Which Virtues?
As Rose explains the practices distinctive to classical schools, he considers how they cultivate an array of intellectual and moral virtues in students. It’s worth examining a few of these virtues in detail to peer inside what he thinks moral formation looks like.
Precision. One way the virtue of precision, closely related to honesty, is fostered at classical schools is through the teaching of grammar, a discipline with precise rules. Rose notes that grammatical structure develops in students “a recognition that words have meanings that cannot be twisted without consequence” and instills “the habit of using language not for manipulation or self-aggrandizement but for the clear expression of truth.” There is a similar precision to formal logic, which teaches students to insist “that arguments be evaluated on their merits rather than their popularity . . . that conclusions follow from premises rather than from preferences.”
Creativity. Rose argues that students become creative artists when they study great works of art, learning their “symbolic vocabulary” and considering “how gesture, drapery, and spatial arrangement communicate meaning.” This engagement with tradition is the key to originality, he says, for “even rebellion needs a thing to rebel against.” He adds, “It is one thing to break the canon and quite another never to have read it.”
Another way to foster creativity is reading and memorizing great works of poetry, oratory, and literature. In Rose’s telling, one’s memory is not just for the storage of information, “as if the mind were merely an inefficient version of a computer.” Rather, a memorized text integrates into “our cognitive and emotional architecture, making it part of the lens through which we perceive and interpret experience.” Hamlet’s Act III soliloquy or King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail become “thoughts to think with,” gifting students “an invisible company of the wise, the eloquent, the profound.”
Perception. The perceptive student senses the “hidden order” in language, argumentation, and the natural world. Geometry “cultivates perception of proportion, symmetry, and elegance.” Sentence diagramming has the same effect but for language and literature. Quoting the first line of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” he points out that:
The diagram of such a sentence becomes a veritable haunted house of grammar, with corridors that twist and turn, rooms that open unexpectedly into other rooms . . . The completed diagram would resemble the House of Usher itself—complex, foreboding, yet possessed of a strange and terrible beauty, where every part connects according to inviolable laws.
Rose suggests that through disciplines like geometry and sentence diagramming, students develop a new sort of vision, “rendering visible aspects of experience that might otherwise remain unnoticed or unarticulated.”
From this survey of virtues, you get a sense of the type of student that classical education is trying to form: one who speaks carefully and listens attentively; whose creativity is thoughtful and deliberate rather than chaotic and self-absorbed; and who senses the order and complexity of the world and marvels at its beauty.
