years ahead.

Three conditions. All three uncomfortable, because all three are demanding: conversation requires small groups and quality texts; mentoring requires teacher training and time; years require an itinerary where nearly the entire sector offers quick-fix pills. That is why shortcuts abound — the motivational talk, the framed values statement, the character week — and that is why shortcuts do not show up in meta-analyses except as a control group.

A virtue for each stage

A serious humanities itinerary takes the three conditions literally, and adds a fourth that comes directly from Aristotle: virtue is not taught in the abstract, it is taught embodied.

This is why each stage of the journey works on a virtue within its own subject matter, not as an attached sermon. Fortitude is learned through history — with real people who resisted real things. Temperance is learned by reconnecting with nature and with what the empty heart attempts to buy. Prudence is learned through philosophy; audacity, in the final stage, when it is time to start something with others before walking out the door. Twelve stages, twelve virtues, a teacher from the school facilitating the conversation, and years — not a weekend.

Socrates, by the way, never gave Meno a definitive answer; the dialogue ends, like nearly all of his, with the question sharper than at the beginning. Perhaps that was the lesson. Virtue is taught, yes — but it is not dictated. It is conversed, practiced, and caught, alongside someone who already possesses it. Now the data says so. He did it every morning in the agora.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.