Deeds

Not Words or Wishes

Oct 27, 2025

Most teachers I know want their students to be good. I don’t mean in the classroom—though that’s nice if you can get it. I mean that as teachers, they consider the highest part of their calling to be the cultivation of their student’s capacity to live a good life. Most consider that a virtuous character is at the heart of the enterprise and that mere data transfer, or trading in facts, falls far short of the teacher’s true vocation which is to help students live virtuously.

Of course, human lives occur in time and space so there are lots of things useful to learn which contribute to our ability to live virtuously in our particular time and space. Often we think of general education, liberal education, or the core of the curriculum as consisting of universally human things as well as things necessary for cultural literacy.

So far so good.

But suppose we’re interested in getting as good at this as possible. There are at least two parts which will require our attention. The tactics and techniques which contribute to effective teaching: we might call these pedagogy. And the things which we will teach: the curriculum.

We can, and should, have long conversations late into the night with bright friends and dim lights about the curriculum.

But as regards pedagogy, we have a bit of a problem.

Those of us with a proclivity and capacity for words, numbers, or abstractions tend to go into teaching. We fall in love with a discipline, with a text, perhaps even with the charms of academic life, and consider teaching the best way to cultivate this love—certainly the best way to make a living while maintaining close proximity to it.

Our fluency at manipulating ideas and language shines in the classroom where, even if we aspire for them to live virtuous lives, the immediate problem we propose to solve is the students’ lack of facility with the concepts or structures we handle so well. After all, we need to get them through the curriculum.

But I’d like to propose that our own proficiency with language and ideas can sometimes inhibit the effectiveness of our teaching. Often it is difficult for those with a talent for language to understand or relate to those whose intelligence and reason are less verbal. Or even, for those who are less intelligent. Teachers tend to be people well suited to the classroom and its methods. But not every student is.

Please don’t mistake my argument as denigrating words, abstractions, or reason. They are all essential for every human.

But can you be certain, though the mechanic might be less adept with language, that the natural law does not speak as clearly to him as to you? Your reason shines in an essay or a lecture. Is it not reason that shines through the work of his hands?

I’m not talking about degrees of refinement, but about being good.

My concern about pedagogical approaches fashioned by the academic for the academic is the possibility that for many students these approaches often introduce a fissure between the “content” of the curriculum and the object of cultivating the good life, like a sword thrust severing the two. This is surely the opposite of what we intend in our impassioned defense of curricula.

But we are vulnerable to this possibility on account of the classic distinction between deeds and words and the ever present danger—temptation—to separate the two.

St. John Henry Newman preached a sermon on the Christian life entitled “Promising Without Doing.” In the sermon, Newman notes what our common sense corroborates: it is easier to say or think something than it is to do or be something. So too with our approach to teaching and our students’ capacity to learn.

Are we like the misguided one Newman describes who “thinks that the characteristic of a religious man is his having correct notions?” He continues, “it escapes him that there is a great interval between feeling and acting.” Substitute “religious” with “educated” and I fear you will have described the vast majority of our pedagogical efforts.” We want our students to be good but rely almost entirely on telling them to be good, or on defining the good with words and texts.

Let me offer an example to try and illustrate the problem and suggest a path toward a solution.

I wrote some time ago about the concept of trust in the Marine Corps: Marines will often say of the title Marine that it must be earned and is never given. One of the Corps’ doctrinal texts entitled Warfighting, describes trust as essential to the life-and-death functioning of leaders and units. “Trust,” it says, “is a product of confidence and familiarity. Confidence among comrades results from demonstrated professional skill.”1

In the sermon I quoted earlier, Newman states the same principle: “Nothing but past acts are the vouchers for future.” Don’t trust me because I tell you to trust me—talk is cheap. Trust me only if my actions have consistently merited your trust.

If we want students to be good, they need practice being so. And since students seem to know their Newman better than us teachers… they know that talk is cheap… you can only get them so far in the classroom. I suggest a pallet of pedagogical approaches which includes the the use of words (whether in mouths, books, or screens, etc), as is so common today, but also includes a heavy dose of experience—allowing the natural law to speak to students through nature and not just text. This is wildly uncommon today despite widespread compulsory schooling.

Sometimes my friends in the classical school movement hear in this suggestion an argument against the great books, the great conversation, and against intellectual virtues and beauty. Not at all. Rich, embodied experience of the real is both prelude and accompaniment to the great song of learning whether it’s occurring in a soul that more resembles a full orchestra or a simple folk guitar.

One thing I’ve read both in nature and great books is that the simple folk guitar can be sublime.