Against the culture of self-display, a new generation of educators is turning to Plato and Aristotle for guidance on how to form human beings, not just résumés.
Across the country, a quiet but consequential experiment is underway. In small towns and big cities alike, a growing number of classical schools are attempting something that might appear, at first glance, impossibly anachronistic: they are trying to teach virtue. Not “virtue signaling,” that familiar twenty-first-century pastime of moral self-advertisement, but virtue in its older, more demanding sense—the formation of character, the steady shaping of the soul toward the good.
The distinction is not a subtle one. Virtue signaling, as the term implies, concerns itself with appearances, with the careful cultivation of moral identity as public performance. It is virtue as branding, ethics as posture, the flutter of yard signs and hashtags and corporate slogans that announce, above all, one’s belonging to the enlightened tribe. The performance is the point. It need not be backed by any interior commitment, or any costly act of self-discipline.
Classical virtue, by contrast, is altogether uninterested in spectators. It has nothing to do with audience and everything to do with interior order. The ancient Greeks called it arete, a word that means excellence of soul. For Plato, it was the harmony of the human faculties: reason ruling spirit and appetite in due proportion, each part of the self ordered toward the good. Aristotle refined the idea, describing virtue as a habit, a disposition formed by practice until right action became second nature. “We are what we repeatedly do,” he wrote, long before motivational posters made the sentiment trite. The Romans rendered arete as virtus, a term that connoted both moral and civic excellence, the quality that made a man worthy of the Republic.
The Lost Art of Forming Souls
In the Middle Ages, these ideas found new life in the fusion of classical wisdom with Christian theology. Education was seen as the formation of the homo universalis, the universal man, one whose intellect and character were developed in tandem, capable of apprehending both truth and goodness. Schools existed, quite explicitly, to form souls. The curriculum was broad: literature to awaken sympathy and imagination; mathematics to discipline the mind toward precision; history to furnish examples of courage and justice; rhetoric to train students to speak persuasively on behalf of truth. Beneath this diversity of subjects lay a unified purpose: the cultivation of wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice—the four cardinal virtues upon which the moral life was thought to rest.
Modern education, by contrast, has largely abandoned such ambitions. Over the past century, under the twin pressures of industrial efficiency and economic utility, schooling has been redefined as a technical enterprise. Its purpose is not to form persons but to produce workers. The questions we ask of education have shifted accordingly. We no longer ask, “What kind of person should this child become?” Instead, we ask, “What competencies will this child need to compete in the global marketplace?” The metrics follow suit: standardized tests, graduation rates, career readiness. What was once a moral and intellectual apprenticeship has become a bureaucratic mechanism for credentialing, and it hasn’t even been successful at that.
The Classical Countermovement
This narrowing of educational purpose has left a vacuum, one that the classical-school movement now seeks, in its modest way, to fill. These schools, many of them newly founded charter institutions like my own Cincinnati Classical Academy, share a conviction that education should be about more than college and career. We teach Latin for the mental discipline it cultivates. We require logic and rhetoric to form citizens capable of reasoning and speaking with clarity. We read Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare because they offer, in their varied ways, insight into what it means to be human.
It is tempting to dismiss such schools as nostalgic curiosities, enclaves for the culturally conservative or the religiously inclined. And yet, their appeal is growing. Hillsdale College, whose K–12 curriculum has become the backbone of a nationwide network of public charter schools, now supports dozens of campuses in states from California to Florida to New Jersey. In each, parents and teachers are drawn by a sense that something vital has gone missing from mainstream education—a moral vocabulary, a coherent account of the good life. In these schools, the word virtue can be spoken without irony.
Still, the project is not without its critics. Classical education, they argue, is the province of privilege. Yet they overlook the classical tradition’s most radical assumption: that excellence of character is not the exclusive possession of any class. The moral imagination, like the rational faculty, belongs to all. The same Socratic questions that stirred the sons of Athenian aristocrats can awaken the minds of children in public schools. Indeed, the classical curriculum at its best has always been democratic in spirit, insisting that the highest things are available to anyone willing to pursue them.
Can Virtue Still Be Taught?
The harder question is not whether classical education is elitist but whether it is possible. Can virtue, in any meaningful sense, be taught? One can assign Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to a classroom of teenagers; one can even test them on its contents. But to cultivate in them the habits of courage, moderation, and justice is another matter. The ancient teachers understood that moral formation depends on the living example of adults. Children become virtuous by witnessing it enacted in the lives of their parents and teachers.
This, perhaps, is where the classical movement’s task is most formidable. Unfortunately, the moral life has become performative. We are constantly aware of the audience, forever adjusting our behavior to signal the right allegiances. To teach virtue in such a context requires a kind of countercultural patience. It means creating schools where character is not measured but modeled, where courage is shown in the classroom, humility in faculty meetings, gratitude in the daily routines of school life.
The educators who attempt this do so against the grain of contemporary culture. They are working in a world that prizes outcomes over integrity. And yet they persist, guided by a belief as old as Plato: that human beings are not simply bundles of preferences to be optimized, but moral agents whose flourishing depends on the alignment of intellect and will with the good. Their classrooms, though humble, are sites of quiet resistance to the prevailing instrumentalism of modern life.
Whether this experiment will succeed is an open question. It is possible that the classical revival will remain a niche movement, a refuge for those disenchanted with the technocratic ethos of public education. It is also possible that its influence will spread, reminding even mainstream schools of the deeper purposes of their vocation. Either way, the effort itself is revealing. It suggests that beneath our culture’s noise of signaling and self-promotion lies a persistent hunger—for meaning, for coherence, for moral seriousness.
In the end, the classical ideal offers something both ancient and urgently contemporary: a vision of education as initiation into the art of being human. The promise, as ever, is to form men and women worthy of the name.
MICHAEL S. ROSE is a national leader in the Classical education movement. He is the founding headmaster of Cincinnati Classical Academy, a Hillsdale College K-12 Member School serving 950 students in southwestern Ohio. He is the author of the forthcoming book The Subversive Art of a Classical Education (Regnery, January 2026). He is the editor and writer of Classical Compass Rose, available on Substack.
