This book proposes an approach to values education centered on an analysis of the relationship between thinking and valuing and focused on strategies for nurturing the capacity for sustained, disciplined, and informed reflection on the issues of moral decision and religious belief.

Robert T. Sandin contends that there is an urgent need for education at the present time to effect a return to the traditional ideals of intellectual and moral virtue. Supporting observations include recent evaluations of values education in American schools and colleges, a review of several well-known theories of values-related education, and an account of the development of the philosophy of value in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sandin is committed to the concept that virtue is compatible with the ideals of learning, and further demonstrates why the role of religion in modern culture depends on the effectiveness of a program of education that nurtures an authentic spirituality, free from illusion.