What is it to learn morally?  After wrestling with this question for decades, American secondary schools, colleges, and universities still do not have all the answers.  While not pretending to have answered the question, either, New York Times columnist David Brooks, in a recent piece, suggested that while Westerners tend to define learning cognitively, Asians lean toward defining it morally.  In other words, for many Asians, to learn is to ultimately learn about how to live virtuously.  Although some Americans, notably Alan Bloom, author of the Closing of the American Mind, and Anthony Kronman, author of Education's End , have endorsed the worth of this position, most American universities have yet to respond positively.
     Not that knowledge is unimportant.  It is vitally important to an industrialized society.  If knowledge is all on which we focus, however, we will eventually encounter a problem.  We will know all we can know about the world, but we will not know how to live in this world.  Conversely, if all we know is what we believe, we will not know how to live in a world in which knowledge as well as belief are required.  One objection that many have to organized religion is that its adherents frequently know a great deal about their God, but do not consistently demonstrate this in their actions.  We might say the same about people without religion.  They may know a great deal about morality, but they inevitably fail to live it consistently.  Either way, if we think about knowing, we overlook doing.  Yet if we think only about doing, we will soon not know why we are doing it.
     Writing in the first century A.D., the apostle James stated that, "For just as the body without the spirit [a body of knowledge without morality] is dead, so also faith without works [a lived and acted faith] is dead" (James 2:26).  When we view knowledge as a means to live virtuously, we become people who, to use James again, this time in the first chapter of his epistle, who are like "the person who looks at his face in a mirror and then walks away."  Like Oscar Wilder's Dorian Gray, we fail to recognize who we really are, that is, people of mind and spirit--and what, given this fact, we must really be.