The vast majority of contemporary scholars working in intellectual character education endeavor to identify those elements that render an educational program reliably successful at fostering the growth of intellectual excellences in students. In this article, I adopt an opposite perspective: I examine potential reasons as to why virtue-based approaches to education might fail to enable students to acquire intellectual virtues. Given the scarcity of accounts of educational failure in contemporary intellectual character education, I search for such accounts in the philosophical roots of the concept of intellectual virtues. In this article, I focus on Plato’s discussion of the eristic agent, namely, an individual who has developed epistemically valuable cognitive abilities but, due to insufficient moral character education, results in misusing them to pursue non-epistemic and quite often also non-moral ends. I argue that Plato’s account of the eristic practice has much to offer to intellectual character education today. It strongly indicates that intellectual virtues cannot be fostered in isolation from moral virtues and that the development of the students’ (1) epistemic emotions and (2) moral virtues should take place prior to the fostering of intellectual excellences in them.

中文翻译：

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防患于未然的智力品德教育：以情商为例

绝大多数从事智力品格教育的当代学者都在努力确定使教育计划在培养学生智力卓越方面取得成功的那些要素。在这篇文章中，我采用了相反的观点：我研究了为什么基于美德的教育方法可能无法让学生获得智力美德的潜在原因。鉴于当代智力品格教育中教育失败的描述很少，我在智力美德概念的哲学根源中寻找这样的描述。在这篇文章中，我关注柏拉图对 eristic 代理的讨论，即一个已经发展出具有认知价值的认知能力但由于道德品格教育不足的个人，导致滥用它们去追求非认识论和非道德的目的。我认为柏拉图对厄运实践的描述对今天的智力品格教育有很大帮助。它有力地表明，智力美德的培养不能脱离道德美德，并且学生的（1）认知情感和（2）道德美德的发展应该先于培养他们的智力卓越。