In 1750, for example, it took 4-6 weeks to sail by ship from New York to London. By 1850, with the advent of the steam engine, the trans-Atlantic journey was reduced to around 1 week. Today, we can fly from New York to London in just 8 hours.

This acceleration in travel illustrates a new value that has emerged for us in the modern world: speed. “Time is money,” we are told and the finance report does not lie. The litmus test for the quality and success of an endeavor is how fast we can complete it. For the sooner we can cross a task off our list, the more quickly we can move on to the next task. Then the next task. Then the next task. Only here’s the catch in a knowledge economy: the list is infinite. 

In education, this obsession for speed materializes in daily schedules, pacing charts, and lesson plans. We move from subject to subject, concept to concept, and assignment to assignment at the speed of light. But is this approach best for students? Is it cultivating virtue? Are they actually developing mastery over what they are learning? Or are these moments of quick exposure creating the illusion of learning instead? 

Festina Lente: Make Haste Slowly

In The Good Teacher (Classical Academic Press, 2025), Christopher Perrin and Carrie Eben argue that it is not. Of the ten principles for great teaching they present in their book, the first is “Festina Lente, Make Haste Slowly.” They propose that instead of engaging in the rush to cover content, it is better to master each step in a lesson, setting a pace that is fitting for the time available. 

Perrin and Eben go on to provide two examples of this principle in our world today. The first is drawn from Aesop’s beloved fable, “The Tortoise and the Hare.” In this well-known tale, two creatures, a quick-footed hare and a contemplative tortoise, engage in a foot race. While the hare is expected to win with its focus on speed, it is actually the tortoise who wins the race. The upshot is that while the hare was certainly faster, its pace was not sustainable. The tortoise, on the other hand, moves at a slower yet sustainable pace, making haste slowly, and ultimately becomes the victor. 

The other example is Jim Collins’ “Twenty Mile March” concept in Great by Choice (Random House, 2011). Imagine two hikers setting out on a three-thousand mile walk from San Diego, California, to the tip of Maine. One hiker commits to twenty miles a day, no exceptions. Whether the conditions are fair or poor, the itinerary is the same. The other hiker adjusts his daily regimen to the circumstances before him. Depending on weather, terrain, and energy levels, some days he may walk 40 miles, other days he may not walk at all. Like the tortoise in Aesop’s fable, the winner of the race is the hiker committed to the wise, disciplined journey, choosing sustainability over speed. 

Now, it must be pointed out that every analogy has its limits. Not every speedster struggles with the overconfidence exhibited in the hare or the weak will of the second hiker. It is possible to be both fast and virtuous.The key insight is not that we need to choose between the two, but in our present culture’s emphasis on speed, we would do well to slow down, resist the lure of speedy completion, and focus on a process that will instill virtues of diligence and perseverance.

Connecting the twenty-mile hike example to teaching, Perrin and Eben write,

Classical education can be compared to the long journey in this story. Each segment should be intentional, planned, and exercised wisely, with ample allotted time. Students, like the winning hiker, should use time well, as they are guided and modeled along each segment of their academic journey. (p. 24)

Working at a Natural Pace 

Interestingly, Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and A World Without Email, is on to a similar idea in his latest book, Slow Productivity (Penguin Random House, 2024). 

Newport observes that we as a culture have succumbed to what he calls pseudo-productivity, “the use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort (22). So we work longer hours, send more emails, and complete more projects, all in the name of productivity. The only problem is that we burn ourselves out, ultimately accomplishing less and at a lower quality. 

Newport’s solution is to adopt a different philosophy of work, one in which we accomplish tasks in a sustainable and meaningful manner. His three principles for this approach are:

1. Do fewer things.
2. Work at a natural pace.
3. Obsess over quality.

My colleague at Educational Renaissance, Jason Barney, has written extensively on these principles for the classical educator in this blog series. I encourage you to check out all four articles as he interacts with the likes of Aristotle, Quintilian, Charlotte Mason, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyiy, and others.

Regarding our present focus on how to manage time in the classroom for the sake of virtue formation, Jason writes, “There must be a purposeful movement in a meaningful direction at the same time as a willingness to delay over the details to ensure quality and a student’s developing mastery. Great teachers can discern when to slow down and when to hasten on.”

Rather than sending students off to work on a frenzy of assignments at once, moving from one worksheet to the next, it is better to slow down and hone in on one worthy assignment that will lead students toward a greater depth of understanding.

True Mastery: Getting the Practice Right 

Here we come to a key distinction that must be made. Thus far, I have been encouraging teachers to focus on virtue over speed, process over outcome, and mastery over pseudo-productivity. But what does true mastery look like? And how is it achieved?

I suggest that mastery is achieved when a student can repeatedly demonstrate a particular skill or lucidly explain a concept on demand. In The Good Teacher, Perrin and Eben are adamant that until this happens, teachers should not move on to the next objective, whether it is moving on from addition to multiplication or 3rd to 4th grade (21-22). They are also careful to identify a distortion of festina lente, namely, using the principle as an excuse to focus too long on one concept at the expense of others (27). 

The key clarification I want to make as we seek to implement a mastery-focused approach is regarding the type of practice we ought to implement to meet this end. It would be natural to assume that if the focus is mastery, teachers should engage in what is called massed practice: practice over and over a specific skill until it is mastered, and only then move on to the next skill. Make haste slowly, right?

In Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Belknap Press, 2014), the authors draw upon cognitive science to argue that this sort of practice can only take you so far. They seek to dispel of the myth that the focused, repetitive practice of one thing at a time is the way to mastery. 

They write:

If learning can be defined as picking up new knowledge or skills and being able to apply them later, then how quickly you pick something up is only part of the story. Is it still there when you need to use it out in the everyday world?…The rapid gains produced by massed practice are often evident, but the rapid forgetting that follows is not. (p. 47)

Interestingly, the authors of Make it Stick are putting their finger on the same concern as Perrin and Eben: prioritizing speed over mastery. Instead of practicing one skill over and over again until students can demonstrate mastery, they suggest mixing up the practice. 

In a past article, I write more about this topic, unpacking three key ways from Make it Stick to practice toward mastery:

Spaced Practice: Instead of intensively focusing on one skill for a single, extended session, space out the practice into multiple sessions. Work on it for a while and then return to it the next day or week. The space allotted between each session allows for the knowledge of the skill to soak into one’s long-term memory and connect to prior knowledge. Revisiting the skill each session certainly takes more effort, but that’s the point.

Interleaved Practice: While we experience the quickest gains by focusing on one specific skill or subset of knowledge over a period of time (momentary strength), interleaving, or mixing up the skill or concept you are focusing on in a practice session, leads to stronger understanding and retention (underlying habit strength). It feels sluggish and frustrating at times, for both teachers and students mind you, because it involves moving from skill to skill before full mastery is attained, but it leads to both a depth and durability of knowledge that massed practice does not (50).

Varied Practice: Varying practice entails constantly changing up the situation or conditions in which the skill or concept is being applied. It therefore strengthens the ability to transfer learning from one situation and apply it to another, requiring the student to constantly be assessing context and bridging concepts. Because this jump from concept to concept triggers different parts of the brain, it is more cognitively challenging, and therefore encodes the learning “…in a more flexible representation that can be applied more broadly” (52).

To be clear, these forms of mixed practice will be more difficult for students and the practice sessions will take longer. But that is the point. To “make haste slowly” when it comes to practice, you want to support your students in meaningful practice that will lead them toward long-term, not temporary, mastery. 

Conclusion

As classical schools, we are playing the long game as we seek to instill wisdom and virtue in our students. In our fast-paced world, this commitment will surely be misunderstood. We are told that a school’s effectiveness ought to be measured by the number of students enrolled, the number of accolades of its graduates, and the impressiveness of test scores.

But if our goal is true mastery for a life of virtue, instilled with the principle of festina lente, then we need to think more like the tortoise than the hare. We need to be intentional with practice, focus on depth over breadth, and mix it up in order to strengthen the durability of the knowledge gained. This is no doubt the harder road, but with our own perseverance at work, we trust that over time it will bear much fruit.

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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 the final book of the Ransom trilogy, That Hideous Strength (Scribner, 1945), C.S. Lewis presents his readers with a stark contrast between two communities: the residents of St. Anne’s on the Hill and the conspirators of the N.I.C.E. in Belbury. In doing so, Lewis offers two pictures of humanity. One is characterized by relationship, nature, and beauty, while the other is marked by bureaucracy, cold rationality, and deception. 

To explore these contrasting visions, Lewis follows Mark and Jane, a married couple, in their individual journeys for meaning, belonging, and ultimately, redemption. Mark is a trained sociologist and fellow at the fictitious Bracton College. Despite his marriage to Jane and successful academic career, Mark is lonely and unfulfilled. In the opening pages, he takes immense pleasure in simply being included in a clique. Meanwhile, Jane, an academic herself, regrets the toll her marriage has taken on her academic career, and the current state of her and Mark’s relationship. She is bitter, hopeless, and discontent with the cards life has dealt her. 

In this article, I want to briefly sketch out some pivotal moments in the novel and then offer some insights for educators today. For while this story’s plot is thick enough to stand on its own, Lewis shares in the preface that there is more to the story, so to speak. He writes, “This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man” (7). Let us proceed with seeking to uncover this “point” to see what Lewis what might teach us.

Surprised by Joy

Early in the novel, Mark is brought into an exclusive group of the college, the Progressive Element, and eventually invited to join the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) itself. Through this process, his desire for belonging is quenched, though never fully, as he makes his way further and further into the inner circle. Still, it is a painful process. Despite repeated attempts to understand his job description and the reporting structure of the institution, his requests are constantly pushed aside. The deputy director John Wither is evasive and dismissive, despite regularly referring to the N.I.C.E. as a family. 

Meanwhile, Jane finds herself being drawn to a very different kind of community. Despite the men and women at St. Anne’s on the Hill referring to themselves as a “company” and “army,” they live together in a beautiful and spacious manor, fulfilling the vision of family that the N.I.C.E. allegedly claimed to be. In her first visit to the manor at St. Anne’s, she walks through a beautiful garden, teeming with life and beauty. Later, she meets with the director of the community, Dr. Ransom, and leaves overflowing with joy (149). 

Interestingly, the source of her joy when meeting with Dr. Ransom was not the conversation they shared together, but the transcendent experience of encountering his divine and royal aura. For the first time, her soul had touched the heavens, as it were, awakening in her a desire for beauty that had grown dormant over the course of her life. Suddenly she gained new eyes for the beauty of nature, from rays of sunlight to grazing wildlife. She longed to hear the chorales of Bach again and read the sonnets of Shakespeare afresh. She cherished the speech of her cabinmates in the train and rejoiced in her hunger and thirst for buttered toast and tea. Her conversion had begun.

Isolation and Objectivity

In contrast, Mark’s progress through concentric circles of exclusivity in Belbury finally leads to his own isolation as he sits alone in a cell awaiting his training in “objectivity.” Professor Augustus Frost, a leader in the innermost circle of the N.I.C.E., shares with Mark his vision for humanity as a race of pure mind and liberated of emotional preference. He desires to destroy all human instincts for what is right, noble, and beautiful. Interestingly, Mark’s training takes place in a room of disproportion with a ceiling covered in specks at irregular intervals. On the walls of the room are pictures, many of them with scriptural themes, yet each of them distorted through bizarre elements of horror and strangeness. Professor Frost’s goal is clear: destroy all of Mark’s intuitions for what is natural, normal, and right. 

To Frost’s surprise, however, the room soon began to have the reverse effect. The striking abnormality and ugliness of the room engendered in Mark a longing for the straight, whole, and normal. The narrator Lewis writes, “As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else–something he vaguely called the ‘Normal’–apparently existed” (296). In the end, Mark finds himself choosing a side, aligning himself with the mountainous pull towards the moral universe, and rejecting Professor Frost’s vision for objectivity untethered from objective value.

And yet, the ultimate test was yet to come. For, in a pivotal moment of the training in the objective room, Professor Frost, with demonic calculation, instructs Mark to trample on a full-sized crucifix and insult it. Unlike the moral defense against the other exercises that had risen inside of Mark, this was different. There was nothing about the wooden figure nailed to the cross that was inherently straight and normal. Though Mark is not a Christian, his conversation was already underway, and he realizes that the crucifix is…”what happened when the Straight met the Crooked, a picture of what the Crooked did to the Straight–what it would do to him if he remained straight. It was, in a more emphatic sense than he had yet understood, a cross” (333). In this decisive moment, this test of tests, Mark refused to desecrate the image.

Hope for Redemption

In the end, both characters encounter elements of redemption, not only for their marriage, but for their moral and spiritual salvation.

Jane’s struggle with pride, most visibly manifested in the novel through her repudiation of traditional gender norms, is overcome as she realizes the goodness of being a creature under the authority and care of God. And yet the divine goodness she accepts comes at a high price: control. She must give up herself to another, to God himself, and let him mold her as he sees fit (316). The universe now appears to her much larger than she imagined. It is massive, stormy, beautiful, and unbending, existing independently of any human emotion or idea. She must embrace the truth that this reality is greater than herself by recognizing she is a creature of God.

Mark’s conversion is different. Though he exhibits the moral courage to resist Professor Frost’s training in objectivity, he has not had the benefit of being formed by the community at St. Anne’s. Only in the end does he begin to recognize his own shortcomings as a husband and lover. His fear is that it is too late, that what would be best for Jane at this point is to move on. But then, in the last available moment, love strikes him as only the goddess Venus can, and his soul is saved.

Insights for Schools Today

There are so many layers to this story, from the redemption of Mark and Jane to the heavenly presence of Dr. Ransom to the demonic nature of the N.I.C.E. It truly is a battle for the abolition of humanity.

In The Abolition of Man (Harper Collins, 1971), Lewis warns against a dystopian future in which humanity abandons traditional moral values in the name of scientific progress. Though he is clear that his argument is not against science itself, in his context he can see that the many successes of modern science have created a lure to conquer nature completely. In the end, all that will be left is to conquer human nature. He writes, “Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won” (59).

Inspired by That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man, I will conclude this article by offering three suggestions for schools in order to resist the coming abolition.

1. Create communities of joy and hospitality.

One of the most endearing elements of the story is the community of St. Anne’s. While I did not focus on the themes of comradeship and belonging so much in this article, it is well worth study and imitation. It can be easy to think that the abolition of man is ultimately a philosophical debate and therefore will take place at an intellectual level. But the reality is that strongest way we can retain our humanity and moral values is through creating beautiful spaces of belonging for learning to occur. From filling our schools with beautiful art and nature to building time for deep relationships to thrive, our schools can become their own manifestations of the idyllic St. Anne’s community.

2. Champion the reality of objective moral values.

Certainly Lewis’ greatest warning in The Abolition of Man, manifested in the N.I.C.E. at Belbury in That Hideous Strength, is the rejection of traditional moral values, what Lewis calls the Tao (pronounced “Dao”). As Alasdair MacIntyre addresses at great length in After Virtue, the modern West has traded out objective moral belief for mere emotional preferences. Ideas of virtue and duty have been reduced to mere subjective responses that cannot be used for moral evaluation. In this framework, a solder sacrificing his life to save his squadron is a story that can engender emotions of high praise, but it is not representative of a deeper truth that we are morally obligated to imitate.

But as Lewis argues through different means in both books, moral truth, goodness, and beauty does exist independently of human perception. In their own journeys, Mark and Jane encountered what Lewis described as a mountain–an entity that existed apart from themselves that is firm, immovable, and embedded in the universe itself. This is natural law, or what Mark experienced as the Straight and Normal.

Our schools need to cling to and proclaim the reality of objective goodness, truth, and beauty, for the future of humanity is at stake.

3. Connect the study of science to worship of our Creator.

There is a warning in both books regarding the dangers that emerge when modern science, or any discipline for that matter, is untethered from moral and biblical truth. In the case of Belbury, the scientific activity literally became demonic. While it is important to equip our students with understanding of the scientific method, steps for conducting a successful lab experiment, and other elements of modern science, we should regularly connect our study of creation to worship of our Creator. For scripture commands us to subdue and cultivate creation, not conquer it out of human arrogance and pride.

It is this temptation toward human arrogance and pride that is the “hideous strength” of which Lewis warns. As the inhabitants of Shinar sought to make a name for themselves through erecting a great tower at Babel, so the temptation to be our own gods resided in Mark and Jane, as well as in us today.

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This series may not be able to answer all the controversies and complex intricacies of this age old set of questions, but at least if we follow out these different strands, we might be able to be more aware of our preconceived notions and how they are affecting our view of the children in front of us day after day. Even as Christians we can tend to hold contradictory notions at one and the same time and this befuddles our practices and responses to everyday occurrences. Once we follow the ghost of the soul out into the courtyard of ideas, we’ll find both valuable insights into who we are and how we should be educated, but also incorrect notions that should be discarded and reburied as liable to lead us astray. In this way we can end the haunting of our educational practices by false views and unhelpful practices.

We can profitably begin with Plato’s account of the soul as immortal and containing three parts which must be properly harmonized with one another through education. Before Plato significant thinking about the nature of the soul had already begun among earlier Greek philosophers, but no one thinker arguably has had a greater influence on Western conceptions of the soul than him. 

The Immortality of the Soul

In Homeric times the word for soul, psyche in Greek, had more of a straightforward referent, something akin to ‘life’ on the one hand, and ‘shade’ or ‘ghost’ on the other: 

The soul is, on the one hand, something that a human being risks in battle and loses in death. On the other hand, it is what at the time of death departs from the person’s limbs and travels to the underworld, where it has a more or less pitiful afterlife as a shade or image of the deceased person.

See Ancient Theories of Soul (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Summer 2009 Edition)

This set of meanings is roughly comparable to the common use of ‘nephesh’ in the Hebrew Old Testament, which may have originally meant ‘neck’ or ‘throat’. Your soul in this ancient Greek or Hebrew context is what makes you alive, and perhaps, ironically, the part of you that lingers on in Hades or Sheol after you have died. 

Plato develops especially on this second meaning in the Phaedo to express his view that the human soul is immortal. For Plato this immortal soul is embodied throughout a human life and can be affected negatively by the choices and lifestyle lived in the body. Purifying the soul from bodily entanglements is part and parcel of the true practice of philosophy, which involves a type of dying that leads to genuinely blessed life. 

This Platonic view of the soul will influence Stoicism, as well as later Gnosticism. Moreover, it seems almost impossible not to conclude that Jesus and the apostles are not, in some ways, both countering and affirming it, as earlier Jews had before them. For instance, Jesus says, “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt 10:28 ESV). This seems to agree with the idea that the soul outlives physical death, adding further the Christian view of final judgment and everlasting “destruction” in hell. 

At the same time, we do not have any Christian affirmation of the idea that the soul pre-exists bodily life in normal humans. Therefore, Plato’s supposition that all learning is in fact remembering finds no support in Christian theology. It also brings with it its own set of problems, like the possible infinite regression of souls passing into and out of bodies. Plato’s socratic method of educating by ‘drawing out’ the knowledge already nascent inside the soul must find some other justification than this theory of the soul for classical Christian educators. 

But we have had no trouble doing so, since asking the student questions to prod thought is attested elsewhere, not least with Jesus himself. In addition, the value of socratic or maieutic instruction is found in training a student in the art of dialectical reasoning and, at the same time, forcing a student to analyze their own partially formed or borrowed answers to life’s fundamental questions for logical consistency. This process can help bring about a metanoia, a repentance or change of mind, where a student adopts a more consistent understanding of the world. We can safely do away with pre-existence while holding onto the human soul’s continued existence after death based on the biblical support.

The Tripartite Soul: Rational, Emotional, and Appetitive

In Plato’s Republic his tripartite theory of the soul finds its most stunning and educationally suggestive descriptions. The overarching concern of the dialogue is the attempt by Socrates to explain what justice is and why it is worthwhile in and of itself, regardless of society’s rewards. The tale of the ring of Gyges told in book 2 helps to bring the issue to a head by positing a scenario in which a man with a ring of invisibility could practice all manner of injustice without any fear of punishment. It is a case of absolute power corrupting absolutely and challenging the hearer on whether he wouldn’t do the same thing, if given the opportunity. 

Socrates’ extended answer to the question of whether justice truly leads to happiness or blessedness hinges on the order or disorder of the several parts of the soul. He maintains that the tyrant with absolute power is actually the most miserable and unhappy type of person. In order to explain why he writs large the nature of the soul, by expanding into an inquiry into the just city-state, which ends up having the same harmonious parts as the individual human soul.  “Corresponding to the three types in the city, the soul also is tripartite,” says Socrates (Perseus Digital Library, Book 9, 580d). “Each of us also in whom the several parts within him perform each their own task—he will be a just man and one who minds his own affair” (441d-e).

The three parts are the rational, high-spirited, or we might say emotional, and the appetitive. The symbolic images he assigns to these are a man (rational), a lion (spirited), and a monkey or monster (appetitive). “Does it not belong to the rational part to rule, being wise and exercising forethought in behalf of the entire soul, and to the principle of high spirit to be subject to this and its ally?” (441e) asks Socrates. These two parts, then, allied together, can effectively “preside over the appetitive part which is the mass of the soul in each of us and the most insatiate by nature of wealth” (442a). In Plato all the non-ideal forms of government, as well as the non-ideal forms of individual character, are explained through various types of disordering of these fundamental parts of the soul or city. 

We can pause at this point to note that Plato’s tripartite soul draws from our common sense self-awareness as human beings. Each of us has felt within 1) the massive force of appetitive desires, 2) the high emotional spirits of a desire for honor and the motivation to act, 3) the ability to think rationally about things, whether our own affairs or abstract sciences. Naming these various parts of the human inner life does not exactly put us in heavily speculative or theoretical territory, unlike the soul’s pre-existence. Whether we think of Freud’s superego, ego and id, or the biblical language of mind, heart and flesh or passions, we find ourselves assuming something very like the threefold division of Plato. In other words, Plato’s tripartite soul is fundamental and necessary, virtually uncontestable (unless we get down very deep in the weeds of exact distinctions), and therefore incredibly important and valuable.

Plato has posed the question of human justice or righteousness as a matter of a rightly ordered soul in harmony with itself. In doing so he framed the work of education and personal growth as aiming principally at what came to be called the cardinal virtues: practical wisdom or prudence, courage, temperance and justice. Practical wisdom arises when the rational part of the soul rules and is obeyed in a person’s choices. Courage involves the high-spirited part’s emotional regulation according to right reason, even in the face of fears. Temperance, or self-control, comes about when the mass of desires and appetites submit to the rational and spirited part, with the outcome of these three being a person who acts justly toward himself and others. 

How does this educational goal come about? we might ask. What pedagogy or means can be turned to this end or purpose of education? Plato’s answer is that it is “the blending of music and gymnastics that will render them concordant, intensifying and fostering the one with fair words and teachings and relaxing and soothing and making gentle the other by harmony and rhythm” (441e-442a). A literary, poetic, and musical education filled with examples of real goodness, truth and beauty (we must engage in some censoring of the poets, Plato asserts) will tune the heart to right reason. Physical training to endure pains and sufferings, improve fitness and build up well-trained reflexes of nerve and sinew, rather than pampering the flesh, will set the appetitive part in submission. (For more on gymnastic and musical education, see Clark and Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition.)

Based on his symbolic and tripartite image of the soul, the task of education becomes very clear, aiming both at justice and ultimate happiness or human flourishing as two sides of the same coin:

And on the other hand he who says that justice is the more profitable affirms that all our actions and words should tend to give the man within us complete domination over the entire man and make him take charge of the many-headed beast—like a farmer who cherishes and trains the cultivated plants but checks the growth of the wild—and he will make an ally of the lion’s nature, and caring for all the beasts alike will first make them friendly to one another and to himself, and so foster their growth. (589a-b)

This type of self-culture implies the help of a certain type of parental discipline and educational regimen that might be otherwise unwelcome. The conclusion is that each soul has a “many-headed beast” within it that must be taken charge of, checked, and dominated. The heart and sense of honor and motivation must be made an ally to the reason, “cultivated plants” like good habits and right emotional responses must be “cherished” but wild growths must be pruned, weeds dug up by the roots. 

Moreover, the three parts of the soul have each, according to Plato, a different set of natural desires. The rational part is a lover of learning and a lover of wisdom, the natural philosopher in us. The spirited part is a lover of honor; we might call this our social-emotional nature, easily swayed by the wrong influences, but a powerhouse of energy and drive. The appetitive part is a lover of gain, money or profit, chiefly concerned with how to satisfy its own desires. According to this insight, then, the major concern of education is not simply how to train the skills of one individual part of the soul, i.e. honing the faculties of the rational part. For, if the appetitive part or spirited part are ruling the man, then the powers of the rational part of the soul can themselves be used in service of the man’s avarice and unchecked ambition. Instead, the challenge of education and self-culture is how to properly order the development and growth of the three parts of the soul in harmonious and proper relationships with one another. Each part must do its own proper task, claims Plato. 

To the extent that Plato is right about this, modern education is found to be wanting because of its abandonment of traditional values and morality. Without an agreed upon principle for the ordering of the soul’s affections, as C.S. Lewis explained in The Abolition of Man, education will tend to be disforming, making bloated heads and shriveled chests, or we might say, unrighteous men, enslaved to their own prejudices and appetites. This much we have said before on Educational Renaissance, but perhaps now we can see more clearly how it is this tripartite view of the soul that hovers over this educational problem. As we continue our series on The Soul of Education we will see how this fundamental insight from Plato finds expression or contradiction in various ways.

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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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It should be no surprise that a message promoting academic rigor would gain traction. Public education in the United States has been the subject of criticism for decades. Despite varied efforts in education reform, there is a growing lack of confidence in the American school system to prepare students adequately to read and write with proficiency or analyze data with a solid foundation in math and science.

Economically, we inhabit what scholars call a knowledge economy, an ideal context for an approach to education that champions academics. In this evolutionary development of the marketplace, a person’s intellectual productivity becomes her chief value proposition. Whereas an agrarian economy is dependent on farming and the raising of animals, and an industrial economy is dependent on facilities and manufacturing, a knowledge economy is dependent on the growth and accessibility of information. A student trained as a master of knowledge, which includes the retention, analysis, and communication of information, will set herself apart in such an economy.

Or, at least, the student would have before artificial intelligence (A.I.) entered the scene. With the rise of generative A.I., like Chat GPT, it becomes an open question precisely how valuable a person’s intellect will remain. From writing poetry to solving calculus problems to composing literature essays, generative A.I. offers a compelling intellectual pathway for what was once thought to be a lane reserved for the human race alone. If robots can analyze complex literature, identify fallacious reasoning, craft persuasive arguments, and write eloquent speeches, why take the time to train students?

To answer the question, we must dig deep into anthropology, and remember that classical education is not at its core about academic rigor, but about the formation of a particular type of person. This person is not one of bare intellect, indiscernible from a robot, but of a virtuous, fully-integrated soul of mind, heart, and body. As we navigate this new era, it is this purpose and no other that will set classical education apart in the educational landscape, not to outsmart A.I., but to work alongside it and steward it wisely. 

Men and Women of Virtue 

What kind of person are we trying to form? How do we form such a person? 

If classical educators are going to offer something more than strong academics in the age of A.I., we need to have clear answers to these questions. Please do not misunderstand: high-quality academics will continue to be important, essential even, for an effective program. The key point I wish to make here is that academic rigor, though necessary to prepare the next generation, is no longer sufficient. We must provide more to separate our graduates from robots. We need to form more than bare intellects. We need to form men and women of virtue. 

Virtue can be defined in a variety of ways. Aristotle famously defined virtue as “a moral habit.” In classical Greek, the words for “virtue” and “excellence” were one and the same: arete (excellence). To be a virtuous human is to be an excellent one, fully aligned with her moral identity and purpose. 

Interestingly, St. Augustine, a Christian rhetorician very familiar with the works of Aristotle, redefines virtue as “the possession of rightly ordered loves.” For a person to be virtuous, he must love the right things in the right order, with God as the supreme object of our love. One’s prospects for growing virtuous are bound up with not only putting the right habits in place, but about training the affections. 

Finally, Christopher Perrin, a prolific leader in the classical education renewal movement, has offered a contemporary definition of virtue: becoming the fullest version of yourself. Following Aristotle, he connects virtue to excellence and explains that humans become virtuous in whatever areas they excel. In the educational formation of a person, the list of example virtues he shares includes perseverance, industry, industry, love, and humility.

In a knowledge economy fueled with A.I., human knowledge workers will remain in top demand, but only with a distinctive trait: knowledge workers of virtue. Robots may be able to instantaneously calculate how to maximize profits in a particular business decision, but they cannot tell you if it is morally right to do so. Chat GPT may be able to list the dangers of substance abuse, but it cannot lend you the moral strength to abstain from debauchery in the dark night of the soul. Generative A.I. may be able to predict the probable success of certain life choices, but it cannot offer compassion to a friend in need of grace.

Habits and Communal Practices 

In Desiring the Kingdom (Baker Academic, 2009),  philosopher James K.A. Smith argues, following St. Augustine, that humans are fundamentally creatures of desire. In other words, what we love orients and drives who we become, over and above anything else. Therefore, if education is about shaping persons, then it is going to be about shaping loves. 

Smith writes, “Education is not primarily a heady project concerned with providing information; rather education is more fundamentally, a matter of formation, a task of shaping and creating a certain kind of people…What makes them a distinctive kind of people is what they love and desire—what they envision as “the good life” or the ideal picture of human flourishing” (26).

So how do we shape men and women of virtue? Smith identifies two primary ways: individual habits and communal practices. In the diagram below, which I have reproduced from a diagram in the book (p. 48), we can make a few observations. 

First, there is the vision of the good life that each person holds. This is the particular state of affairs that each person consciously (and subconsciously) aspires to see and experience in a future state of the world. Small tastes of this future state, such as a home game win or a developing romantic relationship, bring joy and hope that we are on the right track. 

Second, there are the desires aimed at this future vision. The things we love and have our desires set on serve as the GPS coordinates for where we are going. For example, I love when my lawn is green, thick, and healthy. I experience joy when I come home from work and my lawn is nicely edged and free of weeds. This love is determining not only what I currently see in my lawn, but what I hope to see in the future. It is orienting my whole self, including my financial resources, towards this vision.

Third, there are the individual habits and communal practices that shape that which we love. The most effective way to begin loving something new is to make a habit connected to it and join a community who embody similar habits. Likewise, the most effective way to stop loving something is to eliminate habits and withdraw from communities that reinforce the object of our love that we want to move away from. 

If classical education is about forming people of virtue, and if this sort of education in formation is ultimately what will separate humans from artificial intelligence, then we need to take seriously what habits and communal practices are at work in our schools. 

Forming Virtue in Your School

Here are some diagnostic questions to consider:

Habits

• What is the first thing each student does when they enter your classroom?
• How do students approach their individual school work? With care and devotion or pragmatistic speed?
• What happens if you call on a student at random to answer a question?
• If a student needs help on an assignment, is his deskmate eager to help?
• Are students showing that they care about what they are learning, and are not simply learning it for an upcoming test?

Communal Practices

• What does your school community do together in large groups? How is this shaping school culture and affections?
• What kind of games are played at recess? Are these games reinforcing the sort of traits you want to form in your students?
• What role does leisure reading play in your school culture? How can you move beyond reading as an assignment to reading as a way of life? 
• How often do you sing together as a class or school? 
• What does service look like in your school culture? Does service only occur on pre-scheduled trips or is there an effort to integrate small acts of service in daily life?

Conclusion

As Andrew Kern from the Circe Institute writes, we have a single goal as classical educators, virtue, “for which other words might be blessedness, fulness, fruitfulness, wholeness, integrity, harmony, Christlikeness, and so on.” As we navigate the age of A.I. in a knowledge economy, classical educators must remain faithful to cultivating these traits in our students. My prediction is that A.I. will become more and more part of regular life, just as past technological innovations, such as the calculator and microwave, already have. The way forward is not the way of the Luddite–refusing to use technology at all–but rather training students to use it wisely, and being especially careful to not let it replace the assignments, activities, and experiences students must encounter themselves in order to grow as men and women of virtue. 

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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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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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In The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education (Version 2.0, Revised Edition), Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain argue for a recovery of the tradition of moral philosophy against the reductionism of the modern social sciences. Their account of the intellectual history that led to the replacement of this classical and Christian paradigm for wisdom in ethics and the humanities, broadly considered, faithfully unpacks the faulty assumptions of this shaky modern and postmodern problem. In this series on replacing Bloom’s taxonomy with Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues, we have already had occasion to bring the razor edge of their intellectual knife to bear upon Bloom’s taxonomy itself. After all, Bloom’s taxonomy majors on a false analogy from the natural sciences (i.e. a taxonomy for ordering biological species) for the emerging social science of modern education, now obsessed with measurement, clear objectives, and abstract knowledge. 

But as stunning as Clark and Jain’s tour de force is from a broad, intellectual perspective, it leaves us with something missing that only a full recovery of Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of prudence can help us grasp. In order to understand this missing link, we will need to explain more completely Aristotle’s distinctions between prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis) and not only philosophic wisdom (sophia), but also their forerunners, scientific knowledge (episteme) and intuition (nous), as well as the moral virtues, with which prudence is inextricably linked. This set of distinctions will help us recognize more clearly the nature of this lost goal of education, the student’s prudence to decide and act reasonably with regard to human goods. 

(Read the first article in this series: The Counsels of the Wise, Part 1: Foundations of Christian Prudence.)

The key to Aristotle’s distinctions can be found in kernel form in a passage of C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man, which we have already cited. In defending the moral law against modernist skepticism, he claimed, “I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers” (24). Lewis’s point is that the character of a person is influenced by his upbringing and habits, more than his skill or intellectual attainments in philosophical speculation. Such a consideration raises the question of whether we are merely aiming at creating clever devils, or if we intend to educate students for genuine moral virtue and wisdom. In fact, in claiming that there is a type of wisdom, a moral philosophy even, which does not require the moral virtue of the philosopher, Lewis is underlining a crucial set of distinctions found in Aristotle.

Different Intellectual Virtues Have Different Ends

Aristotle began his Nicomachean Ethics by noting that different arts and sciences have different sorts of goals: “Now, as there are many actions, arts, and sciences, their ends also are many; the end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of economics wealth” (Book I, 1; Revised Oxford Trans., p. 1729; 1094a1ff.). The intellectual virtues contribute in different ways to the ultimate goal of happiness, Aristotle’s eudaimonia or human flourishing. These goals are not ancillary to the nature of the intellectual virtues themselves, but are part and parcel of their nature. It is because of this that we not only can but must distinguish between moral philosophy or science and practical wisdom or prudence, even though these seem to have the same subject matter. 

Perhaps Aristotle’s most helpful example of this set of distinctions occurs when he is discussing the difference between artistry and science. Using an example where the subject matter seems to overlap, he contrasts the perspective of the carpenter and the geometer:

For a carpenter and a geometer look for right angles in different ways; the former does so in so far as the right angle is useful for his work, while the latter inquires what it is or what sort of thing it is; for he is a spectator of the truth. We must act in the same way, then, in all other matters as well, that our main task may not be subordinated to minor questions. Nor must we demand the cause in all matters alike; it is enough in some cases that the fact be well established, as in the case of the first principles; the fact is a primary thing or first principle. Now of the first principles we see some by induction, some by perception, some by a certain habituation, and others too in other ways. But each set of principles we must try to investigate in the natural way, and we must take pains to determine them correctly, since they have a great influence on what follows. For the beginning is thought to be more than half of the whole, and many of the questions we ask are cleared up by it.

I, 7; R. Oxford, p. 1736; 1098a29 – 1098b8

The first part of this paragraph is clear enough; a carpenter doesn’t bother with the speculative complexities of angles and their essence like a geometer does. All he needs is a good-enough right angle to be getting on with. In fact, if he paused and contemplated the angle’s essence and relationships too long, he would cease acting as a carpenter. 

What is perhaps harder to see is how Aristotle’s train of thought applies this idea to his own treatise on ethics. We might expect him to side with the geometer, but instead he is claiming to avoid the “minor questions”of moral philosophy or speculative science that might distract him from the “main task.” What is his main task, we might ask? To instruct human beings in making decisions regarding what is good for them (i.e. to teach prudence), we must conclude. He needs a good-enough right angle, which any practiced carpenter can perceive just fine; right angles are one of those “facts” or “first principles,” with which a carpenter must work all the time in his craft. When we get these straight, the battle is more than half-won. 

In artistry or craftsmanship, these principles are perceived, reasoned at by induction, or habituated. The same is true of philosophic wisdom, where intuition (the Greek nous) must perceive first principles correctly, while scientific knowledge (episteme) demonstrates universal truths. Prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis) likewise has its forerunners; in fact, when Aristotle mentions “habituation” he most likely has in mind the habit-forming process as the necessary background for the intellectual virtue that deliberates well with regard to human goods. The moral virtues must link arms with the intellectual virtue of prudence for either to be complete.

As he explains, the prerequisite for understanding the subject matter of prudence is a proper moral upbringing:

Hence any one who is to listen intelligently to lectures about what is noble and just and, generally, about the subjects of political science must have been brought up in good habits. For the facts are the starting-point, and if they are sufficiently plain to him, he will not need the reason as well; and the man who has been well brought up has or can easily get starting-points. And as for him who neither has nor can get them, let him hear the words of Hesiod:

Far best is he who knows all things himself;

Good, he that hearkens when men counsel right;

But he who neither knows, nor lays to heart

Another’s wisdom, is a useless wight.

I, 4; R. Oxford, p. 1731; 1095b4ff.; quotation is from Works and Days 293-7.

A person cannot even “listen intelligently to lectures about what is noble and just” without some measure of moral excellence or “good habits,” according to Aristotle. It’s not that the situation for such a person is hopeless, but he must listen to and store up in his heart the counsels of the wise if he is to remedy the faults of his uninstructed conscience.

So far so good, as we have already mentioned the link between the moral virtues and prudence. But the presence of Lewis’s imaginary “moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers” seems to put the lie to Aristotle’s claim that good habits are a prerequisite… unless we consider the possibility that our modern moral philosopher is not a prudent man at all, but simply a scientist. He may reason accurately from accepted starting points or first principles in the tradition of inquiry for his discipline, but these do not originate from his personal convictions or familiarity with human goods through personal habituation. He is a professional, an academic, a peddler of abstract knowledge.

This then is the danger of missing Aristotle’s distinctions in intellectual virtues, because they are distinctions in the goals or ends of education. The carpenter’s goal is to create something with the material he uses; right angles are part of the necessary means to his product. The geometer aims to demonstrate abstract truths about angles and their relationship. What then is the moral philosopher’s goal? Is it demonstration of abstract truth about human nature? Then he is a scientist and he may or may not be very wise in his own life. But the prudent person requires a different sort of intellectual precision, because he must deliberate and make practical choices about how to live his life, in the midst of all the particularities that he inhabits. Too precise a moral science may not, in fact, be very useful to him. 

As Aristotle explains,

Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, exhibit much variety and fluctuation, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention and not by nature. And goods also exhibit a similar fluctuation because they bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage. We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each of our statements be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits: it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.

Book I, 3; Revised Oxford, p. 1730; 1094a13ff.

In a way, Aristotle is going further than our claim to say that moral science may be a flawed endeavor in and of itself. This coheres with Clark and Jain’s critique of the modern move toward the social sciences rather than accepting the tradition of moral philosophy. For Aristotle’ prudence is the goal of moral philosophy: his is a practical philosophy for life.

Filling the Gap in PGMAPT

The gap in Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition comes from the fact that they trace an intellectual history of the shift in assumptions or first principles for the academic disciplines of the social sciences or moral philosophy. While important in its own right, this move neglects the goal of prudence as an intellectual virtue: the person’s actual well lived life. But one way of developing the Aristotelian distinctions would argue that even moral philosophy is a form of sophia, philosophic wisdom. And while Aristotle ultimately regards sophia as a higher intellectual virtue than phronesis, he does not thereby exclude phronesis as necessary for a happy life (book VI, ch. 13). 

For this reason, we propose an addition to Clark and Jain’s PGMAPT (Piety, Gymnastic, Music, liberal Arts, Philosophy and Theology) paradigm of the liberal arts tradition. Piety, Music and Gymnastic may help form the habituated moral sensibilities necessary for prudence, but none of them seem to constitute the intellectual virtue of prudence itself. The liberal arts (as well as the fine and common arts) are traditional paths of artistry, as we contended in our series on Apprenticeship in the Arts. Philosophy has been traditionally divided into wisdom about the natural world, human goods and affairs (or moral philosophy) and divine philosophy or metaphysics, but the traditional terms for intellectual virtue in these areas are either science or scientific knowledge (episteme), or its more finished attainment of wisdom (sophia), which assumes an accurate perception and understanding of first principles (intuition or nous). 

Aristotle’s terminology and distinctions bring to light the need for another category alongside the acquisition of the liberal arts at the heart of this paradigm: the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom or prudence (phronesis). Otherwise, we leave out the reasoned outcome of moral formation: the educated person’s intellectual capacity to deliberate about what is good for himself and for other human beings. Andrew Kern of the CiRCE Institute has discussed rhetoric as the master art to rule them all, defining it as the art of decision-making in community. This helpfully draws out part of the connection between the liberal arts and prudence; they are in fact interdependent. On the other hand, Kern’s move unhelpfully collapses Aristotle’s distinction between the intellectual virtues of prudence and artistry. One can be skilled in the liberal arts and imprudent; likewise, a person could be prudent but a poor communicator.

In actual fact, the proper goals of education must include prudence separately from the liberal arts, otherwise we will end up neglecting the beating heart of education, just like the modern educators that C.S. Lewis bemoaned. In our zeal for the traditions of the liberal arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric, or arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, we will neglect teaching students to reason effectively with regard to their own choices as individuals. At the school where I work we have a Latin saying that we often repeat at assembly, non scholae, sed vitae, not for school, but for life. The liberal arts, as I have argued elsewhere, are in fact also practical tools for the workaday world, in spite of our Aristotelian love of leisure and the contemplative life. But viewed in and of themselves and without the guiding heart of prudence, without practical reasoning in line with the traditional moral virtues, the liberal arts are hollow. They must have blood of real moral decision-making pumping through them, if the body of our education is to be more than a hollowed-out corpse. 

Another way of putting this might be to call for a third strand through the trunk of the tree of Clark and Jain’s PGMAPT paradigm. Instead of piety simply remaining in the grounding or roots of the tree, “governed by theology” up top, it should intertwine with the liberal arts in the form of prudential wisdom, as distinct from moral philosophy (nota bene: the trivium might more naturally find its culmination in metaphysics then). To be clear, I am not claiming that Clark and Jain have forgotten about or been unconcerned with matters concerning the development of prudence, only that without naming practical wisdom distinctly as an intellectual virtue, it does in fact tend to be neglected by teachers in a modern educational environment. 

Moral virtue has been and will continue to be a major concern of the classical education movement. The point of this series, however, is to see what light Aristotle’s specific and unique paradigm of five intellectual virtues sheds on the goals of education. Aristotle’s distinction between the moral virtues and the intellectual virtues, specifically the intellectual virtue of phronesis or practical wisdom calls for a recognition of prudence as a proper goal of education:

Excellence too is distinguished into kinds in accordance with this difference; for we say that some excellences are intellectual and others moral, philosophic wisdom and understanding and practical wisdom being intellectual, liberality and temperance moral. For in speaking about a man’s character we do not say that he is wise or has understanding but that he is good-tempered or temperate; yet we praise the wise man also with respect to his state; and of states we call those which merit praise excellences.

I, 13, p. 1742; 1103a4-10

Influenced as we are by Bloom’s taxonomy of objectives in the cognitive domain we tend to separate moral matters from so called academic ones; of course, simply by adopting a Christian frame of reference, we may go some way toward the practices that attempt to habituate piety and good morals in the young. Our teachers may also be less reticent in teaching various subjects to bring up aspects of goodness within a committed moral frame of reference. But this does not mean that students are actively instructed in moral reasoning in any substantive way through a standard course of study.

The liberal arts can be used in service of prudence or practical wisdom, but they can also be used in the service of episteme, scientific knowledge, or nous, intuition or understanding. They are formidable tools in this sense. But between Is and Ought, the reasoning of Fact and of Value, Truth and Goodness, there is a wall of separation. Just because something is so does not make it right. Modern skepticism about value judgments posits that “they are entirely subjective and relative to the individual who makes them,” Mortimer Adler points out in Six Great Ideas (68). Therefore, the modern academic bred on Bloom’s has been inclined to collapse all prescriptive statements into merely descriptive ones. Teachers trained in modern colleges and graduate schools have been trained in this sort of descriptive precision, and will therefore be unlikely to venture out into the prescriptive arena of moral reasoning in their teaching of literature, history, science and mathematics, unless practical wisdom is made a specific course goal of their instruction. 

How would we in fact instruct the consciences of our students for prudence throughout the K-12 sequence? This will be the subject of future articles. But before we close we can note a one promising idea for teaching prudence already present in the classical education movement. That is David Hicks’s conception of the Ideal Type in Norms and Nobility:

An Ideal Type tyrranized classical education. The ancient schoolmaster in his intense struggle to achieve a living synthesis of thought and action exemplified this Ideal and passed it on to his pupils by inviting them to share in his struggle for self-knowledge and self-mastery, the immature mind participating in the mature. Against this Ideal were the master’s achievements and his pupil’s judged. All fell short, of course, but some – and here’s the rub – far less short than others.

David Hicks, Norms and Nobility, 43.

Hicks’s educational vision is described by Gene Veith and Andrew Kern as “moral classicism” for good reason (Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America, revised and updated, Capital Research Center: 2001; see pp. 37ff). In his restoration of “norms” Hicks seems to fuse the ideals of artistry, practical wisdom and philosophic, in the persons of master and pupil, as aspiring individuals. In this way his fusion represents dramatically the type of inquiry of the Great Books and humanities that would cultivate practical wisdom; even science “must be pulled down from its non-normative pedestal,” and be turned toward practical wisdom. Scientific “analysis must be framed within the normative inquiry [of human values] if science is to serve life, not destroy it” (Norms and Nobility, 145).

Reviving moral philosophy in the later years of K-12 education is not enough. Instead, we must fully recover the intellectual virtue of prudence as a major goal of education in our classical Christian schools and allow a vision of the Ideal Type to shape our curriculum and teaching methods in all subjects and grades.

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In the quotation above, Charlotte Mason identifies what she believes are the three instruments of education at a teacher’s disposal: atmosphere, discipline, and life. In my first article in this series, I explored the instrument of atmosphere. 

In Mason’s view, the sort of atmosphere a teacher builds is dependent primarily on her view of her students. If students are primarily future contributors to the economy, then the efficiency-driven model of a factory will do. The priority will be to standardize the content as much as possible and boil down the educational process to an assembly line of simple, repeatable acts and interchangeable parts. Likewise, if students are information processors at core, then the atmosphere of a computer lab will suffice. Pack as much information as possible into a lecture, or textbook, and call on students to analyze the data as if they were little Microsoft Excel humanoids.

But if students are persons, relational beings made in the image of God, that are endowed with 1) minds to contemplate and create 2) wills to choose the good (or evil) 3) physical bodies to steward and 4) souls to connect with God Himself, then the task of education, and the atmosphere of a classroom by implication, will look very different.

In today’s article, I will move on to the second instrument of Mason’s triad: “Education is a Discipline.” We will see that, like atmosphere, discipline, or training, is very much an instrument with the idea of students as persons in view. God created humans as persons hard-wired for growth. Either they grow or decline over time; there is no such thing as a static human being. It therefore falls to parents and teachers to consider how they will help children grow, especially through supporting them to develop good habits from a young age. These habits over time become the soil for a child’s moral life to spring up. This is the instrument of discipline. 

Preparing Children for the World…But Which World?

Let us acknowledge it: life is difficult. People face a variety of challenges throughout life, whether they be financial, relational, professional, physical, or otherwise. This realization finds credence across philosophies and religions. The writer of Ecclesiastes observes that life is full of toil and ultimately meaningless (apart from God). The Buddha built a whole religion on four noble truths, the first being that “life is suffering.” There is no shortage of trials we will encounter as human beings. Our posture should therefore pivot from one of full avoidance of these trials, but rather an acceptance and preparation for how to overcome them.

In the classic dystopian novel Brave New World (First Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), originally published by Harper and Brothers in 1932, author Aldous Huxley imagines a future world state in which the trials described above are all but eliminated. Through genetically engineering humans for specific castes, abolishing traditional moral norms, and mass producing happiness-producing drugs for daily consumption, the brave new world is one of ever-present, uninterrupted, happiness.

Interestingly, in this world, there seems to be no need for nobility, heroism, or discipline for that matter. It is a tailor-made civilization in which natural impulses are free to run their course with no fear of the consequences. Habits can continue to be helpful, but there are mechanisms already built into society to prevent real negative consequences from occurring. The startling result: “Anyone can be virtuous now” (238).

Of course, this is not our world, at least, not yet. The children we instruct, whether in our homes or classrooms, must be prepared to encounter challenges, friction points, trials, and opportunities to do what is right. This struggle is constituted both externally (in the circumstances they face) and internally (in mastering their own thoughts, desires, and choices).

Raising children to be disciplined, therefore, should be no afterthought in education. It is a primary responsibility for raising strong, thoughtful, noble, and virtuous men and women.

The Discipline of Habits 

Charlotte Mason believed that the key to helping children build strong moral wills and productive intellectual lives is through instilling good habits. These habits are to be trained, not through the harsh ruling of a Victorian task-master, or the behavioral manipulation of rewards systems, but through relationship, accountability, and support. Maryellen St. Cyr, co-founder of Ambleside Schools International, writes, “The idea of education as a discipline encompasses the full realm of education, taking into account its varied relationships–intellectual, moral, physical, religious, and social, as well as the great potential of persons to move in directions of change and growth” (When Children Love to Learn, 89).

This growth can be developed from a young age through habit training. In modern education, the general thought is to “let kids be kids” and by that it is meant for teachers to permit the majority of children’s natural impulses to run free in the classroom. The heart behind this sentiment, of course, is a desire for the children to be happy. But Mason’s profound insight, which is replete with biblical truth, is that equipping students to develop control over these impulses is actually what will set them up well for a life of flourishing. As one proverb puts it, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6, ESV).

We can begin to see that through helping students develop good habits–attention, self-control, respects for others, kindness, and responsibility–we are preparing them for a life of growth. In Home Education, Charlotte Mason writes, “It is unchangeably true that the child who is not being consistently raised to a higher and a higher platform will sink to a lower and a lower. Wherefore, it is as much the parent’s duty to educate his child into moral strength and purpose and intellectual activity as it is to feed him and clothe him” (103).

As teachers work to train habits in the classroom, they must always keep the vision of building up persons in view. To differentiate between building up persons and mere external conformity, Maryellen St. Cyr makes this table of distinction:

What Neuroscientists Have to Say

As we have noted on Educational Renaissance on multiple occasions, such as here, the practice of habit training, which is what Charlotte Mason primarily means by the instrument of discipline, finds encouraging support in modern neuroscience. Each time we perform an act, we are rewiring our neural pathways and even creating new brain cells, processes called neuroplasticity and neurogenesis.

Mason, herself a lover of modern research, was tracking the earliest scientific discoveries of this phenomenon. She writes, “New brain tissue is being constantly formed at a startlingly rapid rate: one wonders at what age the child has no longer any part left of that brain with which he was born (Home Education, 115). 

Later she goes on to conclude:

“What follows? Why, that the actual conformation of the child’s brain depends upon the habits which the parents permit or encourage; and that the habits of the child produce the character of the man…”

Charlotte Mason, Home Education, 118.

What a profound and even mysterious insight, this connection between moral philosophy and modern neuroscience. God, in His providence, truly created us as mind-body unities. Our brains affect our morals and our morals affect our brains. And while the non-religious materialist might use these scientific discoveries to make the case that even moral phenomenon has a natural explanation, I find the more compelling conclusion to be that this sort of moral-biological synthesis is exactly what we should expect of a universe fashioned by a wise Creator.

From Habits to Virtues

The Greek philosopher Aristotle is one of the earliest proponents of habit training. He draws a straight line from habits through virtue to happiness itself. But unlike in Brave New World, in which happiness is the maximization of pleasure, Aristotle tethers happiness to virtue. Happiness is an activity that is manifested over a whole life as humans align their lives with virtues laid down by reason (A History of Philosophy, Volume 1: From Greece to Rome by Frederick Coppleston, p. 334). However, unlike Cynic contemporaries in his day, Aristotle did not excise pleasure from the equation completely. He acknowledged that circumstances can and do play a role in one’s overall flourishing. But the pathway to happiness is ultimately through virtuous activity, not pleasure-seeking. To be truly happy, one must live a life of activity in accordance with virtue. 

So how do humans become virtuous? Aristotle believed it was through practice, by cultivating good habits. People become virtuous by doing virtuous acts. A soldier becomes courageous, not through reading about it, though that will help, but through stepping foot in the arena. Likewise, a child becomes honest by practicing telling the truth.

Now, some may anticipate the objection of circular thinking. How can one do virtuous acts without being virtuous? But how can one be virtuous without doing virtuous acts? 

Philosopher Frederick Coppleston offers this response on behalf of Aristotle: “We begin by doing acts which are objectively virtuous, without having a flex knowledge of the acts and a deliberate choice of the acts as good, a choice resulting from an habitual disposition…The accusation of a vicious circle is thus answered by the distinction between the acts which create the good disposition and the acts which flow from the good disposition once it has been created” (335). 

In other words, virtue formation is a process. We train children to begin acting in certain ways, holding them to certain expectations, even before they fully understand the “why.” To be sure, we want to relationally come beside them and discuss how particular habits are for the good of themselves and others. But we also need to be patient, understanding that the process of moral development is a lifelong journey, even for adults, one in which moral knowledge and practice slowly grow more and more aligned.

Towards a Christian View of Virtue Formation

So far, I have been discussing the notions of happiness, virtues, and habits without much reference to our Christian faith. To begin making these connections, I find Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s comments in The Liberal Arts Tradition (Classical Academic Press, 2019) really helpful.

Clark and Jain augment a Christian, classical notion of Aristotle’s conception of virtue by connecting virtue to participation in Christ (137). Virtue is more than human effort accompanied by the goods that come of it. It is the path of following Christ and growing in Christlikeness. It encompasses increasing spiritual intimacy with Him through obedience and reliance on the Holy Spirit. Virtue for a Christian begins by being raised with Christ and becoming a new creation (Colossians 3). When this happens, the righteousness of Christ becomes ours, and we are empowered to begin down the path of sanctification, or personal holiness.

There is much, much more to unpack here theologically, but I will need to put this work off for another article. Suffice it to say that for Christians, habit training and virtual formation should be inextricably linked to our walk with Christ and growing in unity with Him.

Conclusion

C.S. Lewis once wrote, “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue (The Abolition of Man, 77). By training students in habits, we are preparing students for the real world. This world is not one free of struggle, pain, and unrestricted passion, as fantasized in Brave New World. Rather it is a world of both comfort and struggle, joy and pain, self-restraint and pleasure.

The well-trained student can navigate both, but not by accident. Rather, it is through year after year of virtue formation through habit training. As the metal worker bends his material into proper shape, so we has humans, through practicing habits, can gradually build lives aligned with virtue. United with Christ, we acknowledge that this strength comes not from us, but from the Holy Spirit, as His power is made perfect in our weakness.

If you want to go deeper into habit training, your next step is to download our free eBook. Enjoy!

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