Can Virtue Be Taught?

As I write this, another academic year looms ahead. Instead of sleeping late, taking naps, going to the gym, and travelling, I'm now spending my time on creating welcome letters, updating supply lists, adjusting assignment sheets, and answering emails from parents who want to ensure that their "little darlings" are adequately prepared for their first foray into PEP. I've taught long enough so that if all I did was change the dates of the assignment sheets from previous years, I would have coherent lesson plans for each class, and nobody would ever know the difference. A decade is a long time to teach the same class with the same books. It's almost as long as my students have been alive! But this begs the question: Why? Why assign readings from texts that are three thousand years old? Why assign weekly study questions on the reading material? What's the point of writing essays, taking tests, or even coming together for class? Certainly, the writers at Spark Notes have done an adequate job of summarizing the texts we read, performing literary analyses, and bringing out the important themes of the texts that we read. Perhaps they do a better job than any of us will. So, what is it that brings us together each class day to discuss these texts? Surely people have read these texts and mined the depths of them over the last millennia so that we have nothing to add that has not already been written by someone else.