Teaching As Virtue Practice

Since antiquity, teaching in our country has been shouldering the responsibility of moral education. Confucian in Early Qin Dynasty provided teaching with a framework, namely "generating virtue from teaching". But under the influence of some historic and political factors, moral education in schools was replaced by ideological and political education, and teaching was simplified and narrowed down to a process of morality transmission or infusion. As some classes exemplify, in a society with plural values, students' values tend to be diversified. Therefore, no matter what method a teacher takes, he would be criticized morally to some degree. In other words, in order to foster morality in teaching, we have to answer the question, "What should we do with the plural values?" The paper attempts to provide an answer to it, and explores a new direction for fostering morality in teaching. Its framework is as follows:Firstly, the paper reviews the background of plural values, and distinguishes between "value pluralism" and "value relativism". It puts forward the concept "reason-based value pluralism", implying that views of value result from reasoning. Though the views of value may be different, they are all reasonable, none of which should be denied by others. Since different values can understand and communicate with each other, they may come to agree each other. So in the background of plural values, it is in the complicated communication of plural values that teaching presents itself. The pure infusion of some given moral value should be criticized both in the aspect of its aim and its manner. Moral education should be attentive to students' experience of moral values, generation of inner morality, and ability to communicate moral values with each other so as to achieve the consensus. All of them may occur in the complex context, and teaching has to meet the new challenge.Secondly, based on the recognition above, the text criticizes two typical points of view on teaching, by analyzing the corresponding teaching examples and looking back on the history of teaching. One is that "teaching is transmission", that is, the function of teaching in fostering morality is to transmit some fixed moral values. The other one is that "teaching is doing nothing", that is, teachers keep neutral when it comes to moral education, either ignoring students' moral values or praising all of them. Both of the points, based on "value singularism" and "value relativism" separately, apply the either-or thinking on issues of moral values. They either deny the abundance of moral values or ignore their possibility of communication, consequently overlooking the possibility of moral generation in the complex situation. What they share most is to take teaching as a technical process of departing from morality, with its focus either on the efficient transmission of moral knowledge or on the avoidance of this transmission. Such a technicalized teaching inevitably appears, when one dreams of the existence of teaching rules and pursues overly teaching efficiency. But teaching is in essence a moral concept. It should assume some moral duty, and avoid retarding students' development of reasoning. Also, it should generate virtue in moral action. After all, it is never a simple issue of technique but a complicated one of practice.The third part of the paper is to demonstrate the proposition that teaching is virtue practice. Based on the idea of the ethical practice, stemming from Aristotle and developed by MacIntyre in the contemporary times, the paper identifies the "non-practice" teaching. It summarizes Aristotle's views of practice and provides a more detailed analysis of MacIntyre's view of virtue practice. Subsequently, the text debates it with some Western points of view and argues that teaching is the virtue practice consistent with MacIntyre's. At the end of this part, the paper proposes such ideas as "virtue is generated within teaching practice", "virtue is generated in one's autonomous pursue of excellence", "teaching practice generates moral standards from within".Fourthly, teaching as virtue practice is not a theoretical slogan but a strategy that can be converted into specific teaching action. From teaching examples, the text gets out three teaching strategies for generating virtue, that is, "random generation", "relevant generation", and "internal generation".Finally, in order to be adapted to the teaching as virtue practice, teachers are required to promote their moral ability, in addition to keeping accumulating their moral knowledge and improving their moral quality. The paper suggests four kinds of moral ability that should be highlighted at present, i.e., moral sensitivity, moral reasoning, moral tolerance, and moral trust. They should be developed by enhancing teachers' theoretical research on ethics and reflection on ethics during the teaching.