Hi, I am Michael Nill. Welcome to my website, featuring my book on moral education and blog posts. Thank you for visiting this site.
A teacher and school administrator for much of my working life, I retired from Brooklyn Friends School (a PS- 12 Quaker school in Brooklyn, NY) after serving as its headmaster for ten years.
I earned my doctorate in Classics and Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and master’s degrees from Johns Hopkins University in Classics and from Columbia Teachers College in Educational Administration.
My experiences in education propelled me to research and reflect further on the role of moral education. And that resulted in my writing Nurturing Decent Human Beings: The Case for Moral Education in Our Schools. (See below for more on how I came to write a book on moral education.)
I will also publishing blog entries on this site, which will primarily feature posts that expand on themes found in this book, and draw out and assess the values that play a role in our schools, life, public policies, and politics. I encourage you to sign up as a subscriber to receive email announcements and a link to each new blog post.
In 1985, E. J. Brill in the Netherlands published my revised doctoral dissertation : Morality and Self-Interest in Protagoras, Antiphon and Democritus. Before becoming an educator, I founded and managed bookstores, first in Austin TX and then in Cambridge MA, and edited a magazine of politics and culture. I am married to a retired geriatric psychiatrist, Irene Cohen, who now devotes time to the visual arts. We are fortunate to live close to the Pacific Ocean, both in California and Mexico, and close to our son Seth and grandson Zachary when in California.
What led to my writing a book on moral education
First off was my education in Classics. I will admit to falling in love with Greek literature.
It started in the Iliad, with those ferocious epic heroes seeking the only kind of immortality open to them: recognition and fame for their bravery and leadership that will live on after they die, and their implacable hate when they did not get the recognition they deserved. Centuries later a Greek tragedy portrays one such unfairly dishonored hero abandoning his hatred and rejoining society in recognition that the only immortality open to human beings is participating in the holiness, nobility, or moral goodness that outlives our individual lives.
From there I gravitated to the study of Greek philosophy, which focused on the moral domain and what constitutes the worthwhile life. Perfect preparation for being an educator: teachers strive to help students be the best they can be.
I came to think more systematically about the role of moral education in schools as I became an administrator and eventually the head of a school where there was a consistent, purposeful commitment on the part of the school community as a whole to ensure that appropriate values were woven into the fabric of the institution.
I then understood just how powerful and necessary moral education is. Upon further research and reflection after retirement, I came to see why this kind of education should be part of the life of every school, especially in these times when the value and scope of education is being narrowly seen as the value-neutral acquisition of academic skills and better paying jobs.