Vico on teaching ethics and wisdom

I've been thinking about Vico's criticism of educational methods at his time. He writes, "the greatest drawback of our educational methods is that we pay an excessive amount of attention to the natural sciences and not enough to ethics. Our chief fault is that we disregard that part of ethics which treats of human character, etc" (871). He concludes that students who are set on a political career should not waste too much time on abstract sciences, but should instead focus on rhetoric and inductive reasoning. Our educational system should strive for excellence in wisdom and eloquence, he says, as well as science. There could be a problem here, though. If Vico is advocating teaching things like human character, good and bad behavior, appealing to the passions, using judgment, then isn't he advocating reducing these things to some kind of science; if not, how could they possibly be taught? I guess this is a paradox which could apply to other theorists, rhetorical and educational, that we have encountered this semester. I don't believe that this paradox is insurmountable, but I do think that authors like Vico don't give enough thought to it. If judgment, after all, is precisely that faculty which knows when and when not to apply the abstract knowledge and scientific axioms, then by definition it cannot itself be reduced to abstract knowledge or scientific axiom. Or think of rhetoric. If its essence is adapting speech to the particulars of a given circumstance, each of which is different, then how can it be taught? Now one might respond that we learn from observing those who practice these skills. Fine, but in that case doesn't education depend entirely on the student's talent for understanding and incorporating what she or he sees? In which case, why is Vico advocating our educational system address these areas of "wisdom" and practical interaction with human beings? I'm stating the problem in very gross terms here just as a way to start thinking about a seeming paradox that I think has plagued a lot of the authors we have read.