Whereas classical education promotes the traditional seven virtues of courage, wisdom, self-control, justice, faith, hope, and love, secular progressive schools tend to focus on such fashionable values as tolerance, diversity, equity, inclusion, environmentalism, and multiculturalism. What is the difference, and why is it vital to the educational enterprise? 

Virtues are universal principles written into the cosmos as much as they are into the nature of man; values are socially constructed and alter from nation to nation, region to region, subgroup to subgroup. The former is finally objective; the latter is ultimately subjective. Perhaps the best way to understand the essential difference between virtues and values is to compare it to the difference between a person’s sex and his or her gender. Sex is an objective reality that we are born with; gender is a social construct that is both culturally fluid and personally subjective. Virtues, like a person’s sex, confront us with an external measure and rule to which we must conform ourselves; values, like a person’s gender, are measured by internal, fluctuating standards of approval or outrage. 

The shift from virtues to values in public, and most private, American education has, I believe, prevented teachers from passing down and imparting the virtues necessary for civilization, particularly democratic civilization, to endure. Here are three reasons why that shift has been a deleterious one. 

First, whereas virtues are positive and take the focus off the person who has them, values are negative and direct the focus inward. Love reaches out toward the other; tolerance steps away and then pats itself on the back. The trouble with the values-driven practice of virtue-signaling is that it does not change a person’s core or align him with standards that transcend the self. To the contrary, it allows him to feel superior while doing nothing to bring himself, or the person he is “tolerating,” within the healthy and human boundaries of the classical and theological virtues. 

And that leads to the second distinction between virtues and values. Virtue, Aristotle taught, is not a feeling but a habit, one that is developed by a long and slow process of performing virtuous actions. The habit drives the feelings, not vice versa. Feelings of charity rarely lead to actual charitable behavior; to the contrary, the habitual action of charity builds in people charitable feelings for others. That is not to say that feelings are unimportant; they are essential to an education in virtue. But the feelings must be tied to active habits and concrete virtues, not virtue-signaling and hazy values.

As for the virtues themselves, they embody the mean between the extremes and cannot be reduced to a simplistic list of dos and don’ts. Although schools need to institute various rules of conduct and to forbid behaviors that are illegal or unethical or disruptive, they must not fool themselves into thinking that such rules make students virtuous. Virtue is built upon discernment, the wisdom that allows people to distinguish extremes and so identify and embody the mean between them.  

Authoritarian, legalistic Christian schools that define virtue in fully negative terms—don’t drink, smoke, curse, or indulge in public displays of affection—inevitably fail to instill virtue in their students. The same goes for extreme progressive schools that focus on negative values that collapse all distinctions and withhold reasoned moral judgment. While the former end up enslaved to a non-discerning list of don’ts, the latter end up enslaved to an equally non-discerning list of dos. Neither group of graduates develops into virtuous, morally self-regulating citizens. Rather than acquiring carefully cultivated habits, they end up being controlled by fear, social (as opposed to moral) guilt, and emotional, knee-jerk responses. They align themselves to shifting social expectations rather than to enduring, transcendent standards of virtue.

Third, I have found—more anecdotally than in my research—that the values promoted by progressive schools and educators can be quite slippery, even to the point of disguising themselves as functional equivalents of traditional virtues. The value of tolerance as taught in public schools today does not, I have found, mean respecting all people because they bear the image of God and so possess essential worth. It means that no one has the right to judge anyone else in accordance with standards grounded in the Bible or in natural law. Diversity should mean giving everyone a voice; in practice, it has led to a campus regime of shutting down, or shouting down, voices that are deemed, by contemporary standards, to be intolerant. 

If equity meant affording all people the same opportunities in life, I would be in favor of it. Too often, however, it means that certain groups are given special privilege over others, with the goal of replacing equality of opportunity with equality of outcome. If environmentalism meant teaching children to be stewards of creation, it would line up well with a classical Christian paideia. Instead, I have found, it means treating nature as sacred and human beings as the problem. The value of multiculturalism does not, as far as I can tell, square with a virtuous duty to treat all cultures with equal respect. More often, it means encouraging young people to view our own culture through the lens of cynicism, skepticism, and deconstruction.

To educate students in values is to build their moral house, and thus the moral house of society, on shifting sand; to educate them in virtue is to found them, and the civilization of which they are a part, securely on the rock. The storms of change will rage against them, but they will not fall (see Matthew 7:24-27).

Louis Markos, Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Christian University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities; his 26 books include The Myth Made Fact, From Plato to Christ, From Achilles to Christ, and, forthcoming from IVP, From Aristotle to Christ. 

This essay is adapted from Passing the Torch by Louis Markos. Copyright (c) 2025 by Louis A. Markos. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515, USA. www.ivpress.com