Is intellectual character growth a realistic educational aim?

Abstract

Responsibilist approaches to virtue epistemology examine the epistemic significance of intellectual virtues like curiosity, attentiveness, intellectual humility, open-mindedness, intellectual courage, and intellectual tenacity. On one way of thinking about these traits, they are the deep personal qualities or character traits of a good thinker or learner. Given the intimate connection between intellectual virtues and good thinking and learning, responsibilist virtue epistemology appears ripe for application to educational theory and practice. At a minimum, growth in intellectual virtues seems like a worthy educational aim. But is such an aim realistic? There are at least three objections to thinking that it is. In this paper, I defend the enterprise of educating for growth in intellectual virtues against each of these objections. I conclude that if pursued in the right way, intellectual character growth is a worthy and realistic educational aim—one that justifies rethinking some fundamental educational priorities and practices.

Keywords:

• Intellectual virtues
• education
• educating for intellectual virtues
• situationism
• virtue epistemology
• educational aims

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Heather Battaly and two anonymous referees for very helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

1. A rather different response to the situationist challenge that I will not develop here is to accept that at present intellectual virtue is a rare phenomenon but that educative efforts are capable of changing this. For arguments to this effect, see Ritchhart, 2002; Perkins, 1993.

2. Depending on how ‘contexts’ are to be individuated, the scenarios described in this and the preceding paragraphs may seem to include contexts different from the original one. If so, they would support (ii) or (iii), not (i). I do not have a firm opinion about how to individuate contexts. Below I give some examples of contexts that seem more clearly to be distinct from the original experimental context; however, were the contexts described in the present and preceding scenarios also deemed different from the original context, this would have little bearing on my argument, especially as I offer additional support for (i) below.