ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that understanding some of the psychological preconditions for virtue formation does open up additional and more focused classroom interventions. It attempts to expose the role that a student's underlying psychology plays in the development of intellectual virtue. The investigators write: So, the notion of intellectual therapy as an important part of cultivating intellectual virtues in the classroom has wide-ranging support in the social sciences. A limited understanding of the dynamics of virtue formation isolates teachers from adapting formational strategies to different topics, students, and learning contexts. Educating for intellectual virtues can begin to take on an overly pragmatic cookbook or formulaic feel in which teachers end up going through the motions of enculturating intellectual virtues but do not have much insight into the deeper dynamics of change. A central objection to intellectual therapy is that it appears to turn the classroom into a therapy session, which can make the approach seem both overly intrusive and overly demanding.
