Alasdair MacIntyre on Education of Personality

[[abstract]]The inadequacy and errors of Taiwanese education have forced educators and politicians to launch a reformation. Regretfully, reformation is rather done in the fields of technical change. Only a very few of educators have paid attention to more essential problems such as those of ideals, virtues, humanity, etc. Aware of this problem, this thesis studies the education of personality, once proposed by Alasdair MacIntyre (1929- ), which we consider as an alternative to our present education idea. The work consists of three main parts: the first part analyses of the shortcomings of an education for technique and practical knowledge adopted by Taiwan authorities. Its main weakness is a notorious lack of an education of personality. The second part presents the main ideas of an education of personality proposed by MacIntyre. This part traces back the whole process of MacIntyre’s construction of his theory, how he synthesizes the ideas of virtues in Aristotle to the concepts of modern sciences and reason, how he combines Aquinas’ transcendent virtues with our actual concepts of values, and how he advocates the practice, the narrative unity of a life, and the tradition. The final part is a critical re-examination of MacIntyre’s theory of an education of personality to discover its feasibility and its applied values. Consequently, we find that there are many similar problems in our education and in American education, between our tradition and the Western tradition. Thus, his proposal may be suitable to our education. However, we are also aware of the fact that there are also many differences. That means a total, uncritical application of his theory would be foolish. Therefore, we suggest that the ways to transfer MacIntyre’s theory to Taiwan could be possible if we know our values and our shortcomings, if we know how to transform MacIntyre’s idea into our own ideas, and finally if we can solve our problems with these new acquired ideas.