Virtue is the most important knowledge to be taught.
"Disciple's training, sage's training, the first filial piety, the second honesty, universal love, kindness, spare capacity, then study literature" ...... Since ancient times, virtue has been highly respected by people, not only in the East, but also in the West. The proposition that "virtue is knowledge" makes many moral education thoughts spring up like mushrooms after rain. So, can morality be taught? From the main ideas of the sages of the East and the West, we can firmly judge that virtue is the most important knowledge transfer regardless of whether human nature is good or evil.
Mencius advocated that "human nature is good" and believed that people were kind from birth. As people grow up, the social environment they contact gradually changes people's inherent goodness. If people want to maintain their virtue, they can only achieve it through continuous education. Rousseau, a western educator, said in his book Emile: "Everything that comes from the creator's hand is good, but it goes bad when it comes to human hands." As Mencius thought, virtue from the creator can only be maintained through constant education, that is, moral teaching. Therefore, from the point of view that human nature is good, only through moral teaching can we maintain human virtue.
Xunzi, another thinker who is opposite to Mencius' thought, advocates that "human nature is evil" and thinks that people are bad from birth. Only through continuous education can we realize the highest moral ideal, that is, virtue. From the point of view of evil in human nature, moral education is the most indispensable education for a person, and its importance is far higher than other knowledge.
Locke, a western educator, put forward the "whiteboard theory", arguing that "nine tenths of the people we see every day are good or bad, or useful or useless, which is determined by their education". From this point of view, it is not difficult to see the importance of education to a person, and it is not difficult to imagine what society will become if everyone lacks moral education.
Although the above three examples only demonstrate that morality needs to be taught from the direction of human nature hypothesis, they also demonstrate from the side that the development of our civilization is the result of constantly teaching morality.
Through the analysis of the above viewpoints, we can see that morality can not only be taught, but also be indispensable in the process of human growth. If a person lacks moral education, he cannot reach the height of virtue. If a society lacks moral education, it cannot realize the ideal of world harmony. Can morality be taught? This is not a valid question in itself. If morality cannot be taught, what is the purpose of learning other knowledge? If morality cannot be taught, the more knowledge you learn, the greater the negative impact on society.
So morality can be taught, and virtue is the most important knowledge to be taught.