Is Civic Virtue Taught?

Is civic virtue taught? The Greeks thought so. "Ethos" and "ethics" are both from the Greek work "habit;" they believed the qualities of  personal responsibility--and social responsibility--were learned from childhood, practiced and developed. Learned--and therefore taught.

 

If civic virtue is taught--and schools are not teaching it--someone else is.

 

Education is curious in this country as it is focused upon continuing on in testing; it has no real social arm. And it is taught by people obsessed with balance, with evenhandedness. Imagine a school system where ethics was a course like geometry, a course you could fail. Imagine the different breed of teacher that would require. What would happen if that grade followed you through life.

 

This would be a revolution in the West. Imagine the crisis that would occur if social and personal behavior had a societal net where every citizen had a basic, school taught foundation. Such a system would, of course, require a general agreement on what the basic social requirements would be. That is an easier task in ancient Greece or contemporary Japan with the obvious homogeneity advantage. But how would such an idea be implemented in the U.S.? What basic, stripped down behaviors would be encouraged as correct?

 

And how would diversity fare? What element in such a system can not be diverse? (Keeping in mind that much of current social and economic thought views diversity as a crucial component of the creative, experimental process that all economies and societies unconsciously undergo.)

 

In a diverse culture, is such a system of accepted ethics even possible? Or, in the other view, in an ethical culture, how much diversity is possible?