How Education Should Change

Education can expand knowledge and strengthen human capability, but it cannot ensure that capability will answer to conscience. Once people learn to redescribe wrongdoing as virtue, the central question of education is no longer merely what students can do. It is what their knowledge, abilities, and actions are ultimately directed towards.

In 2008, Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida to two state criminal charges and was required to register as a sex offender.[1]

The case is not evidence that education makes people morally worse. It reveals a different and more unsettling truth: intelligence, competence, and social sophistication are not moral safeguards.

Why do knowledge, professional competence, and social influence still fail to ensure that a person will refuse to do wrong?

Education and professional training can enlarge a person’s capabilities. Social position can widen that person’s influence and range of action. Yet none of these ensures that ability will remain answerable to conscience. Someone may understand laws and institutions, speak fluently about moral values, and possess considerable intellectual and practical ability, yet still act against what they know to be right under the pressure of money, desire, power, or reputation. Such a person may even become highly skilled at rationalising harm.

This does not mean that education is without value. It means that knowledge and ability do not determine their own moral ends.

The deepest question of education, therefore, is not merely how to produce more capable people. It is also how people come to understand what their capabilities are for.

Education can reduce ignorance, widen opportunity, and lower certain risks of criminal behaviour. But knowledge alone cannot eliminate greed, vanity, cowardice, or the desire to dominate. Education can enlarge the field of human action. It cannot automatically determine where a person will go within it.

When people acquire knowledge without developing a durable commitment to truth and conscience, respect for the dignity of others, and the ability to govern their own desires responsibly, their education remains incomplete.

Educational reform is therefore not only a question of curricula, examinations, and assessment. It is also a question of human nature, desire, freedom, and responsibility.

1. Greater Capability Is Not Moral Maturity

Education has genuine and substantial value.

Quasi-experimental studies from the United States, England and Wales, and Sweden suggest that additional years of education can reduce incarceration, conviction, or property-crime rates within particular institutional settings and populations. The effects vary by country, sex, and type of offence, however, and should not be interpreted as evidence that education affects every form of crime in the same way.[2]

Education can improve access to lawful employment, deepen a person’s understanding of consequences, and reduce the likelihood that young people will enter criminal environments. These are real benefits for individuals and society.

Such findings do not establish, however, that higher qualifications make a person morally more trustworthy. The studies primarily concern broad patterns of crime, conviction, and imprisonment. They do not demonstrate that higher education is sufficient to prevent white-collar crime, abuses of power, or organised harm. These phenomena involve different mechanisms and cannot simply be inferred from research on crime in general.

Many forms of knowledge and ability are inherently dual-use.

Legal knowledge can be used to defend justice or to evade responsibility. Communication skills can expose falsehood or package it persuasively. Familiarity with institutions can support reform or reveal exploitable loopholes. An understanding of human psychology can help the wounded or make the manipulation of others more precise.

The problem is not that education gives people power. The problem is that power does not tell us what it ought to serve.

A qualification can show that someone has met certain academic or professional standards. It cannot prove that the person has developed mature character. Schools and universities can train and select for ability, but a degree cannot certify how its holder will act when confronted by temptation, pressure, or personal advantage.

Education can increase a person’s capacity to do good. It can also increase the efficiency with which that person pursues selfish ends.

2. The Problem Is Not a Lack of Moral Language

The problem is not that modern educational systems lack moral language.

Many schools and universities speak of integrity, responsibility, citizenship, character, service, and the development of the whole person. China’s educational laws and policies, for example, explicitly emphasise moral formation and students’ moral, intellectual, physical, aesthetic, and practical development.[3]

The difficulty lies in the distance that may remain between stated aims, systems of evaluation, and everyday institutional practice.

Educational systems differ substantially across countries. Yet many are shaped by similar underlying pressures: standardised assessment, competition for selective institutions, credentialism, rankings, and the demand for measurable outcomes.

The problem is therefore not confined to countries commonly described as having “exam-oriented education”. Wherever education is organised primarily around selection, credentials, rankings, and measurable performance, students may learn to treat knowledge, character, and even public service as instruments of advancement.

Where educational progression depends heavily on quantifiable achievement, memory, speed, adaptation to standardised pacing, and mastery of expected answers tend to acquire disproportionate importance.

Efforts to promote more holistic education have broadened assessment to include art, sport, practical experience, creativity, public service, and organisational ability. That is a meaningful development. Yet the multiplication of assessment criteria can also transform competition over examination scores into competition over a more elaborate portfolio.

Students may now be expected to accumulate not only grades but also competition results, certificates, project experience, leadership positions, athletic achievements, and records of community involvement. The criteria become more diverse, but the fundamental question remains unanswered.

What are these abilities ultimately for?

Writing can expose the truth or conceal it. Legal expertise can protect rights or help someone escape accountability. Leadership can serve a community or manipulate it. Public service can arise from genuine concern or become an item carefully arranged for a university application.

When education measures only what a person can accomplish, while rarely asking why it is done, how others are treated, or what consequences the person is willing to bear, character formation can be reduced to another set of visible performance indicators.

Examinations themselves are not the enemy.

Public, standardised, and reviewable examinations retain an important value of procedural fairness, especially where students have unequal family resources and educational opportunities. Compared with selection based on wealth, personal connections, or highly subjective judgement, clear examination standards can provide students from different backgrounds with a route of advancement that they can understand and pursue.

The danger arises when scores cease to function as one legitimate instrument among others and become the principal measure of a student’s worth and the organising principle of educational life.

Nor can reform consist merely in replacing examination scores with interviews, certificates, project experience, extracurricular activities, and broader profiles of achievement. These alternatives may be even more vulnerable to inequalities in family resources, institutional access, cultural capital, and subjective discretion.

A more defensible approach would preserve transparent, stable, and reviewable standards while reducing the power of any single score, credential, or portfolio to dominate the educational process.

Similar concerns have appeared in official reform efforts. China’s educational evaluation reforms, for example, have called for an end to excessive reliance on scores, admission rates, credentials, academic publications, and professional titles.[4]

Competitive pressure is not created by schools alone. Admission systems, the unequal distribution of desirable educational resources, family expectations, employment competition, professional licensing, and society’s reliance on academic credentials all shape the choices made by schools, teachers, students, and parents.

Unless these external mechanisms of selection change, expecting schools alone to step outside the logic of competition will not end competition. It will merely redirect it towards new certificates, activities, projects, interviews, and portfolio items.

Schools also teach through their institutional arrangements, authority structures, and systems of reward and punishment. Educational theory often describes these influences beyond the formal curriculum as the “hidden curriculum”.[5]

What earns recognition, resources, protection, and advancement may educate students more powerfully than the values printed on classroom walls.

Intellectual security cannot be built by excluding comparison or prohibiting questions. To understand an idea is not to accept it. To study a political system, tradition, or belief is not to require allegiance to it.

A conviction that can survive only by suppressing disagreement, avoiding evidence, or preventing comparison has not yet become a reasoned conviction.

Education should develop the ability to examine competing ideas. It should not treat exposure to them as a threat.

3. Knowledge Can Become Moral Camouflage

Much moral education rests on an excessively optimistic assumption. People do wrong because they do not know what is right. Explain the principle clearly enough, establish the rule firmly enough, and they will choose correctly.

Moral failure, however, does not always arise from ignorance. People may know what is right and still refuse to let that knowledge govern their conduct.

The Gospels repeatedly use the language of hypocrisy to condemn those who knew the law and displayed religious devotion in public while neglecting justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Jesus criticised the division between outward moral respectability and inward greed and injustice, describing it through the image of whitewashed tombs.[6]

The problem here is not ordinary weakness or an isolated failure. It is the sustained separation of public identity, moral language, and actual conduct.

A person may understand what society expects goodness to look like and become highly proficient in its language. Morality can then be converted into an instrument for protecting status, reputation, and power.

This problem closely resembles what Albert Bandura described as moral disengagement. Bandura argued that people need not openly abandon their moral standards. Through a series of cognitive mechanisms, they can prevent those standards from regulating particular actions.[7]

Harm can be presented as necessary service. Euphemistic language can conceal the character of an action. Responsibility can be transferred to a superior or dispersed across a group. Consequences can be minimised. Victims can be degraded, dehumanised, or blamed for what was done to them.

The biblical critique of hypocrisy and the psychological theory of moral disengagement are not identical. The former is theological and moral. The latter belongs to the social-cognitive tradition in psychology. Yet both illuminate a common phenomenon.

People do not always reject morality before causing harm. They may preserve a favourable moral image of themselves while redescribing their conduct until the harm appears reasonable, necessary, or unavoidable.

Reason has a double function here. It can help us scrutinise our motives. It can also be recruited to defend them.

This does not mean that intelligent people are necessarily more disposed to wrongdoing. Reasoning ability, verbal fluency, and institutional understanding have no predetermined moral direction. They can expose self-deception, but they can also construct more sophisticated defences against self-knowledge.

Knowledge does not automatically produce honesty. It can also facilitate increasingly refined forms of impression management.

Schools naturally assess what can be observed. Was the answer correct? Was the assignment completed? Were the rules followed? Was the presentation persuasive? These things can be recorded, compared, and evaluated.

Some of the most important elements of character, however, emerge precisely where observation becomes difficult.

Will a person remain responsible when no reward is offered? Will someone refuse to cause harm when punishment is unlikely? Will a student speak truthfully when the group has chosen silence? After doing wrong, will the person acknowledge what happened and accept the consequences?

The failure of moral education cannot therefore be remedied simply by adding another subject to the timetable.

So long as the underlying logic of assessment remains unchanged, morality can quickly become another performative competence. Values can be memorised. Volunteer experience can be documented. Leadership narratives can be polished. Even apology and repentance can become techniques of reputation management.

Students may learn not how to become honest, but how to appear honest.

Education must therefore include the formation of judgement, desire, and responsibility. Students need not only to know what is right but also to recognise the ways in which they may evade, distort, or neutralise the authority of that judgement over their own actions.

4. Education Needs a More Honest Account of Human Nature

What education believes about the human person determines both what it attempts and what it overlooks.

When education assumes that increasing knowledge naturally inclines people towards goodness, and that wrongdoing arises mainly from ignorance, it will underestimate selfishness, envy, vanity, cowardice, and the tendency to use power in defence of personal interest.

Scientific and technological knowledge continues to advance, yet crime and human cruelty have not disappeared. This does not make knowledge worthless. It shows that intellectual progress does not automatically become moral progress.

Knowledge can strengthen judgement and enlarge the power to act. It cannot ensure that either will be used well.

Chinese intellectual traditions do not offer a single theory of human nature, but their major representatives did not identify moral growth with the accumulation of knowledge.

Mencius believed that the moral beginnings present in human beings had to be extended and brought to fulfilment. The Doctrine of the Mean emphasised self-vigilance even when no one else was watching. Xunzi disagreed sharply with Mencius about human nature, but he too argued that desire had to be formed and ordered through ritual, education, and institutions.[8][9][10]

These traditions differ in their judgements about human nature. What they share is a refusal to treat character as the automatic consequence of intellectual development. Character is formed over time through practice, habit, reflection, relationships, and institutional restraint.

Acknowledging the darker possibilities of human nature does not require the denial of human dignity. A more adequate account must hold at least three propositions together.

Human beings possess irreducible dignity.

They are capable of recognising and responding to the good.

They are also capable of self-deception, resistance to the good, and serious harm.

Freedom is not only the capacity to choose. It also places the choosing person under responsibility for what is chosen.

Chinese traditions already expose the inadequacy of treating moral development as an automatic consequence of intellectual growth. Christian thought contributes a further and distinctive account of human dignity, wrongdoing, self-deception, responsibility, repentance, and renewal.

This does not mean that religious activity should replace the shared curriculum of public education. Nor does it mean that a plural society must adopt a single theological account of the human person.

The claim is narrower. Christian thought can contribute to the wider public conversation about education, alongside philosophical, psychological, legal, and other religious traditions that remain open to reasoned examination and public debate. It should also inform character formation within Christian families, churches, schools, and other faith communities.

In China, the law maintains a separation between religion and the state education system.[11] The distinction between public educational institutions and religious communities must therefore remain clear.

Christian identity does not make anyone immune to moral failure. Churches, Christian families, Christian schools, and other religious institutions can themselves become sites of hypocrisy, abuse of power, concealment of harm, and suppression of dissent.

When faith is used to protect an institution’s reputation, reduce accountability, preserve authority, or silence victims, it too becomes an instrument of hypocrisy.

The educational significance of Christianity does not lie in guaranteeing virtuous outcomes. It lies in offering a demanding account of human dignity, sin, responsibility, repentance, grace, and renewal.

Human Dignity Cannot Be Determined by Social Utility

Christian faith holds that every human being is created in the image of God.[12]

Human dignity therefore does not depend on examination results, wealth, ability, productivity, social status, or usefulness to an institution. An infant who cannot yet contribute economically, a person who has lost the capacity to work, and someone whose life yields no visible economic return still possess a value that cannot legitimately be reduced to utility.

Education must therefore ask more than what a student will achieve. It must also ask how that student will understand the worth of self and others.

A student with exceptional grades does not possess greater human worth. A student who struggles academically does not become less deserving of respect.

This distinction matters because educational institutions often distribute opportunities according to achievement. Such distinctions may sometimes be necessary. Yet differences in achievement must never be converted into differences in human worth.

When Sin Is Redescribed as Good

Christian thought confronts not only human wrongdoing but also the human capacity to conceal it, justify it, and become deceived about it.

The Bible does not present its major figures as flawless moral heroes. It depicts human beings acting under the pressures of desire, fear, loyalty, resentment, ambition, and power. Some fail in weakness. Some persist in wrongdoing. Others remain faithful under severe testing.

Wrongdoing does not always appear as obvious malice. In its more concealed form, it allows a person to depart from the good while using reasons, identities, and moral language to preserve an image of righteousness.

Greed can be renamed responsibility. Cowardice can become prudence. Revenge can present itself as justice. Dependence on power can be called loyalty. Harm to another person can even be defended as service to a higher good.

Hypocrisy is therefore not merely the deliberate deception of other people. It may begin in deception of the self.

A person need not reject the good openly. That person may know its language, speak in its name, and believe that it governs their actions, while repeatedly revising the facts until desire and self-interest appear justified.

Jeremiah describes the human heart as deceitful and difficult to understand. Jesus likewise condemns those whose outward piety conceals inward greed and injustice.[13]

What makes sin especially difficult to recognise is not merely that people can do wrong, but that they can lose the ability to see that they are doing so.

This does not require us to interpret every action as malicious. It requires us to acknowledge that our understanding of ourselves is not naturally reliable.

We often identify the compromised motives of others more readily than our own. We demand that others confront uncomfortable facts while constructing more charitable accounts of our own choices.

The Daodejing distinguishes the intelligence required to understand others from the deeper illumination required to understand oneself.[14] Self-knowledge is difficult not only because our information is limited, but also because we see selectively, avoid interpretations that threaten us, and conceal less honourable motives beneath more respectable reasons.

An education that ignores this capacity for self-deception may produce people who can analyse everyone except themselves.

Repentance Requires Facing Reality

Christian faith understands repentance as a reorientation of life, not merely the protection of a moral image.

Repentance cannot be reduced to an apology, nor can it be used to cancel the consequences of an action. Where harm has been done, repentance requires at least an end to concealment, an acknowledgement of the facts, acceptance of responsibility, and such repair as remains possible.

The Gospel of Luke describes Zacchaeus, a wealthy chief tax collector, publicly promising after his encounter with Jesus to give half his possessions to the poor and to repay four times as much to anyone he had defrauded.[15]

His promise makes repentance materially testable. He became willing to surrender wealth and restore whatever he had acquired unjustly rather than continue to benefit from wrongdoing.

The story moves repentance from an inward attitude to a form of responsibility that can be tested. It concerns not only how a person now understands himself, but also what he does with the benefits he has gained, how he responds to those he has injured, and what consequences he is willing to bear.

Some losses cannot be repaired. Some consequences must continue to be borne. Grace cannot become an argument for escaping responsibility.

When education requires students to express regret without requiring them to state what happened, accept proportionate consequences, and repair the damage where possible, moral language itself can become a means of avoiding accountability.

Excellence Must Be Redefined

Christian faith does not measure human achievement primarily through wealth, prestige, and power.

The New Testament does not present the greatness of Christ through political conquest, social rank, or material abundance. Jesus is laid in a manger, enters Jerusalem on a donkey, washes his disciples’ feet, and remains obedient to the point of death. He rejects domination as the measure of greatness and teaches that whoever would be first must become a servant of others.[16]

This humility does not require the weak to submit to the powerful. It shows, through Christ’s own action, how power ought to be exercised.

Ability is not given for self-display. Authority is not given for domination. Both should be directed towards service, responsibility, and protection.

The greater a person’s ability and power, the stronger the restraints under which that power should operate and the greater the responsibility that person should bear for others.

The humility and obedience of Christ do not diminish his dignity. They disclose what the rightful use of power looks like.

Human excellence cannot therefore be measured solely by wealth, position, influence, or competitive achievement.

More fundamental questions must be asked. How does someone use their abilities? How do they treat those who are weaker or less useful to them? What responsibility are they willing to bear for their choices and for the welfare of others?

5. Where Educational Reform Can Begin

If the purpose of education is to form whole persons rather than merely more competitive ones, reform cannot stop at adding courses and programmes.

Redefine Success

University admission, income, professional competence, prestige, and social influence may all count as achievements. None should become the final measure of education.

Education must also attend to how people use their advantages, how they treat those who can offer them nothing in return, how they respond to failure, and whether they will bear a cost when personal interest conflicts with conscience.

The greater the capability being developed, the more urgently education should ask whom that capability will serve and who will bear the consequences if it is misused.

Education need not reject achievement. It must reject the identification of achievement with human worth.

Redefining success also requires recognition that different forms of ability and labour possess dignity.

When academic progression is treated as the only respectable path, while vocational education, technical work, manual skill, care work, and service occupations are regarded as inferior, claims about educational plurality and equal human worth cannot be fulfilled.

China’s Vocational Education Law, for example, expressly recognises vocational education as a form of education equal in importance to general education.[17] The larger principle is not confined to China. A society that depends upon diverse forms of labour cannot coherently treat only academic and professional achievement as worthy of respect.

Move from Memorising Moral Conclusions to Practising Moral Judgement

Students need to encounter real and difficult cases. They need to understand how people gradually lose moral judgement under organisational pressure, collective silence, personal temptation, ideological conformity, and unequal relations of power.

Literature, history, law, philosophy, religion, psychology, and contemporary events can all develop moral imagination. They allow students to see the particular people who stand behind abstract decisions and to ask who will ultimately bear their consequences.

Education should not merely require students to identify the approved answer. It should help them recognise how rationalisation, conformity, displacement of responsibility, and the degradation of victims are used to defend wrongdoing.

Moral judgement requires more than recognising what is right. It requires recognising how we ourselves might evade, distort, or suspend the authority of what we know to be right.

This kind of education does not tell students what to think about every disputed question. It teaches them how to examine reasons, evidence, interests, power, consequences, and their own possible self-deception.

Let Students Learn Responsibility through Real Choices

Moral responsibility cannot be formed through instruction alone.

A student whose life is entirely arranged, supervised, and decided by others cannot learn freedom and responsibility merely by attending a class about them. Obedience may preserve order, but it cannot replace judgement.

Schools should provide students with genuine choices appropriate to their age and capacity. Students can participate in discussions of classroom rules, the division of work in collective projects, the conduct of shared affairs, and the resolution of conflict. They should also bear reasonable consequences arising from their decisions.

Chinese regulations on the protection of minors in schools offer one institutional example. They require schools to respect students’ rights of participation and expression, support their involvement in formulating school and classroom rules, and hear their views when dealing with matters affecting their rights and interests.[18]

The underlying principle is broader.

Students are not raw material waiting to be shaped by an institution. They are persons whose judgement, will, and responsibility are already being formed.

Education cannot manufacture virtue directly. It can create conditions in which students practise judgement, make choices, encounter consequences, revise their decisions, and accept responsibility.

Educate Desire and Teach Students to Recognise Harm

Money, sex, power, vanity, envy, resentment, and the desire to belong cannot be addressed through prohibition alone.

Self-restraint does not mean the eradication of desire. It means bringing desire into an appropriate order.

Education should not only tell students which actions are forbidden. It should help them understand why they desire certain things, how those desires can affect judgement, and how they may alter the way other people are perceived and treated.

Sex education should address more than biological risks. Students need to understand bodily boundaries, free and explicit consent, unequal relations of power, grooming, coercion, manipulation, and the means by which help can be sought after abuse.

Consent cannot be casually presumed where fear, dependency, manipulation, intoxication, institutional authority, or a severe imbalance of power is present.

Sexual conduct cannot be separated from mutual dignity, responsibility, and accountability for consequences. Education should help students govern their own desires while enabling them to recognise and resist attempts to use intimacy, advantage, or authority as instruments of control.

Chinese regulations require schools to establish systems for preventing bullying, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment, adopt a zero-tolerance response to such conduct, and provide care and assistance for students who have been harmed.[19] Comparable safeguards, adapted to different legal systems, should form part of any credible system of educational safeguarding.

Power must not degenerate from service into possession. Achievement must not become evidence of superiority or a licence to dominate.

Take the Hidden Curriculum Seriously

Schools educate not only through textbooks but through the ordering of everyday life.

How teachers treat struggling students, how administrators respond to mistakes, how honours and opportunities are distributed, whether competition overwhelms cooperation, and whether rules change according to status all communicate a practical account of success, power, and human worth.

When a school speaks of respect but humiliates the weak, praises honesty but rewards only results, or celebrates independent thought while punishing dissent, students will learn something different from its declared values.

They will learn to adapt themselves to evaluation, please authority, conceal failure, and protect their own interests.

Institutions cannot replace character, but they can make certain forms of character easier or harder to develop.

Fair and consistent rules, space to make mistakes, respect for those who fail, genuine recognition of cooperation, protection for dissent, and adults who acknowledge their own errors may educate more powerfully than moral slogans.

Schools also cannot assign teachers responsibility for character formation while denying them the time and professional discretion required to exercise it.

When teachers are governed primarily by admission targets, administrative inspections, documentary compliance, rankings, performance metrics, and visible outcomes, they too are forced to convert education into a sequence of measurable tasks.

Students then learn that values may be proclaimed, but indicators still determine what people actually do.

The same problem can arise wherever teachers are overwhelmed by reporting requirements, audit systems, performance targets, and administrative surveillance. Their ability to exercise professional judgement is weakened.

In 2025, China’s Ministry of Education issued measures intended to reduce burdens on primary and secondary school teachers that were unrelated to education and teaching, including excessive inspections, meetings, data reporting, form-filling, and externally imposed activities.[20] Such measures illustrate a wider principle: educational institutions cannot cultivate judgement in students while systematically denying it to teachers.

Giving teachers the professional space to understand individual differences, respond honestly to students, acknowledge their own mistakes, and exercise sound judgement is itself part of character education.

What a school teaches includes not only the knowledge students are required to remember. It also includes what the institution tolerates, what it rewards, whom it protects, and how it treats those who cannot produce grades, prestige, or public honour.

Preserve Time That Is Not Consumed by Evaluation

Education should preserve part of a student’s life from continuous assessment.

Reading, exercise, friendship, play, practical work, art, music, voluntary service, and solitude lose part of their educational meaning when every activity is converted into points, certificates, records, recommendation letters, or portfolio material.

Students need activities that are not undertaken for admission, awards, rankings, or the continuous demonstration of merit.

Only when someone continues to read, help another person, practise an art, or fulfil a responsibility without an external reward can an interest or virtue begin to become genuinely their own.

This does not mean abolishing standards, excusing indolence, or rejecting necessary discipline. Education requires effort, practice, correction, and training.

But the whole of childhood and adolescence cannot be occupied by competition, measurement, and display.

Excessive evaluation does more than increase pressure. It changes the meaning of action.

Helping others becomes a requirement for service hours. Reading becomes a logbook. Exercise becomes an admission advantage. Personal interests become instruments of competition. Friendship itself can become networking.

China’s 2021 “double reduction” policy sought to reduce excessive homework and off-campus tutoring burdens in compulsory education. In 2025, the Ministry of Education also issued measures calling for tighter management of homework and examinations and stronger protection of physical activity and sleep.[21]

These policies arise from a particular national context, but the danger they address is not confined to any one educational system. Wherever young people are required to turn every part of life into evidence of achievement, education begins to colonise the very forms of experience through which character, friendship, curiosity, and inward freedom might otherwise develop.

The deepest form of burden reduction is not simply the removal of a few assignments. It is the restoration of a part of life in which students are not required to prove themselves continuously.

Do Not Turn Character into Another Score

Once virtue is precisely quantified and tied directly to admission, honours, employment, or institutional resources, it easily becomes another form of performance.

No school can fully assess a student’s inner character through a collection of indicators. Volunteer hours, conduct grades, leadership records, peer assessments, and teachers’ evaluations can reveal something, but they cannot deliver a final judgement on a person’s moral worth.

Education should not search for students who have never failed. It should help students state the facts after failure, accept the consequences, apologise, make repair, and change their conduct.

The decisive question is not whether someone can maintain an unblemished image. It is whether that person is willing to emerge from self-deception.

Families, schools, universities, religious communities, and public institutions should seek to create environments consistent with these principles.

How adults speak about money, status, weakness, dependence, success, and failure, and how they respond to their own wrongdoing, often exert more influence than the principles they formally teach.

Conclusion

Education cannot guarantee that a person will never commit a crime. Nor can it accomplish anyone’s inward renewal on their behalf. But this does not mean that education must be reduced to the transmission of knowledge and the training of ability.

At a minimum, education should ask two questions.

What powers are we giving students?

What values and responsibilities will govern their use?

High scores, prestigious universities, wealth, professional success, and social standing can demonstrate achievement in particular respects. They cannot establish that a person’s character has matured.

We need more knowledge, but we must also ask what knowledge is for. We need stronger capabilities, but those capabilities must remain answerable to truth, love, justice, and responsibility.

Education should not merely help people understand rules. It should enable them to examine beliefs, judge commands, recognise manipulation, confront self-deception, and refuse participation in harm when refusal becomes necessary.

Christian thought can make a legitimate contribution to the wider public conversation about education, not because it can guarantee moral outcomes, but because it offers a demanding account of human dignity, wrongdoing, self-deception, responsibility, repentance, and renewal.

The same conversation should remain open to other philosophical and religious traditions capable of clarifying human dignity, desire, power, moral failure, and the ends towards which human capability should be directed.

Education cannot decide what a child will ultimately become. It can, however, help that child understand how to treat others and what kind of life they are responsible for forming as their knowledge, capabilities, and freedom expand.

True education should bring human virtue to fuller expression, contribute to the renewal of persons and societies, and orient knowledge, capability, and action towards the highest good.[22]

Notes

[1] U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Professional Responsibility, Investigation into the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida’s Resolution of Its 2006–2008 Federal Criminal Investigation of Jeffrey Epstein: Executive Summary (2020), 2–3. On 30 June 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida state court to felony solicitation of prostitution and procurement of minors to engage in prostitution. He later registered as a sexual offender.

[2] Lance Lochner and Enrico Moretti, “The Effect of Education on Crime: Evidence from Prison Inmates, Arrests, and Self-Reports”, American Economic Review 94, no. 1 (2004): 155–189; Stephen Machin, Olivier Marie, and Sunčica Vujić, “The Crime Reducing Effect of Education”, The Economic Journal 121, no. 552 (2011): 463–484; Randi Hjalmarsson, Helena Holmlund, and Matthew J. Lindquist, “The Effect of Education on Criminal Convictions and Incarceration: Causal Evidence from Micro-data”, The Economic Journal 125, no. 587 (2015): 1290–1326. These studies use reforms to compulsory schooling in the United States, England and Wales, and Sweden, but examine different populations, offences, and outcomes. Lochner and Moretti report reductions in incarceration and arrest; Machin, Marie, and Vujić identify reductions particularly in property crime; Hjalmarsson, Holmlund, and Lindquist find significant negative effects on male conviction and incarceration, but not equivalent effects for women.

[3] Education Law of the People’s Republic of China, arts 5–6. Article 5 requires education to cultivate students across moral, intellectual, physical, aesthetic, and practical dimensions. Article 6 identifies the fostering of virtue as a central educational task and addresses social responsibility, innovation, and practical ability.

[4] Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and State Council, 《深化新时代教育评价改革总体方案》 [Overall Plan for Deepening Reform of Educational Evaluation in the New Era, author’s translation], 2020. The document calls for overcoming excessive reliance on scores, admission rates, credentials, academic publications, and professional titles.

[5] The “hidden curriculum” generally refers to the values, norms, and patterns of conduct conveyed beyond the formal curriculum through institutional arrangements, authority relations, time discipline, systems of reward and punishment, and everyday interaction. See Philip W. Jackson, Life in Classrooms (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968).

[6] See Matthew 6:2, 5, 16; 23:23–28; Mark 12:38–40; and Luke 20:45–47. The Greek term hypokritēs is commonly translated in these New Testament contexts as “hypocrite”. See Walter Bauer et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), s.v. “ὑποκριτής”.

[7] Albert Bandura, “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities”, Personality and Social Psychology Review 3, no. 3 (1999): 193–209. Bandura identifies mechanisms including moral justification, euphemistic labelling, advantageous comparison, displacement and diffusion of responsibility, disregard or distortion of consequences, dehumanisation, and attribution of blame.

[8] Mencius 2A:6. Mencius argues that the moral beginnings or “sprouts” present in human beings must be extended and brought to fulfilment.

[9] The Doctrine of the Mean, opening chapter. Its account of vigilance in solitude emphasises moral discipline even where one’s conduct is hidden from others.

[10] Xunzi, “Human Nature Is Bad”, chapter 23. The term wei, sometimes translated as “deliberate effort”, “conscious activity”, or “artifice”, refers to acquired formation through practice, education, and ritual rather than to falsity in the modern sense.

[11] Education Law of the People’s Republic of China, art. 8. The article states that education and religion are separate and prohibits the use of religion to obstruct the state education system.

[12] Genesis 1:26–27. The Christian account of universal human dignity is grounded in substantial part in the claim that human beings are created in the image of God.

[13] Jeremiah 17:9; Matthew 23:25–28. The description of the heart as deceitful comes from Jeremiah and is not a direct saying of Jesus.

[14] Daodejing, chapter 33.

[15] Luke 19:1–10. Zacchaeus is described as a wealthy chief tax collector. He promises to give half his possessions to the poor and, if he has defrauded anyone, to repay four times as much.

[16] Luke 2:7; Matthew 21:1–11; John 13:1–17; Mark 10:42–45; Philippians 2:6–8.

[17] Vocational Education Law of the People’s Republic of China, art. 3. The law states that vocational education is a type of education equal in importance to general education.

[18] 《未成年人学校保护规定》 [Provisions on the Protection of Minors in Schools, author’s translation], art. 16. The provision requires schools to respect students’ rights of participation and expression, support their involvement in formulating school charters, disciplinary rules, and classroom agreements, and hear their views when dealing with matters affecting their rights and interests.

[19] Ibid., art. 18. The provision requires schools to establish systems for preventing bullying, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment, a zero-tolerance response mechanism, and systems of care and assistance for students who have been harmed.

[20] Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 《教育部办公厅关于进一步减轻中小学教师非教育教学负担若干措施的通知》 [Notice on Measures to Further Reduce Burdens Unrelated to Education and Teaching for Primary and Secondary School Teachers, author’s translation], 2025.

[21] General Offices of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council, 《关于进一步减轻义务教育阶段学生作业负担和校外培训负担的意见》 [Opinions on Further Reducing Homework and Off-Campus Tutoring Burdens for Students in Compulsory Education, author’s translation], 2021; Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 《进一步加强中小学生心理健康工作十条措施》 [Ten Measures for Further Strengthening Mental Health Work for Primary and Secondary School Students, author’s translation], 2025.

[22] The Great Learning, opening passage: “大学之道，在明明德，在亲民，在止于至善.” The concluding sentence is an interpretive rendering of its threefold movement: manifesting luminous virtue, renewing the people, and resting in the highest good. The interpretation of qinmin (亲民) is disputed, with major traditions rendering it either as “renewing the people” or as “loving the people”.