Summary
Modern education suffers from two extremes in physical training: on one side, sedentary and undisciplined children who are weak and unhealthy; on the other, overtrained athletes engaged in excessive, specialized sports that do not contribute to a well-lived life. Neither extreme is reasonable.
Drawing on Aristotle, physical education must aim at a golden mean—a balanced development of the body that serves the soul. The body is the instrument of the soul, and without proper physical training, a person’s intellectual and moral potential cannot be fully realized. Physical discipline cultivates strength, endurance, temperance, and courage, all of which are necessary for serious intellectual work and practical life.
This view is reinforced by Christian teaching, especially in John Cassian, who explains that moral and spiritual progress begins with the discipline of the body. If bodily appetites such as gluttony are not controlled, higher development is impossible.
Therefore, physical education should not be treated as optional or recreational, nor should it be dominated by competitive sports. Instead, it must be a structured, disciplined program aimed at forming virtuous, capable human beings—prepared both for rigorous study and for the difficult work of living well.
Transcript
One of the problems that we face in modern culture, especially American culture, is that we’ve got two extremes, as it were, when it comes to physical fitness. On the one extreme, we’ve got children and adults, but let’s just focus on children. Since we’re talking about education, we’ve got children who are inactive, sedentary, locked up indoors, overfed, obese and so on. We have kids who are unhealthy. They’re not strong, they’re not temperate, they’re indulged. They’re very, very weak and often sick. That’s what we see on one side.
On the other side, we’ve got this crazy modern athlete who’s signed up for organized sports that require all kinds of specialized training, travel equipment and so on, and we’ve got the cultivation of this highly specialized team competitor, and it’s hard to find many examples of moderation between these two extremes.
I grew up as a kid who was involved in sports, and I’ve raised my kids to be active and fit, and I found, as my kids have moved into adult life, that their physical discipline and fitness has been far more important in their practical success than their intellectual education has. They have a great advantage over others in a competitive workplace because they’re disciplined and fit, they’re temperate and tough, they’re courageous and so on. And all of those virtues were cultivated through their childhood by the activity of their life. They never played any organized sports, and yet they’re all strong, fit, disciplined and so on.
When they have a task to complete, their physical readiness is never an obstacle. It’s just a matter of wanting to do something for them, and they understand what it takes to get things done, and that’s usually what we talk about when they call home looking for advice. They usually need to be reminded of what I tell them all the time, which is that nothing is ever easy. Nothing is ever easy to actually accomplish things in life, no matter what it is. There’s tons of talk in our society and very little accomplishment. Real accomplishments are never easy, even things that may seem simple still have to be done. And all the obstacles, all the distractions that come along—that’s part of the challenge and excuses are meaningless.
That’s the kind of stuff I talk about with my kids. And my kids have the discipline and the toughness to take that counsel and put it to work, and that’s why they’re doing courageous, disciplined things as adults.
But when I look around in general, at the Christian community, at schools, at the so-called classical education movement, when I taught in classical schools, when I taught in Christian schools, I’ve seen this dilemma of opposite extremes. You have the wimpy, nerdy kids on one side, and you’ve got the athletic kids wrapped up in all kinds of team sports on the other side.
And the question that I’d like to discuss in this talk today is: what would wise men of history advise us to do if Aristotle, for example, was to design our school or our family physical education program? What would it look like? And this is very important, as we’ll see as we go through this topic. It’s very important because I’ll make a very bold claim: without proper physical training, without proper physical education, the real work of classical education, of philosophical education, can’t be pursued to its full extent. Our potential as learners won’t be realized, and that should concern us. If our physical training is not what it should be, our intellectual training will be restricted.
So I’d like to talk about what Aristotle and at least one other wise man from history would advise on what we might call a classical physical education program.
First of all, Aristotle taught on the subject quite extensively in the ancient world, in the fourth century before Christ. If you want to read what Aristotle says about physical training, you can find his teaching in his work on Politics in books seven and eight. You can also find Plato’s teaching in the Republic on similar issues, but Aristotle’s teaching in books seven and eight are most helpful.
I’d also like you to consider that Aristotle, as a teacher, produced Alexander the Great, who became the model for Hellenistic culture. Aristotle’s teaching didn’t produce a bunch of fragile, fussy nerds. Aristotle’s teaching produced a man who became the master of the world, one of the greatest military champions, if not the greatest military champion in world history. So Aristotelian training, Aristotelian education, isn’t for bookworms, it’s not for nerds. It’s for men who want to live active lives directed by wisdom.
And when we look to Aristotle’s philosophy of education, he begins in a way that most schools, really almost all schools, and most home schools don’t follow. He begins with an emphasis in the early years, an emphasis on what he called gymnastics. Now that doesn’t mean the same thing that it means today. It doesn’t mean Olympic gymnastics. It doesn’t mean signing up for a gymnastics club and learning how to do all different kinds of Olympic activities. Gymnastics simply referred to physical training.
And the physical training that Aristotle was concerned with had a purpose. He believed and taught that the body was an instrument of the soul. The body is the instrument of the soul. The soul can learn and can will, but it can only do what the body makes possible. And in fact, the body can limit what the intellect or the soul can learn, and the body can also limit what the soul will. So the relationship between the body and the soul, which are the parts of the human person, they work together. The body is the instrument of the soul.
The way that I like to think about this is I like to think about working on the farm. When I use a tractor, I like to think about myself as the operator of the tractor, as the soul, and the tractor as the body. And the question is: Do I want a strong and agile and durable tractor to work with, or does it not matter, as long as I’m smart? And the answer is that I want the strongest, most agile and most durable tractor or equipment in general that I can possibly get.
It’s interesting in Dante’s Divine Comedy, one of the ways that Dante refers to God is as the person in whom the ability to will and to do are the same, or will and power are one. That’s the ideal. And so it doesn’t matter if we know great things or if we will great things, if we can’t do great things. And so the cultivation of the body, the training of the body, is necessary for a great life. And by a great life, I mean living out and fulfilling our potential as human beings, and the purpose of education is to help children realize their human potential. So the cultivation of the body is essential to the formation of a student.
And Aristotle taught this. He taught that students should be focused, especially at the beginning of their education, on gymnastics, the training of the body, on music, the cultivation of the soul, and then on the liberal arts. Those three—the cultivation of gymnastics, music and the intellectual arts. And the goal of gymnastics was to train the student to be strong enough and disciplined enough to succeed in the rigors of that intellectual life, and then, of course, to actually go and do what that intellectual life directs.
So when we look back into Greek history, after Aristotle, we find a great emphasis on the gymnasium, the place where this training takes place. And there is an important clarification that needs to be made here.
If you read in the Old Testament the book of First Maccabees, you’ll find that after the death of Alexander the Great, his successors brought Hellenistic culture all through the world, and that included Israel and Jerusalem, and yet we read in the first book of the Maccabees that the faithful Jews rejected the gymnasium. They would not allow that Hellenistic culture to be established in their holy land. Those who do embrace that Hellenistic culture are presented to us as the unfaithful, those who abandon God, and those who reject it are the faithful.
And so this might cause us to doubt whether an Aristotelian view of gymnastic culture and gymnastic education is good for Christians or not. It seems to be opposed in the scriptures. But if we give attention to the details, we can see what’s actually going on.
We know that there is sort of a fantasy history about Greek and Roman culture. And we hear historical narratives about the fact that the Greeks performed these gymnastic exercises naked. And of course, when immoral people get a hold of that history, they run wild with it and try to turn everything into some kind of liberal immoral culture. But that’s not what it was. Surely, there were immoral people in Greek culture, but there were also extraordinarily moral men in Greek culture, and when we read about the fact that they exercised without clothing on, we have to put it in its historical context.
We live in fantasy land in the 21st century. When I exercise, I change out of my ordinary clothes and put on exercise clothes. I put on breathable T-shirts that are made of special fibers and special patterns that allow for my body to breathe while I exercise. I put on exercise shorts and socks and sneakers, all of these supplies and resources that we have in modern society. When I’m done exercising, I hop in the shower, whether I’m at the gym or at home, change back into my normal clothes.
We’re rich when it comes to varieties of resources and clothing. We have special outfits, special pieces of clothing for different activities: yoga pants, basketball shorts, weightlifting shirts, running shorts, running shoes, cross-training shoes, tennis shoes, basketball shoes, all of this specialization in modern society, and we take this for granted. And we read history as if they had all of these options and didn’t use them, but chose instead to run around naked. The truth is they didn’t have the same kind of resources that we do in modern capitalistic culture, and so things like exercising nude, or at least stripped down to what would be called their loincloths, would be normal in ancient culture.
They also shared common toilets. We don’t do that, and the reason why is largely because of the availability of building materials and so on today. So we shouldn’t assume that they did the things that they did in our circumstances, which would be very strange. If I went to the local health club and saw a man working out naked, I’d call the police. In ancient Greece, it would have been considered normal.
But in Jewish culture, because their identity was marked by circumcision, that naked culture became a real source of trouble. Many of the Jews were ashamed of their circumcision because it made them different, made them appear different, and they wanted to fit into the Hellenistic culture. And so you can see how that created a moral or religious dilemma that many chose badly.
In the other concern in the Hellenistic gymnasia was that the religion of the Greeks was often included. And so not only were they exercising and performing Greek activities, but they were also doing things that recognized the ancient Greek deities, the gods and goddesses. And so when the Greek culture was installed in a place, all of that was installed, and that had nothing to do with Aristotle’s teaching on exercise.
Aristotle didn’t teach that men need to exercise naked. He didn’t teach that there needs to be pagan religious activities participated in. Aristotle was concerned with the moral formation of students, and so we need to separate Aristotle’s teaching on the value of physical training and the Greek culture that may have been attached to that in history. So that should remedy that dilemma for us.
Aristotle’s concern was the formation of virtue. That’s what he was concerned with. The body, as I said, was viewed as the instrument of the soul, and the goal was not to develop the body for its own sake, which is what we see today with bodybuilders, where the building up of muscle mass is an end pursued for its own sake. That’s not what Aristotle was interested in. He wouldn’t consider that wise.
Nor would he consider sports training to be the goal of physical fitness. He wouldn’t consider modern sports training—whether it’s youth recreation leagues or high school, college and professional sports—he would consider all of that to be excessive. And if you’ve played sports, you know that that’s true because you spend so much time, so much time developing skills that are useful in that particular sport and are useless outside of that sport.
For example, learning how to hit a curveball is not going to help you live a good life. Learning how to dribble a basketball, learning how to run a basketball offense, learning plays in a football offense—I learned how to run the triple option offense as a kid. That doesn’t help me in real life. Hours and hours, years and years spent learning specific, specialized sport skills that really serve no purpose in life—that’s excessive and irrational in Aristotle’s teaching.
And so when we consider physical training, we realize that there is an end or a formal cause for physical training, and the end is to be able to live well. That’s the goal of physical training: to give ourselves the ability to fulfill our potential as human beings who are made of body and soul.
So just as Aristotle does in all moral issues, he establishes a golden mean. On the one extreme is the evil or the vice of a lack of fitness of any kind, and on the opposite extreme is an equally vicious and disordered excess of athletic training in a specialized activity or for its own sake, as with bodybuilding. So we have this spectrum with extremes on opposite ends, and somewhere in the middle is the golden mean, where we find this balance of physical training, which is considered virtue. That’s what Aristotle would have us investigate and seek in our own physical exercise.
The goal of this physical exercise, according to Aristotle, was to cultivate the body’s natural strength, to make the body capable of doing all that it’s designed to do, to make it agile, to be balanced, to be free from sickness and pain, to develop endurance, the ability to work hard for extended periods of time. All of those virtues of the body are valuable and necessary for us to do all that we can to fulfill our potential.
But even more importantly is that that training provides us with a body that’s capable of enduring labor intellectually or philosophically: the ability to study, to pay attention, to exert great effort for extended periods of time, to minimize a need for sleep, to minimize a need for food and comforts, to not be averse to things that are difficult, to understand what it feels like to persevere through a task, to finish an assigned activity, and so on. Those were virtues that were cultivated through physical training.
The goal was to make a virtuous person with a sound mind in a sound body. That was the goal. There was no admiration for the feeble and unhealthy nerd, and there was also no admiration for the ignorant extreme athlete. The goal was that balanced man who fulfilled the potential of both body and soul, and we can consider a man like Alexander, even though he has his obvious defects, we can consider a man like David in Jewish history, men who were all that they could be, all that they should be, in both body and soul.
That was the goal of Aristotle’s vision for physical training, and he would approve of no school or no educational program that neglected the body or that pursued physical activity in an excessive and irrational way. So that’s the principle, that’s the goal that we learned from Aristotle, and it’s pretty obvious and rational. I don’t think anyone would doubt the value of that, even though we don’t do it because we just dropped the ball in education.
So that’s the first thing. If we think about it from a purely secular philosophical perspective, we can’t deny that our nature consists of body and soul, and it makes no sense to have a body that isn’t developed to the point where it can enable us to fulfill all of our potential and enable us to do great things.
There is also a religious side to this. If we go back to the early Christians, and one Christian in particular, John Cassian, who was a favorite writer of mine when I was in college. John Cassian wrote a treatise on what he called the eight principal faults, the eight principles, or capital sins. I think it’s better to think of them as the eight principal faults.
And what he did was explain the challenge that a man faces in seeking spiritual perfection, the perfection of his life. And he lists these eight faults, and you may be familiar with them. They include things like gluttony, lust, sloth, greed, anger and so on. And so we’ve got this list of the eight principal faults.
But what’s most interesting is he says that these are never to be considered isolated or disconnected individual faults. They’re all one. They’re all part of one system of virtue or spiritual life. And he gives this great illustration of a city with eight gates. And he says each of these gates of the city represents one of these eight faults. And he says the great enemy seeking to attack the city is the devil, and the devil doesn’t care which gate he enters through.
So just because you guard one of the gates and hold it fast doesn’t mean the devil will turn around and leave because he only wants to enter that one gate. He’s willing to enter any of the eight gates. And so if you leave one open, the city will fall. And so it’s an all or nothing challenge for us in the spiritual life. We have got to either rid ourselves of all of these eight faults, or we leave the gates open for our spiritual destruction.
However, after explaining that, he says there is an order in which they’re to be fought against. There is an order in which they’re to be removed. And interestingly, like Aristotle, he says they begin with the faults of the body. They begin with the training of the body. And so he begins with the first of the eight principal faults, which is gluttony.
And he says that if a man cannot bring this fault under control, if he can’t rid himself of the fault of gluttony, his spiritual development cannot progress beyond the first step. Gluttony is the first fault to be fought against, and he doesn’t define gluttony as eating too much. He doesn’t give any detailed description of what gluttony is in terms of quantity or quality of food. He talks about it rather as a moral fault, as a weakness. He describes it as the pleasure of the palate, the desire to please or gratify the taste. That’s how John Cassian described gluttony: the desire to gratify the taste.
And he argued that a man should live and eat and drink according to what’s necessary and good for the body according to reason, and that should be the rule for food and drink in his life, and anything pursued beyond that or outside of that is that fault which makes us vulnerable to failure and doesn’t allow us to progress.
And then after gluttony, he argues, lust is the second fault to be fought against. And again, this is a fault of the body, the desire for pleasure of the body, most obviously in the form of sexual pleasure, but gluttony comes first. And this is why in Catholic moral teaching, if you read writings on fasting, you’ll find that one of the motives for fasting is the reduction of lust. And there’s a connection. St. Thomas teaches about this. There’s a connection between lust and gluttony.
So we can see Cassian’s teaching how there are these different faults, that they’re related to each other as one system. And they begin with the body and progress to the faults of the soul, the last of which is pride. But these are Cassian’s eight principal faults, and we see how this aligns and in a way explains Aristotle’s teaching on physical training, which has much more to do with virtue than any kind of competition or sport. It’s got to do with the training of our own body, so that the body assists the soul rather than hinders the soul in the pursuit of its perfection.
And don’t forget that in Aristotle’s ethics, we learn that the perfection of the soul in virtue does not stop at individual happiness, but extends to the pursuit and service of the common good. So you can start to get a vision of the whole life that not only Aristotle, but also the early Christian spiritual masters were teaching.
And this becomes the foundation for talk about physical education within the context of classical education. It’s not optional. It shouldn’t be stuck on as an elective or an enrichment course. It shouldn’t be reduced to recess time. It should really be considered a central part of the training of rational animals.
A good example of this can be found in the military. Any time we want to think about education from a rational perspective, we should look to the military, because in the military, there’s really no nonsense. They have a very specific mission that they’re working towards, and we can see how that mission is pursued by the training that they organize, especially because this training is based on extensive experience in the actual operation of military activities.
I always laugh when I hear people making excuses for kids that they need to be dealt with gently. They need to be indulged. They need to be cuddled and comforted and so on. But then, when a kid leaves for the military, he gets off a bus on his military base when he arrives for basic training, and he’s greeted by a tough, scary, screaming drill sergeant that just attacks and harasses him non-stop, day and night for weeks and weeks and weeks.
The military understands the need for discipline. The military understands the need for toughness, for attention to detail, for endurance, for courage and so on. And it’s no different. It’s no different whether you’re in the infantry or whether you’re an officer working in an office, or whether you’re a medic or whether you’re a helicopter pilot. The demand for physical training, the demand for physical fitness is the same.
There is a general fitness requirement for all soldiers, regardless of their occupations in the military. Obviously, special operators have higher standards because they’re trained for special missions that are extremely dangerous and demanding, but the general army has general fitness requirements that are forced upon recruits when they arrive for basic training, and failure to fulfill those requirements is very rare, which blows up most of the excuses we make for them.
But we see how the military prepares the soldier, generally through basic training, and then after basic training provides them with their unique or individual occupational training. We see there in the military the model that Aristotle would suggest for education in general. There needs to be a cultivation of the strength of the body, a cultivation of temperance and order and discipline and toughness and courage, so that the intellectual capacities of the human life may be fulfilled. One depends on the other, and that’s the model. That’s the model.
And so the military life really gives us an illustration of what’s necessary for proper human education: the formation of the body in preparation for the formation of the soul, and then a cycle where the formation of the soul then makes use of that disciplined body, and that disciplined body enables the continued growth of the soul, and then that growing soul is able to demand more from its body in terms of increasing in works. And we see how that cycle builds and how a great man is educated.
So that’s the vision for classical Catholic physical education. That’s the vision.
Now the modern failure in schools and home schools is that these opposite extremes tend to be the norm. I see pictures very commonly shared by home school families where the kids are studying at home, they live a very disorderly, undisciplined life. The kids are often obese or they’re weak and uncoordinated, even sickly, and parents act as if, since they’re making progress in their academic work, everything is going well, and that’s simply not true.
The academic work is going to prove to be useless when there’s no body prepared to put it to work. The intellectual development, assuming that it’s even real intellectual development, and not just the collecting of encyclopedic learning, which is common, which is often presented as classical education—just collecting historical and literary, geographical information, math facts, stuff like that—that’s often labeled classical education, but that information in a sick, powerless body is going to be useless.
And on the opposite extreme, we find schools and home schools where kids are devoted to competitive sports, where they’re cultivating all kinds of high levels of specialized sport skills to the large neglect of intellectual pursuits. There’s an imbalance. The athletics are pursued to excess, and they begin to negatively affect learning rather than serve learning.
Now, when I was a teacher, I used to like teaching athletes because I knew that I could push them as a teacher, and I as a teacher was much more like a sports coach than any kind of indulgent mother. I like to teach athletes because I knew they understood the concepts. I knew they understood how to pursue a goal. I knew they understood that they needed to focus, that they needed to train, that they needed to practice, that they needed to learn strategy. I knew they understood all those concepts, and I knew that I could push them and I could challenge them, and I could be tough with them.
I liked teaching athletic kids, but often, as I said, their athletic activity was just disordered. It was excessive. They were too busy with athletic activities, and it took away from their ability to grow intellectually.
And we see all this talk about, well, you can earn a college scholarship. You can—and all of that is a real distraction, because there’s no need to earn college scholarships through competitive sports. There are many different ways to take care of the costs of college education. We don’t need to be pro volleyball players to go to college. We don’t need to be pro football players to go to college. That excuse for excessive attention to sports needs to be rejected.
If you do well in your studies, you can also earn scholarships. So we don’t need to be told that specialized sport excellence is necessary to pursue academics. Pursuing academics in a balanced life will also provide for academics. And so there’s a need for balance, and both schools and home schools err.
And I’m not saying schools err with respect to excessive athletic activity and home schools err with a defect of activity. Both faults are present in both home schools and schools. We find the same problems. But my point is the idea that’s commonly taught in home schools—that disorder and lack of culture, the freedom of kids to just kind of wander and explore and do whatever they want—that’s the opposite of the goal of education that Aristotle or that any wise men or saints of history ever taught.
And likewise, the school obsession with extracurricular activities is also a distraction from what should be the principal work of the school, which is intellectual. The intellectual content of the modern school is deficient because there’s so much other junk that’s taken up school time, resources and so on, and all of that needs to be brought into order. Extracurricular activities, sports—they need to be reorganized and made subject to the higher ends of human life.
This is one of the reasons we see so few religious vocations coming from these modern schools and home schools. It is because those extracurricular activities have just crowded out from the kids’ lives time and energy for the cultivation of the intellect, which is really the foundation of the contemplative life.
So there needs to be a golden mean established with respect to physical training and all of the physical activity, the physical fitness, exercise, diet and so on. All needs to be brought into the service of the intellect, allowing the student to pursue the perfection of the intellect and the will by means of the study of the classical liberal arts. That’s the definition of classical education: the fulfillment of human potential, the perfection of human nature, pursued by means of the study of the liberal arts for the perfection of the intellect and will.
Physical exercise and fitness are useful insofar as they serve that end. Once they go beyond that end, or once they fall deficient of that end, they become vices and obstacles to that purpose for education.
So as we consider an idea of classical physical education, it’s got to have this Aristotelian sense of the golden mean as its guiding principle. It’s got to have virtue, the cultivation of virtue as its end. It’s got to consider the teaching of Cassian on the eight principal faults, and that this battle against vice begins with vices of the body. It’s got to begin there, or we’ll never make any progress, and all of this activity in the name of schooling will prove to actually be hindering us from the goal of schooling.
So the solution, as I said, would be the development of a program of physical training and discipline that strengthens the body, tempers the desires, cultivates the virtues of temperance and courage and prepares a body that allows a student to do the rigorous work of study in the classical liberal arts—very difficult, rigorous work—and then also to put that education into action in the presence of many obstacles and enemies in the real world, where all of that strength and toughness and courage and endurance will be necessary.
That’s the purpose of what we’ll call a classical physical education program: to enable real study and to also be able to put that real study to work.
This makes me think of the Dominican motto in the Dominican Order, where we say that our goal is to contemplate and share the fruits of that contemplation. The work of contemplation is rigorous and difficult. We need to have the physical strength to be able to do that work, but we also need to have the physical strength and the disposition to share the fruit of that work, which is often met with opposition, which is often unpopular.
We need to have the strength to resist peer pressure. We need to have the strength to undertake works that are not supported by large groups of people, for which there is no government funding, or which there won’t be any great donors, for which we will not be able to charge high fees. We’ve got to learn to be able to do that work. We’ve got to undertake work that needs to be done, even when doing that work requires us to live in voluntary poverty. We’ve got to have the toughness and the temperance, the courage to be able and willing to undertake that work.
So we can see how this cultivation of the body, this discipline of the body, making the body subject and subservient to the intellect and the will prepares us for the work that needs to be done, great work, heroic work, in life, in whatever occupation or whatever vocation we choose.
Remember that the mission of the laity is to direct temporal affairs according to the will of God. We can make a secular description of the mission of the laity, or the mission of man in general, to direct temporal affairs according to reason. But that work is always going to be unpopular, unpopular work that’s met with opposition, and we’ve got to be able to undertake that work. We’ve got to be able to undertake work that we know is going to be difficult, and understand that that’s normal, that’s a part of the human mission.
And so that’s what I think the vision and the goal for a classical physical education program needs to be. We can’t just copy what other schools do. We can’t just do whatever seems fun, whatever kids enjoy, whatever the parents want, whatever the other schools do. That’s not reasonable, that is not goal-oriented. We have got to develop programs that teach not just activity, but also that teach children to resist gluttony, to be temperate.
We have got to instill order and discipline: discipline schedules, discipline lists of tasks, disciplined curriculum requirements and teach children to subject themselves to prioritized tasks for the sake of achieving difficult, long-term goals. All of that is included in this work of physical discipline.
So I think that that’s a helpful overview. In light of the teaching of both Aristotle as a representative of secular rational teaching and of John Cassian as a representative of spiritual teaching for those who have faith, finding that golden mean is a challenge that takes real intelligence, real planning and organization, and it also takes real discipline.
Because, like the drill sergeants in the military, establishing order, establishing discipline, is very, very difficult work, and like drill sergeants, we often can’t be friendly about it. The rules and the regulations have to be very clearly articulated and strictly enforced until the culture is established, and then the culture begins to maintain itself. But the establishment of discipline requires aggressive, active force. We’ve got to establish that positive culture, and that is not easy work. That’s the kind of work we need disciplined bodies and disciplined intelligent minds to be able to do.
So I hope that’s helpful. God bless.
Mr. William C. Michael, O.P.
Headmaster
Classical Liberal Arts Academy
