Staging Virtue: Theatre as Moral Formation for Adolescents

Libertas School of Memphis serves a community marked by challenge and resilience, where families consistently have expressed a desire for their children to grow in character as much as in academic skill. Since opening in 2015, Libertas has cultivated a school culture grounded in virtue study, restorative relationships, and the belief that true education must help to form the whole child. From early childhood through elementary school, students participate in Acorns to Oaks, our homegrown virtue curriculum, encountering habits of excellence in how we think, feel, and act through classic literature and moral exemplars drawn from diverse cultural traditions.

As Libertas expanded into middle school, we recognized that adolescents need opportunities not only to study virtue, but to practice it in ways that feel real and personal. Dr. Maria Montessori wrote that adolescents need to “play a part” in the wider society they are entering. Staging Virtue was created in direct response to this insight.
Staging Virtue is a two-semester, theatre-based initiative that helps students translate virtue literacy into lived experience. Drawing on the stories and virtues they encountered as younger children, students engage and create dramatic enactments of morally complex situations rooted in their own lives, families, and communities. Through performance, discussion, and reflection, students explore how intention, emotions, and actions collide in real decisions, developing both virtuous habits and practical wisdom.

Through embodied experience, Staging Virtue aims to deepen adolescents’ understanding of what it means to live well. By creating space to rehearse moral choice in community, the program supports students in developing practical wisdom and learning how to use their freedom wisely, preparing them to meet challenges head on and to act with integrity in their families, schools, and wider communities.