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Talking about the claim, by current atheists, that they are moral, virtuous, and exemplary without the need for God and religion — this passage, by Carol Ianonne, is quite wise:

...we would need about two millennia of purely atheistic culture in order to learn for certain whether human beings on their own would generate what we today consider moral behavior. Without that, we are perfectly justified in concluding, not scientifically of course, but in a common sensicalway, that the saintly behavior of today's atheists comes from their having absorbed the morality that mankind has developed through centuries of religious belief and that is part of the cultural oxygen we all breathe. As C.S. Lewis says, if you are challenging the Tao, or the idea of a transcendent moral law, it's because you have been cultivated within it. Someone outside of it could not even have the wherewithal to challenge it.

In other words, this is analoguous to trust-funders — those people who live off the money earned by others. As such, the notion is the atheists live off the moral capital, so to speak, earned by their forebearers. They have "absorbed the morality that mankind has developed through centuries of religious belief". The fruits of religious contemplation of others operate within the morality of atheists whether they like it (or are aware of it) or not. And, thus, while atheists think moral education, through God and religion, is not needed, in fact it is. Over time, insights are forgotten; fruits go bad.

This notion of "trustfunders" I think also applies to a different realm, that of education. While to explain this fully would require more time than I have now, here's the basic premise. Hundreds of years of classical education (in the liberal arts of the trivium and quadrivium) created an enormous investment in learning, which we still benefit from today. But the bank of knowledge needs constant replenishment, and the watered-down deracinated public school approach (with its age-indexed progression, environment of social pressure, loss of focus on the basic tools of learning, etc.) does not serve the classical ideal of erudition, individual curiosity, and rigorous training. Thus, a culture that does not invest their efforts to learn classically, the culture becomes populated by trustfunders, following the analogy.

And because the "capital" (beit knowledge, morality) is finite, it must be renewed, every generation, by people facing down unfavorable conditions and doing the work (of learning, of religious contemplation). Else we see a slow but steady diminishing of the precious fruits of both, held in common culture, because the classical manner is ignored, short-circuited, diminished, or forgotten.

That's the skinny. More, I'm sure, at some point. Given that this notion has been in my head for a while, it is nice to just get it out. It is a fundamental reason why home-education, using a classical template, has become a choice for Hannah and I, for our daughter.

(And, as far as education, the seminal essay on classical education by Dorothy Sayers makes the trustfund point, as well.)