Teaching Virtue

“We all know that it’s good to be honest, generous, self-controlled, tenacious, and thrifty, but it’s the doing that dogs us.” A sociologist on how to inculcate the youth with lessons on virtue: “America’s first self-help leader, Benjamin Franklin, believed that virtue could be self-taught through practice. He married the practical and democratic Puritan values of thrift, hard work, education, and community spirit with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment, creating an American sense of character. He made lists of virtues to live by, charted his progress in a notebook, and evaluated his own performance daily.”