I want to have a favorable impact
on my students’ relationship to learning.
—Jason Baehr
I learned this week of a news story that probably didn’t catch a lot of people’s attention. Given the general large-scale chaos happening right now—from the Ebola outbreak in central Africa to the tit-for-tat over the Strait of Hormuz—it is hardly surprising that this story might fly under the proverbial radar of many an individual’s attention (even those of us who actively seek to remain accurately informed citizens). But apparently there has been an on-going battle, led by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, over the accreditation process for colleges and universities in Florida and five other states in the traditionally Deep South. Specifically, a battle over accreditation agencies—i.e. who gets to legally certify the academic credentials of institutions of higher ed.
I will spare readers the full details (references available below), but it is essentially the latest skirmish in the culture wars over the so-called (and alleged) liberal bias in today’s academia. DeSantis and others claim that they want to break “the ideological stronghold” of the existing accreditation process, “ensuring higher education prioritizes student achievement without ideological capture” by making sure that colleges and universities can prove that there are an “appropriate number” of conservative scholars teaching on their campuses. In other words, they want to replace what they perceive as one type of dogmatism with their own.
I share this story because having introduced Jason Baehr’s notion of intellectual virtue in my most recent essay, I am struck by how many of what he would call the intellectual vices—“laziness, arrogance, dogmatism, and cowardice” (p. 31)—are at work in the efforts of DeSantis and his fellow collaborators. Rather than allow what Jonathan Rauch calls the “reality-based community” with its “liberal science” (a “set of rules for social behavior, rules for settling conflict” [p. 30]) to determine what is best taught through the testing of fallible hypotheses, DeSantis, et al simply believe they should be able to dictate a curriculum that conforms to the ideology of their liking.
That is why I so fundamentally agree with Baehr that it is so critical to teach the intellectual virtues overtly: to combat the attempts of Ron DeSantis and his like-minded crowd (i.e. the Charlie Kirks of this world) to undermine these same virtues. Therefore, let us explore how Baehr thinks we should go about doing so in our schools and classrooms.
He starts by pointing out that “in teaching for intellectual virtues, we aim to facilitate in our students a kind of personal reorientation, a reconfiguring of some of their fundamental beliefs, attitudes, and feelings about think and learning” and that therefore, “those of us who are seeking to nurture the intellectual character of our students must adopt the long view. We must be prepared to engage in thoughtful and patient planting, watering, fertilizing, and tending” (p. 55). Put bluntly, this is not a one-and-done task; therefore, we need as educators to be prepared to make the necessary investments.
However, to make these, we need first, Baehr argues, to recall that we are all intellectually virtuous only to degrees, with “a mixed bag, a combination of virtues and vices, each quality possessed to a greater or lesser [extent]” (p. 31). Hence, before we start teaching for intellectual virtue, we need to complete an honest inventory of the strengths and weaknesses of our own intellectual character. We need “an informed and accurate understanding of who we are as thinkers and learners” because otherwise, “we can’t know how to negotiate the landscape of thinking and learning [with our students]” (p. 111). Or in the immortal words of the Temple at Delphi, “know thyself.”
Once known and once invested, though, we need to recognize the limits which the cognitive developmental stage of our specific student population may place on what we can accomplish if we are to nurture their intellectual character successfully. Baehr believes this is especially true for what he calls the three dimensions or structures of the intellectual virtues: skill, judgment, and motivation. For example, the quality of questions I can elicit from a child (a skill for the virtue of curiosity) is going to differ—sometimes dramatically—depending on whether I teach kindergarten or graduate students. Likewise, helping students identify which questions are worthy of asking (the judgment dimension of curiosity) will again vary—potentially by quite a lot—given the developmental stage of my particular charges. Hence, identifying what skills and judgments are age-appropriate for my classes will be critical, according to Baehr, for the necessary lesson planning.
Yet what about the motivational element of the virtues? “Suppose I succeed at teaching my students how to switch perspectives or how to formulate thoughtful and insightful questions. They may or may not use this skill once they leave my classroom” (pp. 155-156) because they may or may not have had only an extrinsic reason—such as to earn a high grade—for employing it around me. Truly virtuous motivation, Baehr insists, is by definition intrinsic. Thus, how do we get our students to truly value what they are learning? How do we get them “to care about and seek the truth even if the truth should prove inconvenient” (p. 156; original emphasis)?
Baehr’s answer is modeling. Only as students can observe our own passion for what we teach (curiosity), our willingness to publicly acknowledge when we do not have an answer (humility), or our revelations about how our own understanding has changed over time (open-mindedness) …only as our students can watch us wrestle with shaping and growing our own intellectual character can we draw out in them the internalized motivation to do the same. They must see us practicing our own intellectual virtue.
And one of the best ways to do this, Baehr argues, is to have our students witness us teaching for deeper learning in our classes, not simply for the acquisition of a body of information. As he puts it, “intellectual virtues aim at understanding. [It] is the kind or variety of knowledge that intellectually virtuous people prize and pursue” because “when I have a complex understanding of something, I can explain what I understand to others [and] I can apply my knowledge to new situations, problems, and questions and make reliable predictions on the basis of this knowledge” (p. 124; original emphasis). Therefore, if my students can see me teaching for a deep, rich understanding of whatever material I am covering, they are—almost by definition—observing my own intrinsically motivated intellectual character in action.
But if there is a subtle theme that runs throughout my entire body of work, it is that this kind of teaching is never easy, always demanding. As Baehr reminds us, it “requires intentionally engineering opportunities for our students to think freely, ask challenging questions, and wrestle with ambiguity” (p. 59), and those kinds of opportunities are simply complex to generate and messy to manage. Anyone who takes this profession seriously knows that “teaching aimed at facilitating deep learning and personal growth [is just hard]” (p. 65) and that it takes every bit of one’s own flawed, fallible character—intellectual and otherwise—to evoke it in children.
Perhaps, though, that’s the point. As Baehr quotes math teacher, Cari Noble of the Intellectual Virtues Academy charter school in Long Beach, California:
The best exemplar for students is one who shows growth. Sure, a completely formed very virtuous teacher would be an awesome role model but they would not be good at modeling how to improve. Only a teacher with flaws they are working on can authentically model how to make a virtue goal and work towards it (pp. 160-161).
Thus, in the end, educating for intellectual virtue isn’t about the destination; it’s about the journey. And I think what Baehr wisely reminds all of us involved with young people is that the quality of that journey matters—for our students and for ourselves.
References
Baehr, J. (2021) Deep in Thought: A Practical Guide to Teaching for Intellectual Virtues. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
Montoya, O. (July 10, 2026) Some Republican States Push for New College Accreditation Agency. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2026/07/10/nx-s1-5869546/some-republican-states-push-for-new-college-accreditation-agency.
Rauch, J. (2013) Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (Expanded Edition). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Spitalniak, L. (July 7, 2026) Florida Loses Appeal Over College Accreditation. Higher Ed DIVE. https://www.highereddive.com/news/florida-loses-appeal-over-college-accreditation/824644/.
State of Florida (June 26, 2025) Governor Ron DeSantis Announces First-of-Its-Kind Alternative University Accreditor. Executive Office of the Governor. https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-desantis-announces-first-its-kind-alternative-university-accreditor.
Light a Candle 