ethic, or one’s moral behavior, or one’s outlook on life, etc. All these and more, together, equate a personality. New categorical characteristics may enter and leave, but the personality is still a personality; this is because the personality is fluid. One may change the shape of the water (the water is the personality) but one cannot change the fact that it is the same exact water, just in a different arrangement. If a dish is served with disgusting food, rearranging the food doesn’t change the fact that it is still disgusting; vice cannot be masked. Every categorical characteristic has either a negative or positive value, and/or a neutral value depending on the characteristic. A negative is a vice, a positive a virtue, a neutral a blank slate with the potential of turning to the light and becoming the tough yet rewarding route to virtue, or of taking the slide down the route to vice which ends in punishment. Thus, virtue is a good categorical characteristic, and a virtuous person is one who has many of these. Does school cultivate virtue, or does it inhibit it? On the explicit level, on the superficial one, on the obvious one, yes, it does. But on the implicit level it does not. The truth is hidden by a layer of deceit, but it is not the fault of the school, no, it is a byproduct of the geist, of the spirit of the age, of society! High school in America is built around the idea of competition, for the students are competing against each other in order to gain entrance to the doors of prestigious colleges. Since the elementary school days of education, teachers encourage young ones to share and to play nicely with one another, but all of that is a lie! One either rides the current, or gets swept away by it, and no one wants to get swept away; no one wants to cling to a piece of wood, for dear life, while hundreds around them ride the river comfortably and safely in their life rafts. There are only a limited amount of boats on this river, and many are afraid to give their fellow man a helping hand. How can a system built around getting ahead, at all costs, produce individuals who are true in virtue? It cannot. Socially, academically, and physically, students indulge in unvirtuous behavior. The student who cheats, is he being virtuous? No, he is not, but he is doing the right thing. The goal is to get ahead is it not? To beat all those around him. By cheating, he gets ahead, and he gets in a boat; whereas the virtuous student who does not cheat is left at a disadvantage, and may be tossed into the river with nothing but a life vest. Some students, literally, see their fellow human beings as competition, as impersonal entities that must be vanquished in order to enter the land of milk and honey, the land of college. They treat others differently than the one who sees their fellow man as an equal, as a mass of individuals all taking their own paths of life, for if everyone is taking his/her own path of life how can there be any competition amongst them? Alas, this is not the view of the masses. School explicitly discourages cheating, but implicitly it encourages it. School explicitly encourages education for the sake of learning, but implicitly it encourages getting a good grade no matter the cost. Bribes occur not only on the political level, but on the academic level as
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