teacher is to help the student turn their general well meant intentions into professional
good will. This requires students to be (or to become) consciously self-aware and to be
able to recognise what a genuine regard for others requires of them if they are to
contribute to the flourishing of more-than-ordinarily vulnerable persons. And it is in
learning about these requirements that the habits of good nursing can be encouraged.
Teaching for the moral practice of nursing
It will be noticed that the headings of the last few sections indicate teaehing^br rather
than the teaching of. This deliberate choice of words reflects the view that teaching as a
practice has more to do with helping others to Ieam than with the mere transmission of
information from teacher to student. It will also be noticed here that the focus of the
discussion has moved from teaching to learning. Again this is deliberate for it is a well-
worn truism that however skilful a teacher might be (given that we are talking about
education rather than training or indoctrination) any learning that takes place is as much,
if not more of, a function of the student’s willingness to Ieam as it is of the ability of the
teacher to teach. If this is right then the practice of teaching for nursing must aim in the
first instance to enable students to Ieam what learning to be a nurse requires of them.
From this perspective we need no longer be preoccupied with whether or not virtue can
be taught and can turn our attention to that part of Socrates’ question about the
acquisition of virtue which is perhaps more germane, that is, whether virtue can be
learned. This manoeuvre is one used by Gilbert Ryle (1972) although for Ryle it is a
conclusion bom from a recognition that we Ieam virtue in much the same way (albeit
with at least one important difference) that we Ieam to speak our mother tongue.
Following Protagoras, Ryle argues that because virtue can be learned in ways similar to
the way, as infants, we learn our language, virtue can in fact be taught but it is not
taught by professional teachers. After all, he says, we do not have, and we do not think
we should have, professors of virtue in the way we have professors of maths, chemistry
and so on (although we do have professors of ethics but this reflects ethics as an object
of study rather than as a way of learning to be moral). Rather Everyman is a teacher of
virtue (or vice) as we seek first to imitate and then later emulate those around us whom
we admire. In the same way that we first imitate the language before we become
proficient in using it for our own purposes, so we can first imitate moral (or immoral)
behaviour on the way to learning to become moral (or immoral). The important
unable to learn (at least until much later in life than we would normally expect) to modify their emotions
supports or refutes the idea that people can Ieam virtue.
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