In this case, we are like the haunted house in Pliny that only the Stoic philosopher Athenagoras can liberate by following the ghost to the courtyard and digging up the bones of an ancient murder. This tactic requires an approach that is both open and critical to the great thinkers of the past who have contributed to the jumble of ideas about the soul in contemporary culture. In the last article we responded mostly positively to Plato’s tripartite view of the soul, though of course we rejected the idea of the soul’s preexistence as inconsistent with a biblical worldview. But there is a dark side to Plato’s understanding of the soul that has cast its long shadow on western tradition.

In the article on the soul in Mortimer Adler’s Syntopicon, that masterful guide to the Great Conversation, the perennial question of the soul is framed around a central dispute: Is the soul a distinct substance that inhabits a body, or is it inextricably bound to the body it enlivens? This is not merely an abstract debate. As educators, our answer determines whether we see our task as training a “ghost in a machine,” or as cultivating an integrated, living person. Plato gave us the classic dualist image of the soul as a prisoner longing for release from its bodily cage. This was a helpful, if limited reaction to the materialistic atomism that preceded him in Greek thought. But it is Plato’s student, Aristotle, who offers a third way—a profoundly unified vision that grounds our entire educational project in the rich soil of embodied reality.

From a Christian perspective, Plato’s view might resonate well with the soul’s ongoing existence after death (a truth that Aristotle is also able to account for), but it falls short in accounting for the resurrection of the body, and therefore in what it means to be human from a biblical perspective.

For Aristotle, the soul is not the body’s prisoner but its very principle of life. His psychology (a word originally derived from the Greek for ‘soul’ – psyche), laid out in De Anima, is therefore the necessary foundation for his ethics and thereby his view of proper education. To understand how to cultivate the virtuous mind, we must first understand the living form of the human person. Aristotle’s hylomorphic view of the soul provides the essential framework for understanding and cultivating his five intellectual virtues. In this way, we can shift our pedagogy from the fragmented focus on either mind or body, so common in the modern world, to the integrated formation of the whole person.

A Soul Needs a Body: The Hylomorphic Revolution

Aristotle’s great innovation was to reject both the pure dualism of the Platonists and the crude materialism of the atomists. He charted a middle course known as hylomorphism (from the Greek hyle, “matter,” and morphē, “form”). As scholar Christopher Shields notes, Aristotle saw the soul not as a distinct substance, but as the “principle of organization of a body whose matter has the potentiality for life” (Shields, 2024). In short, the soul is the actuality of a body that has the potential for life. It is the substantial form that makes the matter of a body a living, unified thing.

Aristotle’s own language in De Anima emphasizes this unity with a decisive analogy:

Therefore, we have no need to inquire whether soul and body are one, just as we have no need to inquire whether the wax and its shape are one, nor in general whether the matter of a thing and that of which it is the matter are one. (De Anima, Bk. II, Pt. 1)

This hylomorphic vision is revolutionary for educators. It means we teach embodied souls. The physical world of the classroom—the beauty of the art on the walls, the order of the desks, the posture of the students—is not incidental to learning. It is part of the architecture of the soul’s formation. Because all knowledge begins with the senses, the body is not a distraction from the life of the mind but rather its gateway to the world.

The Ladder of Life: Aristotle’s Ascent and the Imago Dei

Once Aristotle establishes that the soul is the form of the body, he spends the rest of De Anima investigating what this form looks like across the vast spectrum of living things. His method is empirical and observational; he builds his argument from the ground up, starting with the simplest forms of life and ascending to the most complex. This “ladder of life” not only provides a brilliant taxonomy of the natural world but also offers a profound parallel to the biblical account of creation and the nature of man. In a way that mirrors the progression of the days of creation in Genesis, Aristotle’s argument ascends through three fundamental levels of soul, or life-principle.

First, he observes the nutritive soul, the power shared by all living things, from the humblest plant to man. Its functions are the most basic: nutrition, growth, and reproduction. This is the soul in its most foundational sense, the biological urge to sustain oneself and to generate new life. This resonates powerfully with God’s first commands to his creatures in Genesis 1. To the plants, the sea creatures, and to mankind, the imperative is the same: “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:22, 28). For both Aristotle and the biblical authors, life’s primary and most universal impulse is a good and ordained principle of flourishing. It affirms the goodness of our createdness and our participation in the fundamental rhythms of the cosmos.

Next, Aristotle identifies the sensitive soul, which belongs to animals and, by extension, to humans. This faculty adds to the nutritive powers a new set of capacities: sensation, appetite (desire and aversion), pleasure and pain, and locomotion. This is the realm of the passions and corresponds to the lowest part of the soul in Plato’s tripartite conception. Here we see the raw material for what the Apostle Paul calls the “flesh”—the seat of desires which, since the Fall, are disordered and at war with the spirit (Gal. 5:17). Yet these passions are not inherently evil; they are God-given capacities for experiencing and navigating the world. The capacity to feel pleasure is a gift that allows us to enjoy God’s creation; the capacity for anger can be a righteous passion against injustice. The Christian life is not about the Stoic eradication of these passions, but their right ordering. As educators, our work in habituation and character formation is largely the work of disciplining and directing this sensitive soul, training our students’ loves so that their desires are aligned with the good.

Finally, at the pinnacle of the earthly ladder, Aristotle arrives at the rational soul, which is unique to human beings and immortal in its essence (see De Anima, Bk. 3, Pt. 5). This is the power to think, to reason, to use language, and to grasp universal truths. It is here that Aristotle’s philosophy most profoundly intersects with the biblical doctrine of the Imago Dei. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion…'” (Gen. 1:26). While the Imago Dei is a rich and complex concept, it has always been understood to include this unique human capacity for reason, moral deliberation, and relationship with God. Our ability to abstract the form from the matter, to contemplate the eternal, and to order our lives according to a known good is the echo of our Creator’s rational nature. The ultimate goal of a Christian education is the redemption and sanctification of this power—what Paul calls being “transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom. 12:2)—so that our reason is no longer a tool for self-service but an instrument for knowing, loving, and serving God.

This ascent from the nutritive to the sensitive to the rational provides the essential psychological map for our work. We are tending to whole persons, honoring their physical needs, training their passions, and ultimately, guiding their reason toward its proper end. It is the perfection of this rational soul, working in concert with the lower powers, that Aristotle identifies as virtue.

The Soul’s Toolkit: Forging the Intellectual Virtues

In the Great Conversation, a key question about the soul concerns its powers or faculties. Aristotle provides a brilliant taxonomy, showing how the soul’s capacities build upon one another, from the basic nutritive powers we share with plants to the sensitive powers we share with animals, culminating in the rational power unique to humans. It is within the rational soul that the intellectual virtues reside. Aristotle subdivides our reason into two functions: the calculative part, which deliberates about contingent reality (what can be otherwise), and the scientific part, which contemplates necessary reality (what cannot be otherwise). Our task is to bring both to their peak form.

The Virtues of Making and Doing: Technê and Phronēsis

The calculative part of the soul works on the world of action and production, using the data provided by our senses. The two virtues that perfect it are technê and phronēsis.

• Technê (Artistry/Craftsmanship): As we explored in the “Apprenticeship in the Arts” series, technê is the excellence of making, “involving a true course of reasoning” (NE 1140a). It is the virtue of the artisan who can see the form of a chair in a block of wood and guide his tools to bring it into being. When we teach students the technê of grammar, rhetoric, or even long division, we are doing more than transferring skills; we are habituating their souls to reason productively, bringing order and form to matter.
• Phronēsis (Prudence/Practical Wisdom): While technê produces a good product, phronēsis produces good action. This is the master virtue discussed in “Counsels of the Wise,” the “reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for man” (NE 1140b). Phronēsis cannot be learned by abstract rule-following. It requires experience—a deep reservoir of memories built from sensory engagement with the world—to perceive the particulars of a moral situation and deliberate well regarding what is best. We cultivate this by immersing students in history, literature, and scripture, training them to see the world with moral clarity.

The Virtues of Knowing and Contemplating: Epistēmē, Nous, and Sophia

Beyond the changing world of action lies the unchanging world of truth, the domain of the scientific part of the soul. Aristotle argues this highest human faculty, the intellect (nous), is unique among the soul’s powers, describing it as something divine and immortal.

This intellect is separable, impassible, unmixed… and when separated from the body it is that only which it is, and this alone is immortal and eternal… and without this nothing thinks. (De Anima, Bk. III, Pt. 5)

This power of the intellect is what allows us to move from seeing particular examples to grasping universal truths. The virtues that perfect this power are epistēmē, nous, and sophia.

• Epistēmē (Scientific Knowledge): This is knowledge of necessary truths through logical demonstration (NE 1139b). It is the virtue at work in a Euclidean proof or a scientific syllogism.
• Nous (Intuitive Intellect): This is the direct, intuitive grasp of the first principles from which demonstrations begin (NE 1141a). It is the moment of insight, the “seeing” of a self-evident truth that cannot be proven but only understood.
• Sophia (Wisdom): Sophia is the pinnacle of intellectual virtue, the union of nous and epistēmē (NE 1141a). It is the comprehensive understanding of the highest truths, seeing both the foundational principles and the logical conclusions that flow from them. This is the ultimate aim of a classical education: to equip students for the contemplation of ultimate reality.

The Aristotelian Classroom

Aristotle’s answer to the great question of the soul provides us with a fully integrated model for education. Our work is the patient cultivation of the living form, moving students up the ladder of their own God-given capacities.

An Aristotelian classroom begins with rich sensory experience, recognizing the body as the foundation of learning. It proceeds through disciplined apprenticeship to form the virtues of making (technê) and acting (phronēsis). Finally, it guides the student in the joyful work of demonstration (epistēmē) and the profound act of contemplation (nous), all in the service of wisdom (sophia), which finds its ultimate fulfillment in the knowledge and love of God.

References

Adler, Mortimer J. “Chapter 85: Soul.” The Great Books of the Western World, vol. 3: The Great Ideas II. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

Aristotle. De Anima. Translated by J.A. Smith. The Internet Classics Archive. Accessed August 26, 2025. https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.mb.txt.

Shields, Christopher. “Aristotle’s Psychology.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2024 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2024/entries/aristotle-psychology/.

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In this series on Slow Productivity in School, we’ve been exploring the paradox of festina lente (“hasten slowly”). When it comes to the work of learning, sometimes you must go slow to go fast. Or, perhaps more accurately, you must slow down to be truly productive. Taking our cues from Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout, we are applying his three principles for slow productivity to our teaching practices in classical Christian schools (1. Do Fewer Things, 2. Work at a Natural Pace, 3. Obsess Over Quality). 

After first diagnosing the problem of pseudo-productivity in modern schools, analogous to the hustle culture of modern work environments, we then explored the well-known Latin phrase multum non multa (“much not many things”) under the principle of doing fewer things. The key takeaway is that rather than cutting down on “subjects” to the bare essentials, this principle really applies best to the number and quality of “assignments.” Students in our classical Christian schools can read and study widely without suffering through busywork. Second, we explored the need to work at a natural pace as an explanation of how we can recover school as scholé or leisure. The point is that there are rhythms to ideal learning and racing through worksheets and covering pages of textbooks like the wind isn’t necessarily the best for deep understanding and long term retention.

In this final article, we’re focusing on the principle that we might call the main goal of it all: “Obsess over quality.”  In a way, doing fewer things and working at a natural pace are pointless if they don’t lead to an increased focus on quality. At the beginning we set out the idea that what really lurks behind the phrase multum non multa is a prioritization of depth over breadth and quality over quantity. Slowness is not an end in itself but is meant to serve the real or genuine productivity. Newport describes this final principle of obsessing over quality this way:

“Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term” (173). 

For those of us who work in classical Christian schools, as I have argued elsewhere (see Rethinking the Purpose of Education), the true purpose of our educational efforts should be the cultivation of moral, spiritual, and intellectual virtues in our students. If that is the case, then haste can be the enemy of progress. Instead, as master craftsmen, we teachers and educators need to take the necessary time to cultivate mastery in our students. Slipshod, shoddy work, rushed through quickly, without attention to the details and to a host of minor improvements necessary for quality do not “move the needle.” 

There is a real mental shift that must occur here for many of us. We have had the rat-race of school so ingrained in our psyche, that we feel like we are wasting time if we’re not completing a worksheet or a powerpoint buzzer quiz every 20 min. Our media-saturated world too has reduced our attention span and given us ADD for the type of focused effort that actually forges increased quality.

Another culprit to our busyness of attitude is the knowledge-transfer vision of education, as opposed to the traditional liberal arts approach. We tend to envision the main part of education as a process of information download, rather than students developing mastery in handling certain well-worn tools. When we view K-12 education instead through the lens of helping students hone their artistry in the liberal arts, then we will focus more on the students producing high quality interpretations, arguments, and persuasive compositions. 

Students would then develop an artist’s eye for quality and mastery in the creative productions of the liberal arts, including of course in math and science. This focus then multiplies labor by making their own independent reading and thinking that much more effective. They are then able to hasten along the path of lifelong learning with ease, because the way has been smoothed for them by mastering the fundamental skills.

What does this all mean practically for teachers working with students in the classroom? In her book Home Education, Charlotte Mason proposed the habit of perfect execution as a major guiding vision for training young children. She explained,

‘Throw perfection into all you do’ is a counsel upon which a family may be brought up with great advantage. We English, as a nation, think too much of persons, and too little of things, work, execution. Our children are allowed to make their figures or their letters, their stitches, their dolls’ clothes, their small carpentry, anyhow, with the notion that they will do better by-and-by. Other nations–the Germans and the French, for instance–look at the question philosophically, and know that if children get the habit of turning out imperfect work, the men and women will undoubtedly keep that habit up. I remember being delighted with the work of a class of about forty children, of six and seven, in an elementary school at Heidelberg. They were doing a writing lesson, accompanied by a good deal of oral teaching from a master, who wrote each word on the blackboard. By-and-by the slates were shown, and I did not observe one faulty or irregular letter on the whole forty slates. (110-111)

If what Mason says was true of Victorian England, how much more would she note “the Habit of turning out Imperfect Work” in 21st century America. Her example demonstrates that this feature is to a large extent cultural, and may have to do with our Rousseauian focus on children’s “personality” and “developmental readiness.” Our teachers may make excuses for failing to hold out the standard for careful execution of work based on how large the class is (“I simply can’t get around to all sixteen students!”), but this German class of forty puts us to shame.

To be fair, Mason does have a category for setting the bar too high for students. It is possible to obsess over the wrong details or expect a type of detailed quality that is not yet attainable by a young novice. Mason explains, 

No work should be given to a child that he cannot execute perfectly, and then perfection should be required from him as a matter of course. For instance, he is set to do a copy of strokes, and is allowed to show a slateful at all sorts of slopes and all sorts of intervals; his moral sense is vitiated, his eye is injured. Set him six strokes to copy; let him, not bring a slateful, but six perfect strokes, at regular distances and at regular slopes. If he produces a faulty pair, get him to point out the fault, and persevere until he has produced his task; if he does not do it to-day, let him go on to-morrow and the next day, and when the six perfect strokes appear, let it be an occasion of triumph. So with the little tasks of painting, drawing or construction he sets himself–let everything he does be well done. An unsteady house of cards is a thing to be ashamed of. (111)

It can be seen from this that Mason endorses explicitly the principles of doing fewer things at a natural pace, in order to enable an obsession over quality. Clearly she wants students to internalize the mindset of mastery from an early age. 

It’s important to clarify that this is not the sort of perfectionism that expects to never make mistakes in the first place. She is endorsing rather the type of growth mindset that believes that every child can produce high quality and accurate work, if they are given the time and held accountable for doing so. This mindset actually functions to empower the student and enable progress. Filling a slate with incorrect strokes does not improve a student’s handwriting, but tends to solidify bad habits. As my gymnastics coach drill in to us when we were young, “Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect.” 

This paradoxical focus on perfection by actively attending to and correcting mistakes is characteristic of what Daniel Coyle calls deep practice. As he explains, “struggling in certain targeted ways–operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes–makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you’re forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them–as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go–end up making you swift and graceful without you realizing it” (The Talent Code, 18). This provides a helpful counter to a misunderstanding of Mason’s insistence that “no work should be given to a child that he cannot execute perfectly,” which might lead us to ease the way too much and avoid appropriate challenges. We have to read in to her version of “cannot” a much stronger belief in the capability of children than we tend to have.

The practical applications of this habit of perfect execution and obsession over quality are endless and as varied as the nature of the many subjects and arts that we teach. So, instead it might be more helpful to open out our gaze again to all three principles, and provide a series of practical applications to the classroom that fuse a holistic vision for slow productivity in school through 1) doing fewer things, 2) working at a natural pace, and 3) obsessing over quality.

Practical Applications of Slow Productivity in School

First, emphasize deep engagement with material over superficial coverage. This will involve a reduced workload, time for contemplation, and the ability to marinate in the knowledge and skills they are gaining.

• Reduced Workload: Instead of assigning a vast quantity of assignments to complete, or having students race through reading the textbook at home, teachers should prioritize fewer, more substantial readings, projects, and discussions. This reduced workload will allow students to delve more deeply into the material rather than skimming or memorizing for tests.
• Time for Contemplation and Reflection: Working at a natural pace means allowing sufficient time for students to truly wrestle with ideas, formulate their own thoughts, and engage in meaningful discussions, rather than rushing from one topic to the next. This leisurely approach coheres with the movement’s emphasis on school as scholé or leisure and the necessary slowness for true contemplation. The time spent discussing and thinking through ideas, even if it includes some rabbit-trails and dead-ends will be time well spent for students making these ideas their own.
• Marinating in Knowledge: Learning isn’t always linear, but has its natural ups and downs, periods of lying fallow and moments for break-throughs. A natural pace acknowledges that some concepts require time to “marinate” in the mind. Teachers should schedule in times of review and moments to pause and revisit challenging texts or ideas over time, allowing for deeper understanding to develop organically.

Second, in agreement with a mastery mindset focus on artistry, teachers should encourage Deep Practice with a focus on correcting mistakes to develop mastery. This will involve favoring perfect execution over speed, process-oriented learning, and slow reading with commonplacing.

• Perfect Execution Over Speed: Instead of rewarding quick completion, focus on mastery of skills and concepts. This might mean allowing students to re-do assignments until they achieve a certain level of understanding, or providing ample practice opportunities without the pressure of a ticking clock. It’s important to remember that education is a not a one-size-fits all: one student may need to repeat the same assignment until it is correct, while other students have gone on to the next. A misplaced emphasis on “fairness” can get in the way of the real goal of coaching each student to mastery.
• Process-Oriented Learning: Emphasize the learning process itself, including research, careful thinking, revision, and refinement, rather than just the final product. Ironically, this aligns with the “obsess over quality” principle. It’s not that the end destination doesn’t matter, but when we let students focus on just getting an assignment done, rather than getting it right, quality gets lost. When we’re willing to linger in the details with a student, then the genuine questions and focus on accuracy make the whole experience that much more meaningful to student and teacher alike.
• Slow Reading and Commonplacing: Encourage students to engage in “slow reading” of classic texts, marking up pages (when possible), asking questions, copying out quotations into a Commonplace Notebook, and truly grappling with the author’s arguments and literary artistry, rather than speed-reading for information. This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of how many Great Books you’re actually trying to get through in that course. At the same time, it’s important to remember that it is possible to go too slow, and so every delay should be qualitatively meaningful. Festina lente (“hasten slowly”) can help the teacher navigate this dance.

Third, we should protect unscheduled time for intellectual play and the pursuit of meaningful interests. There is something to be said for us trying to accomplish too much in school and that backfiring, as students become overly dependent on the structure of school for their ongoing learning. This will look like preserving time for independent exploration both at school and at home and reducing the homework burden by prioritizing the completion of quality work at school:

• Time for Independent Exploration: A natural pace includes periods of less structured time for students. Students need unscheduled time for independent reading, creative pursuits, exploring ideas that pique their interest, and simply thinking without a specific assignment. The idea that “Every minute matters” (popularized by Doug Lemov in Teach Like a Champion) is not without merits, but it depends on the culture into which it is speaking. In low-achieving communities it might bring helpful discipline, but in suburbia with our overscheduled, oversaturated lives, this approach can make children high-strung. Teachers shouldn’t feel the need to cram every minute of every school day but should embrace a proper sense of leisure. This will help to foster the type of genuine curiosity and intellectual growth in students that is not solely dependent on the teacher.
• Reduced Homework Burden: A slow productivity approach means that we should re-evaluate our homework policies and aim for fewer, more meaningful assignments that take a longer time to complete. Our goal should be to reinforce learning rather than simply creating busywork. Also, many of the challenging assignments that we would give them, like writing assignments, should be started in class with the teacher walking around to assist, double check for errors in spelling, punctuation, proper formation of cursive letters, etc. Even in the upper grades a return to this sort of artistic writing process under the guidance of a teacher can help avoid issues with plagiarism and AI-dependence that are only becoming more and more prevalent in our age.

Finally, a focus on slow productivity in school should foster a culture of patient endurance rather than an obsession with a quick fix and short-term results. This will look like embracing the long-term vision of classical education, recognizing that some of the best growth in students occurs over the course of years rather than months, and therefore fostering resilience and grit in students and parents alike:

• Long-Term Vision: Classical education plays out as a long game, building a strong foundation over many years. A natural pace reinforces the idea that significant intellectual growth is a marathon, not a sprint. Slow productivity sees the results of genuine accomplishment over the course of the whole K-12 sequence, rather than week, month or quarter of the school year. This long-term vision helps us sit patiently in the here and now and focus on mastery of the basics in a given area where a student struggles, rather than giving up or opting out.
• Resilience and Grit: By allowing for a natural pace, students learn that challenges take time to overcome and that persistence, not frantic effort, leads to genuine accomplishment. The insistence on facing our mistakes and learning from them, rather than fleeing to easier tasks, develops a resilient attitude that will serve them well for life. Ultimately, a slow productivity mindset makes kids gritty, while also giving them adequate recovery time to maintain the long trek of their education.

I hope you enjoyed the Slow Productivity in School series. I’m planning a webinar and consulting pathway to follow up on these ideas and help your teachers apply multum non multa, festina lente and the habit of perfect execution or coaching in deep practice in your school.

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I recently read Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport, which was fascinating for its practical application of this principle to the pseudo-productivity so common in our working world today. Emails, app channels, meetings, and looking busy dominate the landscape of office work, to the detriment, all too often, of not only true productivity, but also appropriate margin and work-life balance. While I found the book personally helpful and encouraging for school administration, I was also struck by the phrase “slow productivity” and its helpfulness for conveying the classical approach to our students’ work in school. 

In this series of short articles, I want to unpack Cal Newport’s principles for slow productivity and apply them, instead, to pedagogy at a K-12 classical school. My thesis is that teachers should guide students in the kind of slow productivity in school that optimizes durable learning and cultivates the intellectual virtues. But first we should uncover the analogous problem to our modern office woes. 

Like the office, too often modern educators are fooled by various types of pseudo-productivity that end up undercutting the goals of our educational programs. Time is filled up with “busywork” for students, we race through books regardless of their value for deep learning, and plan “learning activities” that actually undercut the development of genuine intellectual virtues while favoring ease of implementation for student and teacher alike. Minutes and hours crammed with edutainment (I can’t believe that’s even a word…) mirror the hustle and bustle of the office, with little to show for all this supposed productivity. 

What is going wrong here in educational terms? We are focused less on the quality of student work, than on the quantity of filling time with easy-to-apply learning activities. Worksheets, coloring sheets, entertaining educational videos, and flashy, lowest-common-denominator “literature” are filling up the precious educational hours of our students. The inevitable outcome of such fast and easy productivity is low quality and low expectations. What is lost on many modern educators is how all this twaddle and twaddling activities (I am borrowing and reapplying Charlotte Mason’s preferred term for poor quality, childish reading material…) is harming the development of our children. 

When we compare the educational value of, say, a student writing a paragraph or two in cursive of their own volition and drawn from their own memory of a rich text they have read, with any of the aforementioned activities, which are so common in modern education, we can see how much of modern education is best classified as pseudo-productivity. Considered from the vantage point of student attainment, filling out single word answers in a pre-packaged worksheet doesn’t hold a candle to the intellectual virtues honed and developed by, for instance, a written narration. Why is it that we settle for pseudo productivity at school? 

There are likely multiple culprits, but one of them has a similar origin to the historical backdrop of knowledge work pseudo-productivity that Newport describes in his book: the factory mindset. The idea of “productivity” itself rings of the revolution in efficiency brought about in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. As Newport explains, 

There was, of course, a well-known human cost to this emphasis on measurable improvement. Working on an assembly line is repetitive and boring, and the push for individuals to be more efficient in every action creates conditions that promote injury and exhaustion. But the ability for productivity to generate astonishing economic growth in these sectors swept aside most such concerns. (17-18)

Efficiency experts like Frederick Winslow Taylor applied this science in factory settings to great effect. Such gains captured the imagination of the world, including managers of knowledge workers and educational leaders and curriculum designers. The problem is that assessing or judging quality ended up being so much trickier in the knowledge and learning sectors.

This lure of efficiency is part of why Bloom’s Taxonomy often ends up backfiring in a management-centered approach to education. The efficiency of systems of grading, quick completion of “assignments” and tying “learning activities” to standards crowd out the need for careful judgment and high standards. Even if Bloom’s Taxonomy was intended to push educators toward more complex cognitive skills on the hierarchy, it is nevertheless possible to make students perform an easy or shallow “synthesis” task, as it is a knowledge task. Narration as a complex and multifaceted “learning activity” might seem to rank as merely a knowledge task, but it engages the creativity, memory and artistry of the student, while solidifying their understanding of the new story or history they encountered. 

Bloom’s Taxonomy has tried to treat knowledge work in school, just like steps in an assembly line. One part at a time, building up to higher levels of complexity. The only problem is that the brain and knowledge work, simply do not work best like that; isolating bits of information and steps in tasks to their lowest or most basic level (except at the very beginning of something new) can tend to stereotype and bore the minds of our students. They race through “material” without really learning or understanding it, and quickly forget the little that they have learned. Slow productivity in school is the only real productivity.

Cal Newport defines the solution to pseudo-productvity as slow productivity, explaining it as 

“A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles:

1. Do fewer things.
2. Work at a natural pace.
3. Obsess over quality.” (41)

In the following articles of this series, we’ll unpack each of these three principles and see how they might apply to student work in school. In the meantime, share in the comments section how you have seen pseudo-productivity invading modern schooling, as well as any ideas or proven methods for ensuring student work is deep and of high quality.

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We must aim at graduating practically wise young men and women, if we are to restore the moral, intellectual and spiritual virtues as the proper ends or goals of education. Instead of limiting education to Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive domain objectives, we should embrace a baptized prudence.

Aristotle’s prudence has its limits, however, as well as its transcendence. Like artistry, prudence itself is not enough for the Christian educator, but it can participate in or integrate with the other goals of education. In this article we will attempt to map out those limits of prudence and also address the possibilities of prudence for transcending into higher realities. To continue our metaphor of the head, heart and hands from earlier in this series, we have noted that the artistry of the hands is not enough, but we must enter into the deeper realms of the heart (i.e. prudence); in a similar fashion, the heart itself will, on its own, come up short. After all, “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick,” according to Jeremiah (17:6 ESV). 

The Limits of Perfect Prudence and Self-Interest

This Christian view of the heart’s deceitfulness is not simply a commentary on how hard it is for a person to develop genuine prudence, the equivalent of an Aristotelian claim for its rarity, “A man of practical wisdom, who can find?” Instead, it speaks to the thoroughgoing corruption of human prudence itself. Let me explain what I mean. Given Aristotle’s analysis, prudence consists of fear and hope undergirded by natural self-love. Definitionally prudence aims at my own personal human happiness. Since that requires good friends in a polis or city-state involving specialization to provide the good things of life, as well as the public justice of reciprocity and law-abiding citizens, then my own interest coincides with the manifestation of the moral virtues. 

However, Aristotle does not sufficiently address the question posed by the biblical book of Job, why good conduct should remain prudent if it no longer leads to personal eudaimonia. The Satanic claim in the book of Job is that a prudent form of righteousness devolves ultimately into mere self-interest, and when tested it amounts to no more than punishable wickedness. In fact, dependent as it is on an accurate assessment of the particular realities of human life, Aristotelian prudence operates within an immanent frame of reference, rather than a transcendent one, to use the terms of Charles Taylor (see A Secular Age). 

While Aristotle maintains an under-the-sun perspective on the correspondence between righteousness and earthly reward, the book of Job unveils a transcendent perspective held roughly in common with Plato, Aristotle’s predecessor, who likely struggled with the injustice of Socrates’ execution in a way that Aristotle did not. While the issue addressed by Plato’s Republic was first and foremost justice rather than practical wisdom, the character of Socrates at least took up the extreme objection of the ring of Gyges. Injustice becomes more prudent than justice if a man has the capability of getting away with it, pictured well by a ring of invisibility. Absolute power, and with it absolute prudence, corrupts absolutely. And on the other hand, when given the appearance of injustice, “the just man will have to endure the lash, the rack, chains, [362a] the branding-iron in his eyes, and finally, after every extremity of suffering, he will be crucified, and so will learn his lesson that not to be but to seem just is what we ought to desire” (361e-362a). 

Christians have seen in this passage of Plato a proto-evangelion to the Greeks; in addition to the verbal and situational similarity to the passion of the Christ, even more impressive might be its intended effect: to chasten the limits of a worldly Greek wisdom. As the apostle to the Gentiles would put it about four centuries later, “So then Jews ask for signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach a crucified Messiah, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles” (1 Cor 1:22-23, orig. trans.). Why is such a proclamation foolish? Because who would follow a leader so lacking in practical and political wisdom, that he would end up a public failure, executed as a lowly criminal! Plato’s mysterious and extended discourse in the Republic is intended to provide a mystical as well as rational answer to the dilemma of righteousness and self-interest. The answer ultimately becomes dependent on mythical tales of the afterlife and revelatory accounts of the soul like the myth of Er. In this way, Plato’s wisdom embraces a transcendence similar to Christianity but which is lacking in Aristotle. 

Aristotle’s definitional argument against this involves the claim that it is mere cleverness, and not practical wisdom which can manipulate ends in a morally neutral or corrupt manner. Prudence itself caps all the virtues and makes them true or genuine: “Therefore, as in the part of us which forms opinions there are two types, cleverness and practical wisdom, so too in the moral part there are two types, natural virtue and virtue in the strict sense, and of these the latter involves practical wisdom” (VI.13). Not even natural virtues, or mere propensities towards the right way of living or doing something qualify, but only the wholeness of the moral excellences governed by reasoned practical wisdom: “It is clear, then, from what has been said, that it is not possible to be good in the strict sense without practical wisdom, nor practically wise without moral virtue.”

In one sense, we could rightly criticize Aristotle for cooking the books here. If the definition of the correct mark for any of the moral virtues amounts to what the prudent man would choose, how do we actually know the difference between cleverness and practical wisdom, since the clever man might suppose himself to be practicing all the virtues? And we, lacking in full prudence, have little basis on which to judge the clever man for his Machiavellian prudence and political artistry. Aristotle does not give us hope of a transcendent frame of reference from which to call into question the machinations of our prudential self-interest. We have entered a circularity of reasoning; he may in fact describe the truth of the matter, but that does not enable a corrupt human person to actually enter into the loop of perfect virtue, governed by practical wisdom.

The Limitations of Human Calculation and Control

Aristotle would likely object to this challenge by stating that we are looking for the wrong sort of precision in his ethics, when we aim at a circular perfection of virtues (see Nic. Ethics I.3). The point is to give us enough of a sense to be getting on with as we take aim at various human goods. Life isn’t perfect, choices are complex, and chance or luck must be given its due in human affairs. In this way, Aristotle would prefer to emphasize a different limit of prudence, not the dilemma of self-interest, but the limitations of human calculation and control in a complex universe.

According to Herodotus, the wise man Solon famously questioned King Croessus’ claim on happiness, given that the gods are temperamental and a man’s fortune’s can quickly turn from better to worse or vice versa. In book I ch. 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle acknowledges the role of chance in contributing to happiness. While he ultimately disagrees with the conclusion of Solon, that we should only pronounce happiness upon an individual when we’ve seen the end of their life, nevertheless he acknowledges the limits of control available to the prudent individual:

Now many events happen by chance, and events different in importance; small pieces of good fortune or of its opposite clearly do not weigh down the scales of life one way or the other, but a multitude of great events if they turn out well will make life more blessed (for not only are they themselves such as to add beauty to life, but the way a man deals with them may be noble and good), while if they turn out ill they crush and maim blessedness; for they both bring pain with them and hinder many activities. Yet even in these nobility shines through, when a man bears with resignation many great misfortunes, not through insensibility to pain but through nobility and greatness of soul. (Rev. Oxford Trans., 1739)

Aristotle’s ultimate conclusion is still that moral and intellectual excellences, as activities, have a staying power in human life that mostly overcomes the changes and chances of fortune. Excellent activities “are more durable because those who are blessed spend their life most readily and most continuously in these,” and therefore the happy man “will be happy throughout his life,” for “he will bear the chances of life most nobly and altogether decorously” (1739). 

We can note that Aristotle’s philosophy does leave room for the fact that even the most perfect prudence does not have all resources available to turn all events to its own good. In fact, we might even say that there is nothing to prevent prudence itself from leading to catastrophic failure. You could make the absolute best decisions with the knowledge available to you and still be undone by circumstances. Aristotle had a proper appreciation for the nature of tragedy; sometimes in this world the great-souled individual can meet with extreme hardship. In such cases, we would do better to appreciate the limits of practical wisdom to bring about human blessings, rather than throw up our hands at the value of prudence at all. In a way, Aristotle anticipates a Stoic “resignation” in the passage quoted above. Epictetus famously taught his disciples that, when kissing their child goodnight, they should call to mind the fact that the one they love is mortal and could die tomorrow. Far from the coldness that Stoics are criticized for, such reflections as “memento mori” (“Remember that you will die”) should increase gratitude and an emotional tenderness, alongside the nobility and decorousness that Aristotle has named. 

Christian Suffering and Purified Prudence

Christians, likewise, endorse a submission to providence that chastens and humbles those proud of their own prudential reasoning. Job’s response to his third grand misfortune stands as a model for Christian suffering: “Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. And he said, ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’” (Job 1:20-21 ESV). The audience understands from the transcendent visions of the heavenly court that Job’s suffering comes because of a cosmic test posed by the adversary, but Job himself is left none the wiser for why his wise and righteous life has fallen short of its natural reward. Nevertheless, his worshipful submission to a hard providence is genuine and complete, even if he ends up answering the accusations of his “friends” by challenging the justice of God. Job is never given an answer, and so the implicit conclusion of the book is that the faithful must embrace righteous suffering regardless of prudential reward.

We have already had occasion to reference Jesus’ endorsement of a baptized prudence, “Be wise [phronemoi] as serpents but innocent as doves” (Matt 10:16b). But the context is instructive for the current topic. Christian prudence must uniquely transcend self-interest in a world that is in violent opposition to the gospel. The chapter begins with the twelve apostles’ particular mission to cast out demons, heal the sick and proclaim the kingdom of God, but the nature of Jesus’ instructions in the chapter seems intended to characterize the Christian mission throughout the church age. Jesus endorses a unique sort of anti-prudence in terms of the disciples’ preparation for the journey: “Acquire no gold or silver or copper for your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics or sandals or a staff, for the laborer deserves his food” (Matt 10:9-10). 

The disciples are sent out “as sheep in the midst of wolves” (10:16a), innocent victims intentionally led forth to be falsely accused, flogged, dragged before authorities, hated by all and delivered over to death. Jesus is going to put the dilemma of Plato’s Republic and Job on display on a grand scale with the Christian apostles and martyrs. As the apostle Paul explains, “For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as men sentenced to death, for we have become a spectacle to the cosmos, both to angels and men” (1 Cor 4:9). Christian prudence is transformed by faith and hope to be “sorrowful yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor 6:10). Christian students become like the teacher Jesus, who is hated and persecuted by the world (Matt 10:24-25). In so doing they deliberately choose to accept less than earthly happiness for the sake of transcendent happiness. They are commanded, “Deliberate about [phroneite] the things above, not earthly things. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:2; orig. trans.). They fear the God who controls eternal destinies over human authorities and worldly rewards (see Matt 10:26-33). This wisdom is the substance of faith itself, which sees the unseen, and it effects a remarkable transformation on the nature of prudence.

Christian prudence is, at the end of the day, so remarkable that it hardly looks like prudence at all, when gazed on from this angle. And yet there is a sort of rational calculation to it. The introduction of eternal judgment, and therefore the heightened stakes of an eternal weight of glory or misery, radically upends the rational calculation of human goods. This enlightened prudence dictates not only the outcome of Pascal’s wager (Belief in God is the only rationally self-interested course of action, given the possibilities of heaven and hell.), but also a life of radical self-sacrifice. The pearl of great price of eternal happiness claims from us any cost, any sacrifice in earthly goods. As Jim Elliott, the martyred Christian missionary to Quechua Indians of Ecuador, famously wrote in his journal on Oct 28, 1949: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” 

Christianity thus resolved the corruption of self-interested prudence through the call to take up our individual cross and follow Christ, through personal suffering to infinite joy beyond. In this context the golden rule to do unto others as we would have them do unto us can actually find fulfillment, because a dove-like hope has quieted the serpent of self-interest. Prudence is transcended but it remains even while swallowed up in faith, hope, and love. After all, the “unblushing promises of reward” in the New Testament (to quote Lewis’ “Weight of Glory”) prevent us from claiming unselfishness as a virtue in itself. The fear and hope inbred through natural self-love are not abandoned but grow up into full manhood, as it were. Christians do not throw out prudence entirely, but embrace a baptized and purified prudence of faith, hope and love.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov 9:10), but in the transformation of wisdom into perfect love, fear becomes faith and only prudential love remains (see 1 John 4:17-18). As St. Paul concludes,

Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. (1 Cor. 13:8-12)

The Christian, then, cannot agree with Aristotle that the philosophic wisdom or sophia characterized by knowledge and comprehension is the highest intellectual virtue. For him, the Unmoved Mover sits in pure deistic contemplation and therefore non-acting philosophic wisdom is crowned king of the intellectual virtues. The Christian worships a God whose steadfast love endures forever, who in His very being is love, who is Eternal Act. And so, not only is our partial knowledge dwarfed by his perfect perception of all things, knowledge itself passes away in prudential love, as we come face to face with the living, acting God. 

Prudence and the Other Intellectual Virtues

Of course, such theological reflections do not negate the way in which intuition, scientific knowledge and philosophic wisdom properly transcend practical wisdom. We are simply acknowledging that the theological virtues of faith, hope and love uniquely draw up the life of prudence into themselves, and in this way lead prudence beyond and above the intellectual virtues of the head. The heart transcends the head in the realm of the spirit. But it is not less true to remark on the ways that the head stands above the heart. The classical educational endeavor itself requires this. Have I not before remarked on the joy of learning for its own sake? 

The utilitarian and practical perspective on schooling and learning tends toward a reductionism that views knowledge simply as power. Prudential learning looks to advantage and endeavors to provide for earthly needs by a course of schooling that will lead to a good job with a good salary. But in the actual course of learning, new loves and affections are found. The beauty of education is that often a study begun for some advantage becomes an end in itself. There is a higher nobility found in the disinterested enjoyment of knowledge for its own sake, and, whatever our theological comments may have seemed to indicate before, this too is a form of love. The love of learning and the love of reality for itself and not merely as a means is part and parcel of full intellectual virtue. This limit and transcendence of practical wisdom occurs naturally and is not a rare mystery beyond our normal experience. Observation and calculation, with a view to the self, almost of its own accord will move a person towards a real encounter with the other as an end in itself. 

Such an experience of prudence transcending into disinterested intuition, knowledge and wisdom is almost proverbial. From thinking of ourselves we become lost in contemplation of curious mysteries. The boy who has gone to collect firewood stops to look at a piece of wood and is mesmerized by the moss growing on it, then the insects crawling about, and his practical task forgotten, he freely spends precious minutes indulging his curiosity. This too is part of a full life engaged in the good things of the created order God has made. And so, we must progress still further up and further in, to account for the full beauty and flowering of human intellectuality. The life of the mind has its own rewards. To these we must turn next in our series on Aristotle’s intellectual virtues.

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Of course, not all resolutions are created equal. There’s a resolution to get in shape by working out more, and then there are The Resolutions of Jonathan Edwards, full of profound thought and purposeful Christian spirituality. Are written goals and resolutions classical? Should personal goal setting be a deliberate feature in our educational programs? I believe the answer to both questions is yes. There is a rich classical tradition of personal goal setting, especially as it relates to virtue and habit development. Helping our students cast a positive vision for their own personal growth and detail the steps they can take toward their own development is a powerful and undervalued lever in the classical, Christian educator’s hands.

Classical Goal Setting

To demonstrate that resolutions and goal setting are classical, we need look no further than the Stoic philosophers. Their handbooks and meditations are full of the stuff of resolutions. Classical goal setting might be said to differ from many modern New Year’s resolutions in its overarching focus on character as the outcome rather than money, beauty or career. Living a good life, developing areté or virtue, and serving God and neighbor better should be the aim of a classical and Christian set of resolutions. This is in contrast to goals centered merely on increased discipline to promote personal fulfillment. 

At the same time, even goals with a narrow focus tend to work, or at least substantially increase the likelihood that a person will hit their goal. The reason why is articulated well by Aristotle. It is as simple and profound as saying that those who have a clear target are much more likely to hit it:

If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good. Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right? If so, we must try in outline at least, to determine what it is, and of which of the sciences or capacities it is the object.

Aristotle, Ethics and Poetics (Veritas Press: 2019), 10 

Aristotle believes the chief good is eudaimonia, happiness or, we might say, personal fulfillment. We have already had occasion to modify Aristotle’s endorsement of happiness to suit the transcendent frame of a Christian worldview in the opening foray into a series on Aristotle’s intellectual virtues (see “Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education”). We can merely note for our purposes here that Aristotle’s metaphor of archers having a goal or target is incredibly helpful. 

In life we all make choices. In fact, we all deliberate about what is good for ourselves. Having in mind the ultimate goal that we are aiming at will necessarily clarify the mechanics involved in taking a successful shot. Of course, here Aristotle is showing how our life is not an infinite regression of goods that are merely useful for some other good. Classical goal setting does not settle for the immediate desired end but pushes its participants to ask why. Why do you want to go to the gym? Why do you want to be more physically fit? Why do you want to have more energy and vibrancy as well as look better? For Aristotle, these questions lead up and out to his big picture vision of eudaimonia and the good life. 

This questioning and clarification process helps sort our immediate wants from bigger goals and our future vision. It also makes classical goal setting more effective, because in the process we are also sorting out our various priorities and connecting our short term goals and objectives to our ultimate telos and vision of human flourishing. The clarity achieved will then increase motivation to stick to a new habit or practice in spite of obstacles. If our goals are connected to a lesser vision, which, say, identifies human pleasure as the end-all-be-all, the misguided vision of happiness that Aristotle says most human beings operate with, then we will be easily led astray from our goal of regular exercise when the pain increases and the Siren song of some other pleasure is calling our name (read Educating for Self-Control, Part 1: A Lost Christian Virtue).

Modern Research on Goal Setting

Similarly modern research has shown that there are better and worse ways to set goals. Brian Johnson explains the importance of imagining both a positive future vision and the presence of obstacles to making that vision a reality. He draws from the research of Rick Snyder in his book The Psychology of Hope to detail the need for not only goals, but a sense of agency and multiple pathways (i.e. plans B, C, D, etc.) to get there (Areté: Activate Your Heroic Potential, Heroic Blackstone: 2023; 88-89). Genuine hope distinguishes itself from mere wish by involving both a sense that I can personally contribute in some way toward a better future and the realism that struggle, failure and the need to try-try-again will be part of that process.

Johnson also draws from the work of Gabriele Oettingen to much the same effect (90-91). In her book Rethinking Positive Thinking Oettingen uses the acronym WOOP to delineate the most effective set of steps to turn resolutions into reality: Wish, Outcome, Obstacles, Plan. Each step should be written down and articulated. A wish for the future must be connected to the overall purpose or vision of the good life (think Aristotle’s eudaimonia). Obstacles must be anticipated with some plans or “implementation intentions” for how to deal with them. This process helps us stick to the vision when the rubber of good intentions meets the road of reality. 

Jordan Peterson, the now famous Canadian Psychologist and author of 12 Rules for Life, has independently worked out something similar in the form of his Future Authoring program:

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, decided to ask his students to sit down and write about their ideal future. They were asked to specifically describe the type of person they wanted to be, the skills they wanted to attain, and the relationships they wanted to have, among other things. (see Self Authoring – Future Authoring)

Notice that writing out the “ideal future” constitutes the major element in this process. From public lectures we know that Peterson’s Future Authoring program also involves imagining a negative picture as well of what the hellish version of the self would be if it went down a dark path instead. 

(Read Patrick’s series on Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: Rules for Schools?, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.)

In addition, like the work of Snyder and Oettingen, Peterson’s process also involves getting down into the nitty gritty of daily habits and potential obstacles. It also has the support of research studies to demonstrate its effectiveness (see Self Authoring – Research). For instance, a single intensive goal setting session significantly improved the GPA of undergraduate students who were struggling academically within a semester (see Hirsh and Peterson, “Setting, Elaborating, and Reflecting on Personal Goals Improves Academic Performance,” 260). The research is clear, despite the low success rate of New Year’s resolutions. Goal setting in a detailed way with written goals and articulated obstacles has been shown to be incredibly effective. 

Applying Goal Setting to Education

The study cited above makes the application of goal setting to education obvious in one sense. It can be used powerfully as an intervention for students who are struggling academically. This should not be overlooked in our K-12 classical Christian schools and homeschools. Too often we resort to lecturing a student about what they should do or not do in order to improve their academic performance. Part of why this does not work is because it doesn’t appropriately harness a student’s autonomy or will, in Charlotte Mason’s terms. 

Sometimes we are tempted to think of habit training as something we do to a student, rather than something we do with a student. But Charlotte Mason is clear that a student must own his or her own character development, otherwise it is a mere veneer: 

We who teach should make it clear to ourselves that our aim in education is less conduct than character; conduct may be arrived at, as we have seen, by indirect routes, but it is of value to the world only as it has its source in character…. What we do with the will we describe as voluntary. What we do without the conscious action of will is involuntary. The will has only one mode of action, its function is to ‘choose,’ and with every choice we make we grow in force of character. (vol. 6, p. 129)

A goal setting process allows an individual student to make their own assessment of their future vision, their obstacles, and the pathways forward. The student then choses to follow the positive goals that they set for themselves. The voluntary and personal nature of this process make it ideal for developing character. 

Now we must add in to this process the classical goal setting features we discussed before. We should direct them in their resolutions not just toward improving academic performance or an exercising habit but their ultimate purpose from a Christian perspective and how their immediate goals relate not only to their personal fulfillment but also to the glory of God and their salvation in Christ. Christian classical goal setting should not only WOOP (Wish-Outcome-Obstacles-Plan), it should do it Jonathan Edwards style. 

What does this look like in our education settings? The first and most obvious note is that a classical goal setting exercise should most likely not be an assignment with a grade. The tang of artificiality and forced reflection might undercut the autonomy and will of the student. It is important to have times and seasons set apart perhaps at the start of the year and the beginning of a new quarter or semester, or even a unit in a course, where students are given the opportunity to reflect in writing on their own learning and progress, as well as their ultimate goals and personal growth. I have conducted a writing session similar to the future authoring prompts for students during an Upper School student orientation time. Students were told that what they wrote would not be collected or graded and were encouraged to reflect seriously and purposefully on their own future vision of themselves and their goals for the year. 

In some classes and courses, specific virtues and vices can be used as prompts or options to articulate their own assessment of themselves. The classical and Christian content of history, literature and biblical texts can be helpfully applied in a meditation journal, where students regularly react personally to questions that ask them to apply the examples and thoughts of these subjects to themselves. Most of all, we can conclude that the development of character and specifically the intellectual virtue of prudence or practical wisdom hinge on these sorts of practices. Prudence involves a person deliberating about the real decisions they are making on a daily basis in light of a future vision of flourishing. Goal setting and resolutions are necessary part of that process. In order to turn out men and women of prudence we should carve out periodic class time for intentional reflection regarding personal development.

A series entitled “Counsels of the Wise” explores and applies the intellectual virtue of prudence or practical wisdom (Greek: phronesis):

1. Counsels of the Wise, Part 1: Foundations of Christian Prudence
2. Counsels of the Wise, Part 2: Why Reviving Moral Philosophy Is Not Enough
3. Counsels of the Wise, Part 3: The Practical Nature of Prudence
4. Counsels of the Wise, Part 4: Preliminary Instruction in Prudence
5. Counsels of the Wise, Part 5: Principles and Practice, Examples and Discipline
6. Counsels of the Wise, Part 6: A Pedagogy of Prudence
7. Counsels of the Wise, Part 7: Leadership, Liberal Arts, and Prudence
8. Counsels of the Wise, Part 8: Aiming at the Intermediate or Aristotle’s Moral Virtues

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We’ve also explored how the underpinnings of prudence are instilled in the young through practice according to principles, examples of good character, and appropriate discipline. Prudence itself can then flower into fully blooming rationality through a pedagogy of dialectic, rhetoric, and ethical inquiry. Students who have had their “powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Heb 5:14 ESV) will then be equipped to live virtuous and prudent lives. And if they add some measure of political, managerial or leadership wisdom to their personal prudence, these graduates might just lead their communities and the culture at large in a wiser direction.

But readers familiar with Aristotle, whether from a college philosophy class or an inspiring YouTube video, may be left wondering, “What about the virtues themselves? What about Aristotle’s famous mean?” Today were going strengthen the connection between Head and Heart by describing how the beginnings of prudence can help a person develop the moral virtues through aiming at the mean or intermediate state. Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean is an incredibly helpful aid to self-regulation and self-government. Through understanding and teaching students the nature of virtue and vice, we give them one of the linchpins of prudence that has stood the test of time.

Moral Virtue as a Mean between Excess and Deficiency

What does Aristotle mean by the “mean” or “intermediate” in his discussions of moral virtue? In Book II, chapter 2 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle introduces this idea of the mean through a physical analogy:

First, then, let us consider this, that it is the nature of such things to be destroyed by defect and excess, as we see in the case of strength and of health (for to gain light on things imperceptible we must use the evidence of sensible things); both excessive and defective exercise destroys the strength, and similarly drink or food which is above or below a certain amount destroys the health, while that which is proportionate both produces and increases and preserves it. (Nicomachean Ethics II.2, trans. W. D. Ross, Internet Classics Archive)

“Defect” here refers to a deficiency, when there is too little of something, the excess refers to too much. If you work out too little or too much, both those extremes will have a negative effect on strength, just like eating too little or too much will hurt a person’s health. But an amount that is in between or “proportionate” will have a positive effect. That right amount is the virtuous mean or intermediate. Aristotle then applies this principle to two common virtues: 

So too is it, then, in the case of temperance and courage and the other virtues. For the man who flies from and fears everything and does not stand his ground against anything becomes a coward, and the man who fears nothing at all but goes to meet every danger becomes rash; and similarly the man who indulges in every pleasure and abstains from none becomes self-indulgent, while the man who shuns every pleasure, as boors do, becomes in a way insensible; temperance and courage, then, are destroyed by excess and defect, and preserved by the mean. (Nicomachean Ethics II.2, trans. W. D. Ross, Internet Classics Archive)

We might summarize Aristotle here by observing that courage is a mean or intermediate state of proportionate fear between cowardice, on the one hand,  and rashness on the other. Courage, as a virtue, then is not simply a passion, like fear, but a state of character, whereby a person has been accustomed to feel fear or confidence at the right sorts of things in the right amounts and at the right time (see Nic Ethics II.5). 

Developing courage over time, then, can be helped by a sort of nascent awareness of our own tendency toward excess or defect in our responses or passions. In the same way, when I become aware that temperance consists in a mean or intermediate state between the excess of too much indulgence pleasures or the wrong sorts in the wrong ways, and insensibility of the deficiency in pleasure, I can learn how to prudently manage my own inclinations to aim nearer the mark. 

Aristotle helpfully remarks that the intermediate or mean of virtue isn’t always halfway between two equal and opposite vices, but is an intermediate “relative to us”: “if ten pounds are too much for a particular person to eat and two too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order six pounds; for this also is perhaps too much for the person who is to take it, or too little- too little for Milo, too much for the beginner in athletic exercises” (Nic Ethics II.6). So in similar fashion to this physical analogy, moral virtue too has 

the quality of aiming at the intermediate… for it is this that is concerned with passions and actions, and in these there is excess, defect, and the intermediate. For instance, both fear and confidence and appetite and anger and pity and in general pleasure and pain may be felt both too much and too little, and in both cases not well; but to feel them at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of virtue. (Nic Ethics II.6)

The intermediate is a helpful concept for understanding virtue because it provides us with the moral categories for avoiding pendulum swinging from one extreme to another. There is a real danger in swinging continually from one vice to another that we must guard ourselves and our students against. Aristotle concludes this thought with the blatant remark that “men are good in but one way, but bad in many” (Nic Ethics II.6), a comment that could have come out of a Christian theology book. “To miss the mark [is] easy, to hit it difficult,” he says, reminding attentive readers of the linguistic origin of the term ‘sin’ in Greek as to miss the mark. Which mark? The intermediate virtue that we should be aiming at!

Aristotle’s Moral Virtues in Prudential Perspective

For those who have paid close attention to this series of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues, it may be that this descent into the details of his theory of moral virtues seems out of place. (Never mind the fact that we’ve already discoursed on the analogy between artistry and morality in our series on Apprenticeship in the Arts….) While I can assure you that we are right on track, or hitting the proper mean as far as I’m concerned, that may convince you less than a deliberate appeal to Aristotle:

Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect; and again it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate. Hence in respect of its substance and the definition which states its essence virtue is a mean, with regard to what is best and right an extreme. (Nic Ethics II.6)

Did you catch it? While we’ve jumped back several chapters from the Nicomachean Ethics Book VI, where Aristotle’s mini-treatise on the five intellectual virtues situates the life of the mind within his broader ethical vision of the good life, still Aristotle’s consistent terminology is at play here. Practical wisdom consists in that rational principle to choose correctly the mean of moral virtue rather than the vices of excess or deficiency. 

What then are some of these Aristotelian virtues, along with their vices of excess and deficiency? It seems obvious that knowing or perceiving the nature of virtue and vice will help the person who is developing prudence to aim correctly. In the case of prudence, we must, says Aristotle, “not only make this general statement, but also apply it to the individual facts,” because the particulars are essential to reasoning about what will make for human flourishing (Nic Ethics II.7). 

The following table has been developed from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, ch. 7, and also Books III-IV, when Aristotle returns to each of these to discuss them in more detail (using mainly Ross’ translation, but with some additions/alterations). Take a moment to look it through and contemplate the Aristotelian mean. 

It is important to note that even Aristotle confessed that the names are not always apparent for either the excess or deficiency. Ambition, for instance, is a challenging virtue and vice because sometimes people call ambition the vice, when someone is too ambitious and sometimes an ambitious person is praised (see IV.4). Aristotle’s conclusion is that the character of moral virtue is “to aim at what is intermediate in passions and in actions”: he has given us the middle way as a target and argued for “moderation in all things.” This claim does not let us off from the hard discipline of virtue; in fact, he states that often there is a more opposed vice, whether for humanity as a whole or for a particular individual, that must be violently striven against. For instance, Aristotle barely even discusses insensibility, since he knows that self-indulgence is the vastly more common flaw (see III.10-12)

On the contrary, most often we must, as in archery practice, aim toward the opposite side of the target, since we see clearly that when we shoot at the bull’s eye, our arrow inevitably strays off to a particular side. As Aristotle explains, 

Hence he who aims at the intermediate must first depart from what is the more contrary to it, as Calypso advises–

Hold the ship out beyond that surf and spray.

For of the extremes one is more erroneous, one less so; therefore, since to hit the mean is hard in the extreme, we must as second best, as people say, take the least of the evils…. But we must consider the things toward which we ourselves also are easily carried away; for some of us tend to one thing, some to another; and this will be recognizable from the pleasure and pain we feel. We must drag ourselves away to the contrary extreme; for we shall get into the intermediate state by drawing well away from error, as people do in straightening sticks that are bent. (II.9)

This involves a knowledge of self and particulars that only the eye of prudence can rightly perceive. And so it is that we encounter the inevitable chicken or the egg syndrome of moral virtue and prudence: both require some measure of the other’s presence even in their first formation. 

A Christian Assessment of Prudential Aim

Christians might initially object to these Aristotelian categories as being unbiblical. Surely Jesus and the apostles do not represent holiness as in every case an intermediate between extremes? Should we really aim at vice rather than virtue in order to straighten ourselves out? We can deal with these objections by first noting that Aristotle is crystal clear that while in one sense the essence of virtue is a mean, “with regard to what is best and right it is an extreme” (II.6). As for whether we should aim at an opposite vice in order to hit the mark of virtue, we need look no further than Jesus’ hyperbolic words in the Sermon on the Mount: 

If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. (Matt 5:29-30 ESV)

I cannot think of a stronger endorsement of aiming at insensibility in order to fix the fatal flaw of intemperance and self-indulgence. Lest we forget, the term ‘self-control’ used in the New Testament derived from the Aristotelian and Stoic tradition of reflection. 

We must admit that the idea of proper pride as a sort of crown of the virtues strikes against the heart of the New Testament’s overwhelming endorsement of humility. Part of this is easily accounted for based on a different view of the facts of the human situation. In Christian theology, human beings are poor and needy sinners standing by nature under the judgment of a holy God. In such a context humility before God and fellow image-bearers is the only right disposition. Still, even Christians can resonate appropriately with some aspects of Aristotle’s description of the man of proper pride, as characteristic of Jesus at least, if not the Christian martyr:

Again, it is characteristic of the proud man not to aim at the things commonly held in honour, or the things in which others excel…. He must also be open in his hate and in his love (for to conceal one’s feelings is a mark of timidity), and must care more for truth than for what people will think, and must speak and act openly; for he is free of speech because he is contemptuous, and he is given to telling the truth, except when he speaks in irony to the vulgar. He must be unable to make his life revolve around another, unless it be a friend; for this is slavish, and for this reason all flatterers are servile and people lacking in self-respect are flatterers. (IV.3) 

We need not quibble over details, but we can simply observe that a person’s worldview as well as their assessment of the particular details of life and relationships will inevitably influence their take on what exactly each virtue looks like.

Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice offers its own semi-Christian chastening of Mr. Darcy’s Aristotelian proper pride. When charged by Elizabeth (ironically) with the faults of pride and vanity, he disavows vanity but says that “pride will always be under good regulation where there is a real superiority of mind.” It is this Aristotelian view that he must modify in his repentance after being initially rejected in his proposals. There is good reason to fail to endorse all the details of Aristotle’s exact take on what is and is not virtuous. At the same time, we would be unwise not to take on board Aristotle’s fundamental insights into the nature of virtue as an intermediate state between excess and deficiency. We can recognize with him that “to find the middle of a circle is not for every one but for him who knows” and this unique sort of knowledge is in fact prudence. So also, “any one can get angry–that is easy–or give or spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right aim, and in the right way, that is not for every one, nor is it easy; that is why goodness is both rare and laudable and noble” (II.9).

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If our educational renewal movement consistently graduated students well on their way to practical wisdom, that fact alone would entail a remarkable positive inheritance. I might go so far as to say that, even if our educational methods bore no better fruit in standardized test scores or excellent artistry in language, mathematics, or the fine and performing arts, still it all would have been worth it if our graduates were more prudent. Part of the reason for this is that no man is an island, and so, regardless of other attainments, the influence of these prudent citizens on the world at large is nothing short of incalculable. Prudence is the quintessential virtue of true leadership.

Much ink has been spilled on the liberal arts as the proper training for a free human being. A free society relies on men and women leaders who are able to reason persuasively with both verbal and mathematical precision, in order to lead us to human flourishing. As Aristotle asserts,

That is why we think Pericles and people of that sort to be practically wise–because they have theoretical knowledge of what is good for themselves and for human beings, and we think household-managers and politicians are like that. (Reeve, Aristotle on Practical Wisdom, 56; VI.5 translation)

In actual fact, it is not the liberal arts simply, but the liberal arts facing prudential matters that prepare a person for leadership. Study of the liberal arts can tend toward the arcane, mystic and purely academic. The best students of abstract intellectual matters are not always the best leaders. 

Aristotle’s inclusion of both household-managers and politicians justifies our exploration of prudence as a leadership trait generally. When he says that “political wisdom and practical wisdom are the same state of mind, but to be them is not the same,” (VI.8, Revised Oxford Trans.) he further clarifies that political wisdom is that type of practical wisdom concerned with the city, just as economic or household management is that practical wisdom concerned with the household. This doesn’t negate the fact that a person could have individual practical wisdom but not the leadership varieties, because of lacking particular knowledge of that sphere. But it does mean that practical wisdom expands up into all types of leadership spheres, making the essence of practical wisdom itself highly desirable. 

After all, our graduates will lead in various ways after their Christian classical education, whether it be as parents themselves, church and small group leaders, coaches, business managers and executives, and perhaps even politicians. Our world needs more prudent leaders, just as it does more prudent individuals. 

In this article we will explore practical wisdom in dialogue with Jim Collin’s idea of Level 5 leadership from his book Good to Great. Then we will note some practical implications for training prudent leaders through the school experience today.

Level 5 Leadership and Prudence

In his masterfully researched Good to Great, Jim Collins and his team of researchers set out to discover what separated enduringly great businesses (measured “objectively” by publicly available stock valuation) from comparison companies. According to his own admission Collins “gave the research team explicit instructions to downplay the role of top executives so that [they] could avoid the simplistic ‘credit the leader’ or ‘blame the leader’ thinking common today.” In spite of this, the presence of what they came to call “Level 5 Leadership” in all the Good to Great companies at the time of transition kept staring them in the face, the more so since the traits they saw were so paradoxical and unexpected. 

Collins describes the Level 5 executive as a person who “builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will” (20). He goes on to describe it this way:

Level 5 leaders are a study in duality: modest and willful, humble and fearless. To quickly grasp this concept, think of United States President Abraham Lincoln (one of the few Level 5 presidents in United States history), who never let his ego get in the way of his primary ambition for the larger cause of an enduring great nation. Yet those who mistook Mr. Lincoln’s personal modesty, shy nature, and awkward manner as signs of weakness found themselves terribly mistaken, to the scale of 250,000 and 360,000 Union lives, including Lincoln’s own. (22)

Lincoln provides an inspiring example of this “professional will” combined with “personal humility.” These leaders are not the superstar executives that led the company to a brief period of high profitability during their tenure as CEO, but then left it in the lurch at their departure. 

Collins lists a hierarchy of five levels of leadership that we can profitably set in dialogue with Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of prudence:

• Level 1 – Highly Capable Individual: Makes productive contributions through talent, knowledge, skills, and good work habits.

• Level 2 – Contributing Team Member: Contributes individual capabilities to the achievement of group objectives and works effectively with others in a group setting.

• Level 3 – Competent Manager: Organizes people and resources toward the effective and efficient pursuit of predetermined objectives.

• Level 4 – Effective Leader: Catalyzes commitment to and vigorous pursuit of a clear and compelling vision, stimulating higher performance standards.

• Level 5 – Level 5 Executive: Builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. (Jim Collins, Good to Great, 20) 

First, the highly capable individual has established good habits or virtues that productively make use of the talent, skills and knowledge that he has. This individual level of prudence calculates correctly that it will be beneficial to himself to work well and be known as a good worker, as that will provide him with the good things of life.

Second, the contributing team member has what Aristotle calls “consideration” or “judgment” (gnome; see Nicomachean Ethics VI.11), discerning correctly what is fair in working together with a team. This fair-mindedness relies on a perception or comprehension of each person’s rights and responsibilities. 

Third, the competent manager receives objectives or goals from and is able to use his cleverness (a morally neutral category related to practical wisdom in Aristotle; see VI.13) to organize people and resources toward meeting those goals. Moreover, this manager does so in a way that coordinates those combined efforts well and is in this sense political. We now see the forerunners of prudence approaching something like it in applied political leadership. 

Fourth, the effective leader adds still another element of practical wisdom, in that the leader first perceives and then articulates “a clear and compelling vision”–something that Aristotle would have called understanding the proper ends or goals of human flourishing and then having the art of persuasion to communicate it to others. The effective leader not only has the cleverness to chart out a path to these goals, but discerns the end from the beginning because he has high standards of excellence (virtue) within himself that enable this perception. 

Fifth, the level 5 leader adds on to these the crowning achievement of practical and political wisdom, because he has subsumed his own personal benefit within the good of the community or organization as a whole. Collins hesitates to use the term servant leadership because of how it might degenerate into mere niceness in our imaginations, but the conclusion is unavoidable:

Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious–but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves. (21)

Christians should not be surprised by this finding, resonating as it does with the model of self-sacrificial leadership attested in scripture.

The sacrificial leadership described in Collins’s Good to Great also has a firmness of will, reminiscent of Charlotte Mason’s Way of the Will, which we have already had occasion to mention. The prudent leader may take time to deliberate well and correctly, but once his mind is made up about the best course of action, his will is iron. This iron will can coexist with a heart of humility partly because his knowledge is so firm and clear. He sincerely knows why, how and what is best for himself and others precisely because of his practical wisdom. 

A Pathway for Prudent Leaders

There are several practical take-aways for Christian classical schools that accept prudence as one of their aims. The first comes from the possibility of taking these 5 levels as a scope & sequence of sorts for leadership development in our schools. It might be fair to criticize the value of group work and teamwork in class projects from the vantage point of simple academic attainments. But if, as we are contending, school should act as a training ground for prudent decision-making in life, then the back-and-forth negotiations and power dynamics of persons are possible life lessons in and of themselves. Mentoring students up the levels of leadership could function as one strand in the curriculum governing this type of learning activity. 

It is worth pausing to note that it is important to differentiate this from simple rhetorical skill. Often in rhetorical training, it is the speech or paper that is graded or ranked, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the viewpoint taken. This isolation of the simple product of persuasion makes sense when we are focusing on developing the art of rhetoric only, but if we expand the vision to prudent leadership, then we can see that the speech functions holistically within a vision & strategy, a web of relationships, a set of challenges, and a perception of the resources, needs, and trade-offs of various pathways. While real-life experience leading is the most accurate training ground for this, proxies involving actual leadership of other students can help. 

It is for this reason that student leadership within a house system or student council can be a proper classical educational feature. Not because schools should function like democracies, but because of our educational goals. These leadership opportunities mimic real-world complexity than games or assignments since they involve real human beings and definite choices for their good or ill within a timeframe and constraints. Of course, if we were merely talking about strategy, it might be that our modern strategy games (whether board games, video games, or computer games) might afford the best training. Chess is a good example of this, originating as it did almost 1500 years ago in India, and its venerable history of mimicking military tactics. A little bit of such things throughout youth might be of value to future prudent leader, but because all the particulars of an actual leadership situation matter, becoming a grandmaster will be unlikely to transfer to level 5 leadership.

In fact, this case helps to illustrate one of the key differences between artistic training and an education for prudence. While artistry of any sort benefits from an abundance of focused practice within the discipline, game, or subject matter, too much specialization might actually be a hindrance to prudent leadership. As David Epstein illustrates in his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, a wide array of experiences often equips us with a better intuition, vision, and creativity for making decisions in the complex situations we face. 

In this sense too, the liberal arts were made for prudence, not only because they prepare a person with practical skills to lead (writing, discussing, speaking, calculation, charting, etc.), but also because they help us encounter the world in all its variety and prevent us from focusing too narrowly on one subject or aspect of things. Prudent leaders are generalists, who have encountered the world in all its complexity: people, products, research, and relationships, to name just a few aspects. They draw from all this varied data to make complex calculations about the best course of action and they regularly lead others to human goods. 

Let’s smooth this liberal arts pathway with lessons for level 5 leadership at our schools.

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To answer this question we must return to Aristotle’s definition of prudence itself, borrow from Charlotte Mason’s “way of the will,” and consider educational activities that align appropriately with the nature of practical wisdom. These three pieces will enable us to develop a pedagogy of prudence, through which, with God’s help and the student’s voluntary learning, we can pass on prudence to the young. 

The Defining Traits of Prudence

In his Nicomachean Ethics book VI Aristotle’s main goal is to illuminate the nature of phronesis or practical wisdom. In fact, he addresses the other four intellectual virtues (artistry, intuition, scientific knowledge, and philosophic wisdom) mainly in order to define more precisely what prudence is by comparison with other species of the overarching category or genus, intellectual virtue. This makes sense given the fact that it is a treatise on ethics, and so intended to clarify how we are to live in the world. Prudence itself involves the deliberate choices that would lead to a good life.

In one place, Aristotle defines practical wisdom as “a state involving true reason, a practical one, concerned with what is good or bad for a human being” (Reeve, Aristotle on Practical Wisdom, 56; VI.5 translation). It is not simply having good habits but involves the reasoning faculty of a human being, directed particularly at things that are good or bad for us as human beings. Practical wisdom is therefore not concerned, strictly speaking, with what objectively happened in the past or with what might happen in the future or elsewhere, but which has no immediate relevance to us. “Nothing that happened in the past, however, is deliberately chosen–for example, nobody deliberately chooses to have sacked Troy” (Reeve, 50; VI.2). It is concerned with those things that might benefit or harm us as human beings.

In this way, practical wisdom differs from scientific or theoretical knowledge, which makes truth claims about the world regardless of their relationship to us. Nevertheless, there is an analogy between them. As Aristotle explains, “What assertion and denial are in the case of thought–that, in the case of desire, is precisely what pursuit and avoidance are” (Reeve, 48; VI.2). Prudence causes us to pursue or avoid things, whereas knowledge simply asserts or denies. This is precisely what makes practical reasoning practical in Aristotle’s thinking; it is the type of thinking that we engage in as doers, actors in the world. Therefore, our desires and our deliberate choices are involved in the experience of practical wisdom. 

The Way of the Will

These two companions (desire and deliberate choice) might be said to make practical wisdom what it is. But they are uneasy companions even in the best of times. And that is because our desires are often in conflict with one another and with reason. As the apostle James says, “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel” (4:1-2a ESV). This is why, for Aristotle, the moral virtues are a necessary precursor to practical wisdom, because if a person’s desires are entirely corrupt, he is not able to reason correctly about what is good for himself. His vision is so blurry, so obscured we might say by the log in his own eye, that he cannot see with any clarity what would in fact be good, either for himself or anyone else. 

Charlotte Mason, a British Christian educator from the turn of the last century, offers the “way of the will” as a guide to moral “self-management.” Being aware of our conflicting desires and able to manage them through deliberate choice is part and parcel of what prudence consists of. She explains this explicit instruction that children should be given in order to fortify their wills in vol. 6 Towards a Philosophy of Education:

Children should be taught (a) to distinguish between ‘I want’ and ‘I will.’ (b) That the way to will effectively is to turn our thoughts away from that which we desire but do not will. (c) That the best way to turn our thoughts is to think of, or do some quite different thing, entertaining or interesting. (d) That after a little rest in this way, the will returns to its work with new vigour. (ch. 8)

We might add on to Mason’s categories here by helping our students understand that they often want not one thing but many different things, and that part of becoming wise is not listening to only one of those voices, those competing desires, at any one time. We are prudent if we hear them each out in turn, think through the options rationally to discern what is best for us, and then choose with our will. And at the same time, as we will to follow one particular desire, we stop our ears to the others through tactics like diversion. (I have discussed this tactic and another like it, pre-committment) at some length in a two-part series entitled “Educating for Self-Control”: 1) A Lost Christian Virtue, 2) The Link Between Attention and Willpower.)

Among the moral virtues that are a necessary prerequisite to Aristotle’s course on prudence he names specifically temperance (sophrosune in Greek), noting that it is called this because it saves or preserves (sozousan) the person’s practical wisdom (ten phronesin; see Reeve, 58; VI.5). The temperate and wise man has a strong will, in Mason’s terminology, to be able to resist the suggestions of wayward desires. Of course, our ultimate goal is that a person would desire the right things in the right way and to the right degree. The moral virtues help set the desires straight on things that are actually good for you as a human being and at a degree that is appropriate. But in this life, we know as Christians, we will still struggle against the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life. And so, we must strive for temperance and prudence, baptized by charity, at one and the same time.

But what is the central work of prudence itself? What does it take to will correctly with regard to human good? For Aristotle, the mental act of deliberation is highlighted as the key activity of a prudent person:

Practical wisdom, however, is concerned with human affairs and what can be deliberated about; for of a practically wise man we say that this most of all is the function, to deliberate well, and nobody deliberates about what cannot be otherwise or about the sorts of things that do not lead to some specific end, where this is something good, doable in action. The unconditionally good deliberator, however, is the one capable of aiming, in accord with calculation, at the best, for a human being, of things doable in action. (Reeve, 64; VI.7)

Deliberation then is the golden key that unlocks the door of a prudent life. A wise person must be able to think through options, calculate the respective values of different human goods, and accurately choose the best course of action. 

Training the Powers of Deliberative Reasoning

For Aristotle this deliberation or consultation will take the form of what we might call deliberative or practical syllogisms. They will know fundamental or categorical principles of what is good for human beings (the universal or major premise), and then they will also know the particular facts of this or that situation (particular or minor premise), leading them to reason: 

• Heavy water is bad to drink.
• This water is heavy.
• Therefore, I should not drink it. (see VI.8)

The practically wise person will be able to reason quickly and correctly about the new situations he faces in order to decide optimally about how to act in any doubtful situation (see the end of VI.9). 

From this follows the primary method of our pedagogy of prudence: students should be trained in logic, rhetoric, and ethics. It may seem at first glance that this is a curricular, rather than a pedagogical claim, until we recognize the role of logic and rhetoric as productive arts. When understood correctly, dialectic or logic, as well as rhetoric, are tools for the process of inquiry or deliberation. The process of inquiry and deliberation involves the student in seeking the truth through discovering arguments and reasons. It follows that a student who has a practiced ability to perceive reasons for and against a course of action will be able to deliberate well. If the student has studied ethics, he should have the major premises necessary for his practical syllogisms. Of course, he must also have enough experience of the world, so that he is not at a loss for discerning the particulars of his situation. 

Training in dialectic, rhetoric, and ethics, then, are not merely courses that must be added on in the high school or college years, but are instead a set of pedagogical practices that should be embedded in a student’s study from their earliest encounters with the “humanities,” those subjects that are concerned with instructing the conscience with the hard-won wisdom of mankind. This is why the Narration-Trivium lesson capitalizes on and expands Charlotte Mason’s narration-based lesson structure to explicitly name dialectic and rhetoric as proper responses to a rich text. To be clear, dialectic and rhetoric can face in two directions, as it were. They can be turned toward theoretical knowledge, on the one hand, establishing through reasoning some truth that has no direct bearing on my life or choices. Or else, they can face ethics and practical affairs and engage in the practical thinking of deliberation, where options are weighed about what is best for a human being. 

For this reason, and not simply for their own rhetorical training, should students be asked to deliberate about the best course of action for a character in a novel or a figure from history. By living vicariously through the decision-points of many people who have come before them, students gain facility with externalizing the thought-process of deliberation. While this is not the same thing as their own deliberate choices, it is an incredibly effective way to engage the faculty students will use in their own lives. This process of deliberation can be put on display in the classroom in any number of ways, whether it be through set speeches or essays, where a student endeavors to persuade others of the right course of action in a fictional or historical situation, or through harkness table discussions and socratic seminars, where the teacher poses some ethical dilemma. The important thing is that teachers regularly discuss, and get the students to discuss, human values and choices, using biblical moral categories. How else are students to grow in prudence if they never deliberate? 

A helpful tool in this regard is the pro and con chart, where students list out the positives and negatives of a possible choice in terms of its effects on self and others. The discipline of pausing long enough to think through all the ramifications not only develops a student’s analytical thinking, it also improves their invention, or ability to think of reasons or arguments. Traditionally, listed as one of the canons of rhetoric, invention will benefit from a student’s frequent use of common topics, like the more and the less, the better and the worse, the greater and the lesser, etc. (see Aristotle’s Topics).

In addition to vicarious exercises in deliberation, parents, teachers and mentors should utilize every opportunity that arises to assist a young person in their own deliberation process. We will be able to do this by acting as counselor rather than decision-maker. The college and career guidance counselling process is perhaps the prime example, because often in our culture this is a decision that parents hand over to their teenage children, even if some constraints are imposed. Parents and mentors should be asking questions, providing students with an awareness of the experiences of other students, and raising categories of what might be valuable or desirable in a college or career choice. It is not a matter of doing the thinking and deciding for these older students, but of helping them engage in a genuine process of decision-making that is not short-circuited by one or two considerations. These big decisions of early life will make a deep impression on students and act as guides for their process of making all the other important decisions of their life.

In the next article, we will see how this training in deliberative reasoning not only prepares our students for a wise personal life, but also enables them to lead in their homes, communities and churches.

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The book of Proverbs provides the perfect illustration of this. In it we find not only programmatic statements of value like “Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues with injustice” (16:8 ESV), but also observations about human nature like “A worker’s appetite works for him; his mouth urges him on” (16:26). As we explained last time, these are truthful opinions worthy of being shared with the young to help them learn to understand the world around them and to value things rightly. 

Early education should be packed with content of this sort, both directly from the mouths of teachers, but across all the subjects of study. Reading and writing instruction should not merely train in skills but should be rich in moral wisdom. In this way, we can sow the seeds of virtue and wisdom in the young. We have already had occasion to remark on the intimate connection between the moral virtues and practical wisdom. They are two sides of the same coin. As Aristotle says, “the function of man is achieved only in accordance with practical wisdom as well as with moral excellence; for excellence makes the aim right, and practical wisdom the things leading to it” (Nicomachean Ethics VI.12; rev. Oxford trans., 1807). And again, “it is not possible to be good in the strict sense without practical wisdom, nor practically wise without moral excellence” (VI.13, 1808). 

We had to go somewhat far afield, with both John Amos Comenius, the great Czech educational reformer of the 17th century, and Aristotle as our guides, during the last article, in order to establish the necessity of laying this foundation of virtue and prudence in early education. In this article, we will put some flesh on the bones of this “good instruction” by teachers of the young through delineating the role of principles and practice, examples and discipline. 

Principles and Practice

First of all, we can pick up again and dust off the analogy between artistry and morality that we explored while introducing our series on Apprenticeship in the Arts. “Excellences we get by first exercising them,” Aristotle asserts, speaking of the moral virtues which are inextricably tied to prudence, “as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts” (Nicomachean Ethics II.1, 1743). Practice, in line with the correct principles, will form a person toward either artistry or morality. 

As in apprenticeship in the arts then, laying the appropriate foundation for prudence involves both moral practice and principles. John Amos Comenius emphasized the preliminary role of practice in craftsmanship, and he does the same for each of the other cardinal virtues. Regarding temperance, he says, in his Great Didactic,

“Boys should be taught to observe temperance in eating and in drinking, in sleeping and in waking, in work and in play, in talking and in keeping silence, throughout the whole period of their instruction.

“In this relation the golden rule, ‘Nothing in excess,’ should be dinned into their ears, that they may learn on all occasions to leave off before satiety sets in.” (212)

Temperance constitutes a guiding principle for the ordering of students’ days that parents and teachers should heed. Notice how Comenius draws from traditional wisdom for a principle that should be actively, rather than passively “dinned into their ears.” 

As modernists and postmodernists we are apt to recoil at such tough love, but we would do well to question our assumptions. Either we order their days, emotions, and minds with an open door to intemperance (e.g., playing video games all day, eating unhealthy foods, staying up late into the night, etc.), or we hold the line and cause them to practice temperance day in and day out. Intemperate habituation is no small issue to worry about; as Aristotle said, “It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather, all the difference” (Nic Ethics II.1, 1743). 

Apparently moral subtlety is not a virtue for an early education in prudence. Instead Comenius envisions a type of moral catechism with answers drawn from scripture and wise men to provide rules for life (answering questions like “Why should we strive against envy?” “With what arms should we fortify ourselves against the sorrows and chances of life?” “How should we observe moderation in joy?” “How should anger be controlled?” “How should illicit love be driven out?”; 216). These provide the guiding principles to accompany the practice of daily life.

Comenius goes on to delineate the reason for this habituation according to the cardinal virtues. It lies in the rational nature of a human being and therefore develops the proper connection between moral habits and the principled deliberation of prudence:

The principle which underlies this is that we should accustom boys to do everything by reason, and nothing under the guidance of impulse. For man is a rational animal, and should therefore be led by reason, and, before action, ought to deliberate how each operation should be performed, so that he may really be master of his own actions. Now since boys are not quite capable of such a deliberate and rational mode of procedure, it will be a great advance towards teaching them fortitude and self-control if they be forced to acquire the habit of performing the will of another in preference to their own, that is to say, to obey their superiors promptly in everything. (212-213)

For Comenius, obedience to a prudent parent or teacher acts as a preliminary stage in a person’s development of prudential wisdom. Since children cannot be entirely rational in consulting about which operation or act to perform, they should obey their elders, who at the same time explain to them the reasons for why one course of action should be preferred to another. 

Children thus act as moral apprentices through the habit of prompt obedience, practicing the very thing that they will do in later life when they must subordinate the impulsive and emotional part of them to their rational and deliberate mind. Again it must be reiterated that this is not the possession of prudence itself, but it is, in Comenius’ mind, “a great advance” toward it. A development of his playful analogy, sowing the seeds of virtue, helps him explain why:

“Virtue must be inculcated at a very early stage before vice gets possession of the mind.

“For if you do not sow a field with good seed it will produce nothing but weeds of the worst kind. But if you wish to subdue it, you will do so more easily and with a better hope of success if you plough it, sow it, and harrow it in early spring. Indeed, it is of the greatest importance that children be well trained in early youth, since a jar preserves for a long time the odour with which it has been imbued when new.” (215)

For this reason, we can see as injurious the inclination of many parents and teachers, to say of some vice a young child is displaying, “Oh, he’ll grow out of it.” Weeds do not disappear of their own accord but grow and infest the field. The diligent labor of bringing up children involves, first, sowing well the field, but then, harrowing it, as well, breaking up the ground and tearing up the weeds through proper discipline. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Examples and Discipline

So far we have explained the importance of providing principles alongside practice to prepare the hearts and minds of students for moral virtue and intellectual prudence. In his Great Didactic Comenius reiterates this Aristotelian emphasis on ‘practice, practice, practice’ as he transitions to a discussion of examples: 

We have seen in chaps. xx. and xxi. that it is by learning that we find out what we ought to learn, and by acting that we learn to act as we should. So then, as boys easily learn to walk by walking, to talk by talking, and to write by writing, in the same way they will learn obedience by obeying, abstinence by abstaining, truth by speaking the truth, and constancy by being constant. But it is necessary that the child be helped by advice and example at the same time. (215)

Just as in other skills and arts, practice according to good principles provides the foundation for prudence. In a similar way to training in artistry, where theory should not crowd out the importance of examples and models, so also in prudence moral exemplars hold a crucial role.

When the classicists among us think of moral exemplars, we might imagine Plutarch’s Lives or Aesop’s fables, the well-known figures of history and literature who demonstrate for us right and wrong behavior in the vivid color of a narrative. And this is right, but Comenius reminds us of the even more living curriculum of the lives of people in the school community: “Examples of well-ordered lives, in the persons of their parents, nurses, tutors, and school-fellows, must continually be set before children” (215). Comenius seems to suggest highlighting virtuous and wise individuals in the community through public praise and story-telling. We could imagine this being done in the classroom or assembly-hall, formally and informally. 

Comenius’ reason for valuing living examples resonates with modern research on mirror neurons and our imitative nature as human beings: 

For boys are like apes, and love to imitate whatever they see, whether good or bad, even though not bidden to do so; and on this account they learn to imitate before they learn to use their minds. By ‘examples,’ I mean living ones as well as those taken from books; in fact, living ones are the more important because they make a stronger impression. And therefore, if parents are worthy and careful guardians of domestic discipline, and if tutors are chosen with the greatest possible care, and are men of exceptional virtue, a great advance will have been made towards the proper training of the young in morals. (215)

We might supplement Comenius statement about children “learning to imitate before they learn to use their minds” with reference to the recent research that links imitation to the foundational emotional and artistic skills, say in mirroring the emotions of another through facial expressions or the hand-grasping movements of another simply by observing (see Patrick’s article The Imitation Brain). This monkey-see, monkey-do (or monkey-feel) may be less than the fully blossomed rationality of prudence, but it is a fundamental and therefore necessary step along the way. 

Parents and teachers must remember that their example and influence will have a real and overarching effect on the moral development of the children under their care. This is not an area where “Do as I say, not as I do” is going to be effective (if there is any domain where that works…). Ironically, it is this personal lack of prudence that contributes to parents’ lack of perseverance in discipline. Did you notice how in the block quote above Comenius transitioned immediately from living examples to the necessity of parents as “worthy and careful guardians of domestic discipline”? In his mind these are connected, because the faithful administration of discipline in the little things of the home functions as an overflow of a prudent and godly life.

In our modern cultural imagination we picture the pickiness of a hot-tempered and unpredictable parent when we think of domestic discipline: e.g., the surly father who corrects his son’s eating habits or messy room when he himself is in a bad mood from work. But for Comenius and the Christian tradition (“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” -Ephesians 6:4), “domestic discipline” involves consistency, emotional warmth, and a sensitivity to the child’s needs and abilities. In another counter cultural move (for us anyway), Comenius agrees with Charlotte Mason that children should “be very carefully guarded from bad society, lest they be infected by it” (216). Apparently, the idea that “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with” has a deeper moral point to it. Comenius also believes that ‘idleness is the devil’s playground’ for the young, who are apt to “be led to evil deeds or contract a tendency to indolence” through it (216). They should therefore “be kept continually employed either with work or with play” (216). 

It is important to note the Christian coloring that Comenius has given discipline in its role in developing prudence, at the same time as we consider the tradition’s questioning of corporal punishment in school. Quintilian, the famous Roman rhetorical teacher, for instance, had ruled against the use of corporal punishment in his Education of an Orator as tending toward a slavish disposition in students and abusiveness on the part of the tutor (I.3.14). Comenius, likewise, seems to have a lighter approach, remarking famously on the natural curiosity of children and the easiness of the way he recommends. However, when it comes to moral and spiritual matters he has a Christian seriousness that we must reckon with. He begins by noting the inevitability of discipline: “Since it is impossible for us to be so watchful that nothing evil can find an entrance, stern discipline is necessary to keep evil tendencies in check” (216). 

The whole work of sowing the seeds of prudence is for Comenius elevated to the spiritual plane of reference, when we view it from a Christian worldview–a fact that increases the need for watchfulness and careful treatment of moral maladies through timely discipline:

For our enemy Satan is on the watch not only while we sleep, but also while we wake, and as we sow good seed into the minds of our pupils he contrives to plant his own weeds there as well, and sometimes a corrupt nature brings forth weeds of its own accord, so that these evil dispositions must be kept in check by force. We must therefore strive against them by means of discipline, that is to say, by using blame or punishment, words or blows, as the occasion demands. This punishment should always be administered on the spot, that the vice may be choked as soon as it shows itself, or may be, as far as is possible, torn up by the roots. Discipline, therefore, should ever be watchful, not with the view of enforcing application to study (for learning is always attractive to the mind, if it be treated by the right method), but to ensure cleanly morals. (216-217)

Comenius’ measured approach stands between the extreme positions of our time and his, where the sterner forms of punishment (and even the name of punishment) is either neglected or over-used. His little phrase, “as the occasion demands,” endorses the prudential use of varied types of rebuke or consequence in a way that fits the students’ moral misstep.

If we are to recover the Aristotelian goal of prudence, we must reconsider the details of discipline as a part of a moral education. Principles and practice, examples and discipline form the appropriate web of “good instruction” that functions as a preliminary training in prudence, with the ultimate goal that students internalize right and wrong and a true sense of the value of things in the moral and spiritual universe from a God’s-eye perspective.

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So far in this series we have had occasion to develop the Christian underpinnings for prudence. “Be wise [phronemoi, prudent] as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt 10:16), Jesus tells his disciples, utilizing the same word for prudence that Aristotle had named among his five intellectual virtues hundreds of years before. And while the New Testament does not consistently endorse this linguistic distinction between practical and philosophic wisdom (phronesis vs sophia), still the emphasis of the Bible lands squarely on the practical ability to discern the difference between good and evil, to see through the deceitfulness of sin and value goods rightly. Augustine’s ordo amoris, or the proper ordering of loves, provides an important theological development of the Greek philosophical vision of the prudent man. 

Practical wisdom is thus necessarily contrasted with philosophic wisdom (sophia), which for Aristotle involved perception (nous) of first principles and scientific knowledge (episteme) about invariable things, things that never change. We might call these invariable things eternal truths and think more readily of mathematics and metaphysics, than history and literature. What is best for human beings differs with different particulars. Christians might likewise contrast abstract or theoretical knowledge about the divine being, that He is eternal, immortal, impassible, etc., with knowing God himself in a saving relationship. As James writes in his letter, “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe–and shudder!” (James 2:19 ESV). In the same way, prudence has the heart of action in a way that other intellectual virtues do not. 

Adopting a prudential perspective thus has the potential to transform our classical Christian educational paradigm by pumping the lifeblood of practicality back into it. To do that we must now begin to answer in earnest the question of how. What are the proper methods of instructing the conscience and instilling moral wisdom? We must begin with the preliminary stages of instilling prudence in the young, before delineating a pedagogy of prudence for our older students. The full dawning of prudence requires the later stages of reflection and rationality that await higher intellectual development in high school and college years. 

Can We Even Teach Prudence? 

At first, in consulting Aristotle we might be tempted to despair of a pedagogy for prudence. After all, the main requirement for developing prudence in Aristotle seems to be experience, a notion that is illustrated by the fact that scientific knowledge (episteme), while technically of a higher rank among the intellectual virtues, is attainable much earlier than prudence (phronesis):

What has been said is confirmed by the fact that while young men become geometricians and mathematicians and wise in matters like these, it is thought that a young man of practical wisdom cannot be found. The cause is that such wisdom is concerned not only with universals but with particulars, which become familiar from experience, but a young man has no experience, for it is length of time that gives experience; indeed one might ask this question too, why a boy may become a mathematician, but not a wise man or a natural scientist. Is it because the objects of mathematics exist by abstraction, while the first principles of these other subjects come from experience, and because young men have no conviction about the latter but merely use the proper language, while the essence of mathematical objects is plain enough to them? (Nicomachean Ethics VI.8, p. 1803 in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2)

In modern teaching circles we are inclined to believe that it is abstractions and universals that stymie the young mind. Aristotle provides a good counter to our inclinations here, as does the documented Flynn effect: “the increase in correct IQ test answers with each new generation in the twentieth century.” In his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein explains the increasing understanding of abstractions for children in the modern world:

A child today who scores average on similarities would be in the 94th percentile of her grandparents’ generation. When a group of Estonian researchers used national test scores to compare word understandings of schoolkids in the 1930s to those in 2006, they saw that improvement came very specifically on the most abstract words. The more abstract the word, the bigger the improvement. The kids barely bested their grandparents on words for directly observable objects or phenomena (“hen,” “eating,” “illness”), but they improved massively on imperceptible concepts (“law,” “pledge,” “citizen”). (39)

It turns out that abstractions are not as impenetrable to the young as we had thought. The linguistic environment of modern societies, which is rich in such abstractions (if deficient in other ways…), has provided for a steady advance in this sort of thinking. 

It has not, we can assert anecdotally, seemed to afford any meaningful advance in the particulars of prudence. Experience, we are tempted to believe, may not be the best teacher, but perhaps it is the only teacher of practical wisdom. We might forgive Gary Hartenburg, the author of Aristotle: Education for Virtue and Leisure (from the Giants in the History of Education series from Classical Academic Press), for claiming that the development of prudence must wait for after the conclusion of formal education (53-54).

I think that this pessimistic conclusion, however, is incorrect. Even if we must go beyond Aristotle’s admittedly incomplete writings on education (the section of his Politics which concerns education is corrupt and ends abruptly before its actual conclusion), we have reason to hope that we can influence the development of prudence in the young. In addition to a host of classical and Christian resources that answer the question, “Can virtue be taught?”, in the affirmative, as David Hicks memorably put it in Norms and Nobility (Buy through the EdRen Bookstore!), we need look no further than the great Christian educational reformer John Amos Comenius. 

Sowing the Seeds of All the Virtues

You might recall that John Amos Comenius, the brilliant Czech educational celebrity of the late Reformation era, came to our aid earlier in this series on Aristotle’s intellectual virtues. His reflections helped to establish the ultimate goal of Christian education as the cultivation of all the moral, intellectual and spiritual virtues. In this way we were able to effectively replace Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives in the cognitive domain with a more holistic Christian paradigm focused on the virtues. Prudence uniquely ties together the moral and spiritual virtues at the rational center of human thought. It has therefore rightly been regarded as a hinge virtue, one of the cardinal (from the Latin cardo for hinge) virtues of classical and medieval tradition. 

Comenius, also, provided us a pedagogy of artistry through his method of the arts, laid out first in his Great Didactic, then refined and developed in the Analytical Didactic, which he published much later in life. The first of these developed analogies from nature to detail a thrilling and vibrant (if at times startling) educational vision. The second delighted in the bracing air of analytical logic and method, rather than continuing the playful analogies of his first great educational work. 

In a chapter of The Great Didactic entitled, “The Method of Morals” he begins by stating programmatically, “All the virtues, without exception, should be implanted in the young. For in morality nothing can be admitted without leaving a gap.” We can pause to note the natural metaphor of implanting, sowing the seeds of virtue we might say. (I explored this idea for the benefit of parents on Coram Deo Academy’s website: intro, memory, habits, ideas.) For Comenius, like Aristotle, the virtues do not “exist in separation from each other…, for with the presence of the one quality, practical wisdom, will be given all the excellences” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.13, Rev. Oxford Trans., 1808). 

Comenius goes on, drawing from medieval and classical tradition, to endorse the cardinal virtues explicitly, as the hinges on which the door of virtue is swung open:

Those virtues which are called cardinal should be first instilled; these are prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice. In this way we may ensure that the structure shall not be built up without a foundation, and that the various parts shall form a harmonious whole. (211-212)

Comenius’ ordering of these virtues seems deliberate, as he continues through them in the order named, delineating certain “fundamental rules” for “shaping the morals” and “instilling true virtue and piety” in schools (211). It is refreshing to see Comenius’ clear endorsement of the classical tradition’s call to teach virtue and establish a bedrock of piety in our students (on which we might reference Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s chapter on piety in The Liberal Arts Tradition). 

But why does Comenius list prudence first? Most of the time the cardinal virtues are enumerated with prudence last as the crowning achievement after the preliminary moral virtues. Surely our awareness of Aristotle’s categorization of prudence as an intellectual virtue would cause us to place it after the moral virtues of temperance, justice and fortitude. We must read on to see that Comenius’s practical advice on how to instill these virtues requires the seeds of prudence to be sowed alongside every virtue. We cannot really train in virtuous habits, unless we are at the same time laying the foundation of prudence in the hearts and minds of the young. 

The Method of Instruction in Prudence

Charlotte Mason distinguished her method of habit training from mere behaviorism by her insistence on going back further than simply “sowing a habit” to “reap a character”. We must sow the idea that makes the habit valuable and good. In the same way, Comenius regards prudential instruction as the basis for the development of the moral virtues. He begins by stating, “Prudence must be acquired by receiving good instruction, and by learning the real differences that exist between things, and the relative value of those things.” Surprisingly, perhaps to our postmodern ears, Comenius asserts that “good instruction” on values is not only possible, but is grounded in objective reality. 

In our contemporary culture ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’ are sharply distinguished, and opinions and value judgments are classed as unimportant because they are contested in the public square. But practical wisdom is precisely concerned with, in Aristotle’s words, “that part [of the soul] which forms opinions” (Nic. Ethics, VI.5, 1801), and “correctness of opinion is truth” (VI.9, 1804). Understanding the “good instruction” of a teacher on the “real differences… between things” and the “relative value of those things” is therefore a preliminary to prudence. As Aristotle explains, 

Now understanding [nous] is neither the having nor the acquiring of practical wisdom; but as learning is called understanding when it means the exercise of the faculty of opinion for the purpose of judging of what some one else says about matters with which practical wisdom is concerned–and of judging soundly. (VI.10, 1805)

The key point for our purposes is that, while understanding a teacher’s “good instruction” is not prudence itself, it does exercise the faculty of opining and judging soundly. It therefore constitutes sowing the proper seeds for prudence, or laying the right foundation, to continue with Comenius’ vivid metaphors. 

Comenius elaborates on this preliminary instruction in prudence quoting from John Ludovic Vives, one of the great educators of the sixteenth century:

A sound judgment on matters of fact is the true foundation of all virtue. Well does Vives say: “True wisdom consists in having a sound judgment, and in thus arriving at the truth. Thus are we prevented from following worthless things as if they were of value, or from rejecting what is of value as if it were worthless; from blaming what should be praised, and from praising what should be blamed. This is the source from which all error arises in the human mind, and there is nothing in the life of man that is more disastrous than the lack of judgment through which a false estimate of facts is made. Sound judgment,” he proceeds, “should be practiced in early youth, and will thus be developed by the time manhood is reached. A boy should seek that which is right and avoid that which is worthless, for thus the practice of judging correctly will become second nature with him.” (212)

We can pause here to note that this sort of instruction cannot be given by a man or woman without sound judgment and some measure of prudence herself. You cannot give what you do not have. In matters of prudence, John Milton Gregory’s Law of the Teacher could not be truer: a teacher must know that which he would teach. We should also fix in our minds clearly that our modern dichotomy between fact and opinion has been entirely done away with (at least in this translation…). The fact is that riches are less valuable than friendship; you can call this an opinion or judgment if you want, but it does not reduce the importance or truth of such a fact. 

Proverbs provide a collected store of such judgments or estimates of the facts of a case, which can provide a preliminary to prudence for the young. Even where the reasoning of moral sayings and aphorisms is not spelled out, they are of immense value to the young in averting prudential error in valuing things rightly. As Aristotle claims, “Therefore we ought to attend to the undemonstrated sayings and opinions of experienced and older people or of people of practical wisdom not less than to demonstrations; for because experience has given them an eye they see aright” (Nic. Ethics VI.11, 1806). 

It is in the realm of prudence, then, that we must question Charlotte Mason’s outlaw of opining before children:

One of our presumptuous sins in this connection is that we venture to offer opinions to children (and to older persons) instead of ideas. We believe that an opinion expresses thought and therefore embodies an idea. Even if it did so once the very act of crystallization into opinion destroys any vitality it may have had…. (Toward a Philosophy of Education, vol. 6; Wilder, 2008; 87)

If by “opinions” we are talking primarily about personal views on contemporary issues or debatable matters of history or literary criticism where solid evidence is lacking, Mason’s point is well-taken. The precious class time should not be concerned with such trivialities and the accidence of their teacher’s preferred opinions. 

But if instead we are talking about matters related to living a good life and the general human condition, with what is truly valuable in life and what dead ends and roadblocks have prevented many people for making virtuous choices, then Charlotte Mason’s opinion about opinions must be soundly discarded. If a teacher’s hard-won opinions about such matters are not worth passing on to the young, the teacher should not be employed to give care to the young. In fact, we might go so far as to state that the most important quality of a teacher or tutor of the young is that he or she be a man or woman of prudence, with the ability to give instruction in the form of good opinions about life in the midst of all the studies. As John Locke openly declares in Some Thoughts Concerning Education:

The great work of a governor is to fashion the carriage and form the mind, to settle in his pupil good habits and the principles of virtue and wisdom, to give him by little and little a view of mankind, and work him into a love and imitation of what is excellent and praiseworthy, and in the prosecution of it to give him vigor, activity, and industry. The studies which he sets him upon are but as it were the exercises of his faculties and employment of his time to keep him from sauntering and idleness, to teach him application, and accustom him to take pains, and to give him some little taste of what his own industry must perfect. (70)

The studies themselves pale in comparison to the training in “good habits” and the teacher’s instruction in “the principles of virtue and wisdom.” 

So, our conclusion, for the moment, is that the teacher of the young should not muzzle herself when it comes to opining on matters of wisdom and virtue. She should proactively and deliberately seek to share all the accumulated wisdom on living a good life that she has available to her, from proverbs and sayings, passages of scripture, lessons of life from history, literature, and modern examples. It is the job of a teacher of the young to thus opine. In the next article we’ll continue to explore the methods of instilling prudence in the young through not only “good instruction” but the use of examples, rules and discipline.

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