This year at St. John the Baptist Catholic School in Jordan, staff are officially prioritizing the education of virtues for elementary and middle school students with a “virtue of the month.”
For nine months, a Bible verse and matching hymn will be used to help students focus on a given virtue including prudence, faith, hope, love, humility, charity, temperance, fortitude and justice, said Father Neil Bakker, pastor of St. John the Baptist.
Principal Ann Dettmann’s morning announcements will include a definition of a virtue. For middle schoolers, Mondays and Tuesdays will include a virtue hour to learn about and discuss ways to live out that virtue.
Dettmann will provide teachers with resources and research on virtues.
“It’s very important, especially for our older students, because they’re more and more in the world and making their own choices,” Dettman said. “They need that strong foundation of those good habits of making those choices. That’s what the virtues will give them, so that they can choose based on charity, based on justice and based on prudence and make the best choice they can for their life. … At the end of the month, they should have a pretty complete picture of what is this virtue and some ways they can live it out.”
Based on an idea from Father Bakker, the program has been loosely in the works for two years. With help from counselor Billy Grazyck, owner of mental health firm Our Lady of Good Counsel, St. John the Baptist staff planned the program over the summer.
“The Catholic Church has always had a solution to these problems that we face in our modern day,” Father Bakker said. “The Church has always had the solutions, and we need to tap back into the solution. Virtue is one of them for sure, and then the internal life. … Hopefully that will set them up to have that constantly in their life. … It could be injustice when we gossip, when we back-bite, when we tear down someone’s name. That’s a sub-virtue and vice of justice. How are we being just if we’re back-biting and gossiping and what are the virtues that we need? Such as controlling of the tongue so that we have that internal pause.”
Elementary school students at St. John the Baptist celebrate Mass on Wednesdays and Fridays. Here, Father Bakker will work each virtue of the month into his homily. Father Bakker equated this routine to the Benedictine model of work and prayer. Students begin the day with prayer, then immediately start their work. After some time, students take a break to pray and reflect on their internal, spiritual development, then return to work.
“For the middle school kids, it’s a little more involved,” Father Bakker said of encouraging virtue. “Their day begins in the classroom with some classroom time, and then they take a pause every day, midday for about an hour, and either go to Mass three days a week or they will have a group discussion in their classrooms … They’ll be talking more in depth about that virtue for the month, but then also go deeper. St. Thomas Aquinas, when he talks about humility, there’s all kinds of sub-virtues that go into humility. So, they’ll go deeper into those kinds of sub-virtues and then reflect on their behavior.”
