The next summer, after one year of college, I spent with a band out in Seattle. We would busk in the streets or at Pike’s Place Market during the day and would pack the pubs at night with crowds ready to dance to our fairly raw and raucous sound. The tips came in the form of pitchers of beer and phone numbers scrawled on napkins.

The summer after that, I traded my guitar for a gun and spent months crawling in the dirt in Southern California alongside hundreds of other young men who were intent on becoming United States Marines.

To my musician’s ear, the first morning of boot camp truly registered as a different universe—one I had no experience of despite having attended an all-male boarding school, travelled pretty widely for a kid, and done some unusual things (like living off the streets in Rome as a member of a juggling troupe). But this was entirely different.

After the initial terrifying introduction to bootcamp, which occurs the day you arrive and is conducted by gnarled and tattooed Marines with impossible stamina and voices like ice picks—they make it clear that they despise, disrespect, and intend to harm you every way they can—we eventually found ourselves trying to fall asleep in a cavernous hall in metal bunks while the fatigue and adrenaline from hours of screaming, running, pushing and shoving, wrestled for the upper hand.

But it was the sound of the morning that told me the portals between the old world I had come from, and this new one I had chosen, were slammed shut. Our drill instructors had not yet come for us that morning, but as I lay in my rack, I heard at various points of the compass around me the powerful, foreign sound of hundreds of voices resonating in sharp, decisive unison, at the top of their lungs. At first I couldn’t tell what those massed voices were barking, but as the days passes and the rag-taggle group of recruits of which I was a member began to take on the same form as those ahead of us in training, it became clear that these were responses to commands: “yes sir,” “no sir,” “aye-aye sir,” and most of all that universal assent to a command in the Corps: “KILL.”

The pain in bootcamp is mundane. If you’re in decent shape, it’s not a problem. Too little sleep, too little time to eat, physical training, exposure to the elements, and combatives comprise the physical pain. For those who have never experienced elite military training, physical suffering is often top of mind. In my experience, it does exist, but most people could endure it with the right attitude. In the operating forces, we trained to a much higher level of physical suffering than in bootcamp.

What is much more thorough and impactful, however, is the sustained humiliation. There are other elements to martial formation aside from physical pain and humiliation: acclimation to responsibility; membership on a team; institutional ethos and esprit d’corps, technical mastery of weapons, etc. All of these need to happen, but humiliation is like a good marinade before searing the meat. It makes it pliable for the work to come. The forms of humiliation are many and ingenious and probably contribute the most to a young man’s martial formation.

You eat and sleep and exercise all bodily functions like an animal on the run. You have no first name and if you find yourself having to communicate with a drill instructor, you must only use the third person to refer to yourself. There is no “self” now…just another Marine recruit among many. The armor, weapons, and equipment one trains with are so old, shabby, and ill-fitting that any sense of pride quickly gives away to a humiliating grind. One is never spoken to—always screamed at. Eye contact with real Marines is forbidden. Any infraction is rewarded with physical pain and degradation, and sometimes an added psychological element if you do something stupid: you might have to write letters to your fellow recruits’ mothers, wives, and children to explain why your selfishness, incompetence, weakness, or stupidity has caused their son, husband, or father to die unnecessarily.

If politicians had a boot camp to qualify them for service, I’d recommend this last exercise in particular.

To succeed in this environment requires negotiating a sustainable truce between your fear of pain and humiliation, your resentment at being forced into those feelings, your own disgust with yourself for feeling them in the first place, and a prudence which keeps your goals in sight while your humanity is disassembled and reassembled around you.

It’s brilliant.

I consider often how martial formation and basic formation as a man are related. Martial formation requires a quick and thorough development of certain virtues which are difficult to develop with any dependability among young men. They need fortitude, selflessness, aggression, capacity for violence, dependability, and the ability to follow orders decisively but also imaginatively. It seems to me these martial qualities—while not coextensive with all the qualities of a good man—are all present in a good man.

I’ve noticed that the approach to forming Marines (you might consider it an approach necessary for forming good men in general) exhibits a structure which appears throughout history in various rites of passage. Take Xenophon or Herodotus when they describe the formation of Persian youth, or consider the Christian monastic novitiate, chivalric procedures for knighthood, or the native American vision quest or huskanaw. The path to full, adult manhood, requires pain, responsibility, and humiliation.

There is a deep sensibility in this path—deeper, I think, than simple expressions of this or that different culture’s values. I suspect it corresponds fundamentally to our anthropology—one seen clearly inscribed in Christianity’s account of salvation through a God who lowered Himself to our level and then suffered.

The structure is hyper-legible in the ancient rite of the Roman Catholic Mass, used continually for nearly two thousand years. The priest, representing his people, can only approach the altar by lowering himself. The opening psalm of the ancient Mass is a poem of pain and penance called colloquially, the “prayers at the foot of the altar.” It is recited by the priest at the bottom of the steps approaching the altar, at times bent double in humiliation. “Judge me, oh God,” says the priest before continuing, “why hast thou cast me off?” You’ll notice that the form imitates Christ’s mission on earth and seeks to follow Him by implicating all the congregation in the process of humiliation and sacrifice.

This structural consonance of the Mass with our anthropology is not an accident, I suspect, but a formal parallel… one of the ways in which the ritual is metaphysically correct and educative. The Church’s central act of worship reenacts Christ’s life and because both His life, and the Church’s reenactment correspond to all our lives, they illuminate and instruct. At least, they used to. As with the general culture which no longer values pain, humiliation, and responsibility as essential ingredients in masculine formation, so too has the Church, only very recently in its long history, altered the ritual to remove the gradual approach to the altar, the pain-filled psalm, and the physical postures of humility which once guarded the altar.

The new ritual, like the general cultural, prefers a therapeutic approach focused on speech. In this way it is much more abstract and intellectual than the Mass that formed the faithful for millennia. In education (formation of the young) as in the liturgy, we now place a premium on talking about things rather than forcing ourselves, however uncomfortably, into metaphysically correct postures.

After that alcohol-dimmed, smoke wreathed summer in New York City, the next time I hit the beach was as an infantry Marine, at midnight in the frigid Pacific. As I crawled from the water through the sand to create a perimeter around our zodiacs, I fumbled with numb hands to keep my SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon) out of the sand, knowing that if I failed, there would be hell to pay.

This kind of thing happened daily back then. I spent over a decade in the Corps, and though I little understood it at the time, I think now that I was fortunate to be participating in one of the ancient, durable, rites of formation.

Formation fit for a king

Xenophon is famous for his Anabasis, an account of a Greek mercenary army’s tactical egress from Persia in the most desperate circumstances. Xenophon commanded the army and his account of his men’s performance under pressure rendered Greek soldiers’ mettle famous for millennia. A less well-known work by Xenophon, written after the salty general retired to Sparta, is called the Cyropaedia, and is an account of the formation and adventures of the young Cyrus before he ascended to the throne of Persia. The Cyropaedia is a strange literary form. It almost reads like history until you realize that much of the paideia Xenophon describes derives from Spartan culture rather than Persian. Paideia is the process of formation whereby the young become the kind of people their civilization wants them to be. Xenophon does not create a simple historical record but cherry-picks as necessary to convey the picture of ideal formation for leadership as a king.

Xenophon’s Cyrus grew up with rigorous discipline: combatives, cold exposure, fasting, and the austere corrections of men hardened by war. His education was a series of experiences fashioning him for military service, accustoming him to privation, and schooling him in the unapologetic art of justice. So far, Xenophon’s account echoes his fellow Greek historian Herodotus’ description of the education of noble Persian youth. Herodotus famously noted in Book 1 of his Histories that they were sent away from the court to spend time with military commanders out on the frontiers of the empire. Far from the corrosive luxuries and intrigues of the court, they learned to “ride, shoot the bow, and speak the truth.” Only when sufficiently hardened were they considered fit to return to the seats of power and take their place in the political life of the empire.

While some details differ, I’d like to draw your attention to where the two Greek’s depiction of ideal education overlaps. What we find is a paideia which prioritizes exposure to nature, the cultivation of martial virtue, and a simple, manly rhetoric consisting of straightforward, honest speech—rather than the velvet and fork-tongued parlance common in the halls of power. This, both Greeks report, is the formation fit for a king—or by implication—one responsible for governance, even self-governance.

Sounds just like our approach to education does it not? Well, no, it does not at all. Not in public, private, STEM, or classical schools will you find anything approaching the Cyropaedia. Perhaps even as you read this, you thought to yourself: that’s fine for the Greeks and Persians, but it would never work today. Education is about reading and writing, and clearly they didn’t spend enough time in the books.

The limits of book learning

Now, I do not intend to argue directly with book learning. I am grateful for some of the book learning I received myself. But I do propose that we take seriously what Xenophon and Herodotus had to say about education especially where it is at odds with contemporary practice. To help us take it seriously, I’d like to enlist the aid of one particularly learned, including book-learned, John Henry Newman who wrote luminously and voluminously about education, was himself an academic, and is now a Doctor of the Catholic Church. When he criticizes book-learning and the nearly homogeneous-in-form intellectual activities we call education today, we should sit up and pay attention.

There are innumerable exhortations and examples in his work, but we’ll focus on just two. The first is a simple observation he makes in one of his sermons: our reason is just as fallen and corrupt as our passions. Perhaps this sounds like heresy? It shouldn’t. In the admixture of classical philosophy and Christianity, the philosophers seem to have won the upper hand on this point with their urging that reason rule the passions. Fair enough, the Christian should say—but don’t forget that reason is just as fallen as passion. Newman asks, “what then is intellect itself, as exercised in the world, but a fruit of the fall, not found in paradise or in heaven, more than in little children, and at the utmost but tolerated in the Church?” He continues that since the Fall, “passion and reason have abandoned their due place in man’s nature, which is one of subordination, and conspired together against the Divine light within him, which is his proper guide.” It goes without saying that Newman acknowledges reason as a gift from God for which we should be grateful, but this hardly contradicts his call for us to refrain from idolizing it whether at the expense of the passions or not.

The second example from another of Newman’s sermons might go hard with those who, like me, love literature in particular and have urged its advantages in moral formation and encouragement. “Now the danger of an elegant and polite education is, that it separates feeling and acting; it teaches us to think, speak, and be affected aright, without forcing us to practise what is right.” Newman continues: “The refinement which literature gives, is that of thinking, feeling, knowing and speaking, right, not of acting right; and thus, while it makes the manners amiable, and the conversation decorous and agreeable, it has no tendency to make the conduct, the practice of the man virtuous.” This sounds like bad news for a culture whose educational practice consists almost entirely of sitting and reading and thinking.

But surely, we might object, reading about heroic characters can inspire us to emulate their virtues. So too can vicious characters warn us off their path and help us to see patterns of evil as they develop. Without rejecting literature entirely, Newman in the same sermon does play out for us a likely scenario involving the breakdown of character when it has been reared on affect rather than its rougher cousin, reality:

“For instance, we will say we have read again and again, of the heroism of facing danger, and we have glowed with the thought of its nobleness. We have felt how great it is to bear pain, and submit to indignities, rather than wound our conscience; and all this, again and again, when we had no opportunity of carrying our good feelings into practice. Now, suppose at length we actually come into trial, and let us say, our feelings become roused, as often before, at the thought of boldly resisting temptations to cowardice, shall we therefore do our duty, quitting ourselves like men? Rather, we are likely to talk loudly, and then run from the danger. Why?—rather, let us ask, why not? What is to keep us from yielding? Because we feel aright? Nay, we have again and again felt aright and thought aright, without accustoming ourselves to act aright; and though there was an original connexion in our minds between feeling and acting, there is none now; the wires within us, as they may be called, are loosened and powerless.”

“Loosened and powerless” is a sad substitute for what Newman suggests in the same sermon we ought to demonstrate instead: “hardy, rough-handed obedience.”

It is important to note that these arguments come from Newman’s sermons and therefore address a particular audience in a particular time and place. He is an able rhetorician who, while always honoring the truth, was adept at adjusting his language for his audience. Perhaps I’m overstating the point or taking quotes out of context? I encourage you to read the sermons in their entirety—in fact, read his entire corpus and you’ll find many more such encouragements toward reality. Still, you might temper the harshness of the message especially for our classical educators who are striving to substitute great works for the inane pop-drivel which might otherwise envelope their students. But let us not temper it so much that we lose the corrective it offers us when we think about the best way to educate the young.

The corrective

As Newman points us back to what he calls “hardy, rough-handed obedience,” we find ourselves back with Cyrus on the frontier where reality itself is the teacher, and the lesson is not optional. Our students, even in the best schools, spend too much time in intellectual arenas where they can separate feeling from action; sentiment from reality; arenas where talk is as cheap as it is plentiful.

Fortunately, there is a corrective. But be warned, the corrective is as rugged and as demanding of adults as it is of the young. It will require many in education who are accustomed to the relative comfort of lecture halls and seminar tables to re-learn the feel of callouses and the inevitable alternation between sweating and shivering that the unmediated life provokes. The corrective, simply put, is robust physical training in fitness, athletics, or in the school of the outdoors—camping, climbing, diving, and the like. The corrective is raw contact with nature in a manner which requires one to exercise the virtues as decisions made with cold hands and aching backs rather than as concepts batted around the seminar table. The corrective is hard physical work in the soil or in caring for animals which teach patience, responsibility, and the limits of human will. The corrective is willingly to forgo the various mediations we have built ourselves to make less legible the lessons contained in God’s first book: nature.

Hard physical work and self-mastery learned through challenge can no longer serve as mere supplements to education. As long as we consider them so, we should not expect our children to demonstrate the “hardy, rough-handed obedience” that is the hallmark of the citizens of great nations and of those capable of self-government.

A version of this article first appeared in The American Mind.

When Alexis de Tocqueville reflected on his travels in America, he noted that Americans had been shaped, and were still being shaped, by the land itself. “The American,” he wrote, “struggles against the obstacles which nature opposes to him.” It was in the unforgiving school of experience, on the frontiers and homesteads, that American character was forged. It was a character fashioned through struggle and suited for self-government by that challenging formation much more than by book-learning. Tocqueville observed that “true information is mainly derived from experience; and if the Americans had not been gradually accustomed to govern themselves, their book-learning would not assist them much at the present day.”

At the heart of the American educational project is the obligation to form future generations of citizens capable of carrying forward the task of self-governance. But as Tocqueville indicates, this capacity depends upon a certain character in the citizenry, one which, at least in the early years, was forged in a hardy proximity to the land itself. Acknowledging that the material conditions have changed considerably since the founding, as have our educational methods, are we certain that the character formation necessary for a free people no longer includes a robust experience of and struggle with reality? Before answering, it is worth considering how the greatest of the Founders was himself formed.

George Washington was less book-learned than most of the Founders, and some of them — men who had enjoyed formal European educations and attended the most prominent American universities — thought this disqualified him from prominent service to the new republic. Writing to Benjamin Rush in 1812, John Adams was blunt: “That Washington was not a Scholar is certain. That he was too illiterate, unlearned, unread, for his Station and reputation is equally past dispute.” We all know how decisively Washington proved this judgment to be an error. In fact, the elite academic background of many of his peers might have disqualified them from the kind of work the young republic, with its harsh geography, independent citizenry, and looming threat of war, needed in order to thrive. It was work for which Washington, and his formation, were uniquely well suited.

Washington’s father died when George was only eleven years old. His two older half-brothers had attended the Appleby School in England, but the untimely death of his father meant George would not enjoy the same privilege of formal schooling. Instead, he moved in with his half-brother Lawrence and spent his teen years working on the estate at Mount Vernon, learning from his older brother, and engaging in a self-directed course of study that included practical geometry, etiquette, and social propriety. While many young men of his generation were heading to Harvard or William and Mary, Washington was bivouacking in the Blue Ridge Mountains on a surveying expedition or trekking through the winter to western Pennsylvania as a major in the Virginia militia.

In his Histories, Herodotus describes the Persian practice of sending its young aristocrats to the frontier of the empire, where they would learn to “ride, draw the bow, and speak the truth,” far from the morally corrosive influence of the court. This is a fairly close description of the formation Washington received. While his peers engaged in the sedentary, formulaic paideia inherited from Europe, Washington was learning to ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth — a formation whose rigors and austerity, you might say, matched the occasion.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The intellectual heritage for which many of his peers are famous is fundamental to the American project. I’d be grateful if more of our children received even a fraction of that heritage and formation. But in addition to largely abandoning those classical intellectual roots, we’ve also forgotten Tocqueville’s keen observation of the need for a certain hardiness, even roughness, in shaping characters capable of self-government.

What would it look like to reinvest in American hardiness? Does it require an actual frontier? I’d suggest not. However comfortable our technologies have made contemporary life, the American landscape maintains its rugged beauty and the invitation for its people to resemble it. But we will need to treat the body and its encounter with the real world as part of education, not an interruption of it. A boy who has spent a week on a long hike, carrying what he needs on his back, has learned something about himself and his country that no classroom can supply. A girl who has ridden a horse or built a fire for warmth has taken on a weight that schooling of the usual kind never asks her to bear. Manual work on a farm or a job site, wilderness travel, competitive athletics pursued seriously, apprenticeship to a capable adult — these are not extras to fit around the edges of a sedentary education. They are the grit and chisel that shape our children’s characters.

One might fairly ask whether anything we devise today could accomplish the same level of formation the founders received. Can we shape characters as rugged and hardy as Washington’s? A week in the backcountry is not a winter crossing to Fort Le Boeuf, and a summer job on a farm is not a three-year surveying commission on a live frontier.

But to this question there are two responses. First, just because we cannot match the details and degree of that kind of physical experience does not mean we should give up on the whole gambit. Recognizing how formative it is should encourage us to seek it where and how we can. Second, while it’s true that we can as little re-create Washington as we can his specific experience, the essential qualities still exist, and we find them prominently the closer into contact with unmediated nature we go. These essential qualities consist of real and enduring stakes as well as the fact of the indifference of nature to our feelings. While the particulars will look different from Washington’s time, I believe we can still confront and learn from these essential qualities of nature. (take this footage from the Iliad Athletics camp for example…)

Schools and other youth programs should prioritize direct encounters with nature, and the rest of us should fight against the risk-aversion and over-protectiveness which tend to cripple the young and the organizations which serve them. Take the Boy Scout’s fire merit badge, for example. In 1911, a twelve-year-old could earn it by demonstrating his ability to be helpful in combating an emergency: ability to carry a ladder, drag an unconscious person to safety, and assist with crowd control. The 2024 requirements focus exclusively on safety and academic abstractions such as naming the “parts of the fire tetrahedron” and “describing a fire safety-related career.” There is no essential reason we could not return to the 1911 standards, and if we want our young to resemble Washington, then I suggest we do so.

Washington’s formation was not incidental to his greatness; it was the condition of it. The boy who spent his teens on the Shenandoah frontier became the man who held an army together through Valley Forge, who refused a crown, who walked away from power twice. The republic he founded has outlasted every regime his contemporaries would have compared it to, and it has done so because it was built by men formed to bear its weight. If we want citizens and statesmen of the kind it still requires, we will have to form them as he was formed — in struggle with the land, with real work, and with the truth.

I spent the last several days in the field running a camp focused on outdoorsmanship and functional fitness…a camp that strives to realize the aspirations detailed in this essay. Appropriately, the article was first published while we were outdoors, sweating in nearly hundred degree heat, carrying logs, navigating cross-country, and sleeping on the ground. You can see the original at Lyceum.

Like many occasions that call for celebration, a commencement marks the crossing of a threshold. When we approach a threshold to cross, we ought to do so with some sense of who we are, a sense of what change this threshold represents, and how we intend to carry on on the other side. These are questions of ideals.

We ask “what is the best way for me to be?” which is the same as asking “what are my ideals for myself?”. What vision of the good do I have which I hope to pursue through all my actions?

This sifting and questioning of our own ideals is essential to living a rational life. We among the animals are uniquely capable of considering ourselves and how we ought to be, and then striving to be that way. To stop this fundamental rational consideration of the good, is to be far less than we should be.

But consider a distinction between maintaining ideals for your own cultivation and behavior — ideals about who you want to be — versus political or material ideals, which project outwards, and which we might describe as ideals about the way we wish the world was, or the way we wish politics were. Or, stripped down to its essentials, the way we wish other people were.

As you have learned by studying history, human beings often have high ideals about how to shape society— how to make things better. This is natural, rational, and necessary to a degree. We might have ideals about the kind of job we want, what kind of justice system we live under, how other people should act, and what the economy is like. Of course, we have to live and eat and raise our families, and so all of these matter.

But history shows time and again that this form of externally oriented idealism often makes us unhappy and even potentially dangerous to ourselves and to one another. The great communist revolutions, and the brutal industrial wars of the twentieth century were all forms of material and political idealism. The communist revolutions alone claimed 80 – 100 million lives. They started with people earnestly desiring to “fix” the world, to achieve justice for this or that group, or perhaps for everyone. But as the poet Ezra Pound noted, and Pound certainly had experience of this kind of idealism, “the dreams clash and are shattered / ...I tried to make a paradiso terrestre / ...Let the gods forgive what I have made.”(canto CXVII)

You see, externally oriented ideals can be passionately held and defended. They also tend to conflict with one another and with reality. And when they inevitably do conflict, human life is the ammunition expended in that clash. Pound, unlike many enthralled by activism, had the humility to recognize this at the end of his life when he wrote the line: “Let the gods forgive what I have made.”

So, while idealism is one of the precious possessions of youth, we should be reluctant to orient it outward toward others.

But to be clear, I am not cautioning against idealism. No, in fact, I’m urging a rougher, hardier idealism. Do not focus on how you wish other people were, how social structures were, or any other form of external idealism. Instead, focus on the much more challenging and rewarding idealism for your own cultivation and behavior.

Let me explain.

There’s a choice each one of us faces when confronting the various happenstances of life, which often include suffering, deprivation, and various forms of challenge. I would describe this choice as between two options. 1. Choosing to be a victim or 2. Choosing to be a hero.

The victim dwells on the suffering and is chiefly motivated to change the situation. It might require breaking some things in order to change the situation. The victim tends to be resentful, likes to blame others, is full of excuses, and typically unhappy.

The hero, on the other hand, considers challenge as a precondition for excellence. Challenge is where I have the opportunity to prove my mettle. The hero is joyful in the face of challenge, takes responsibility and avoids casting blame, and is vigorous in doing whatever it is that needs to be done. The hero’s standards for himself or for herself are extremely high. Delightfully high. You might even think impossibly high. But after all, we’re talking about ideals. Let’s place them high enough that we have to reach a little.

(The collection of historical figures and events by is an inspiring roll call of these heroes.)

Let me describe this choice between victimhood and individual heroic idealism in a few scenarios:

Take the body for example: you may or may not be physically gifted or naturally healthy, but heroic physicality would look something like extraordinary physical discipline, dignified bearing, efforts toward cultivating beauty in your person and surroundings, and vigorous exercise and fitness. Physical suffering — whether self-imposed, or on account of illness or aging — can be considered an opportunity for soul and body alike to show their mettle, to endure with dignity the challenge, and thereby prove their superiority to the particular condition.

The victim mentality, on the other hand, is one that looks for a way out, that makes excuses, and that dodges accountability.

What about spiritually? Heroic spirituality would look like a powerful love of God, one’s neighbor, and a voracious search for wisdom. The loss of a loved one would be a trial which opens new vistas of understanding — makes each minute of life and each friend and loved one even more precious — not diminishing the pain of loss and privation, which are the hallmarks of human love when confronted with loss, but gathering that pain and privation as the raw materials to construct an interior monument, which builds up and ennobles while it marks the loss.

Victim spirituality cannot recognize joy or sustain the losses which inevitably occur throughout the victim’s life. The burden of life becomes heavier and heavier and tends to push the victim toward despair. Such a one in despair, habituated to making excuses, is not likely to contribute in a meaningful way to a happy and flourishing society regardless of political slogans and external ideals.

What about politics? Civic heroism looks like the choice to build a beautiful and happy life with those around you. It starts with manners and bearing. The common courtesies we show each other, even complete strangers, are the building blocks of civilization, and allow us opportunities to share civic spaces, to meet, to mate, and to build a society together. The hero asks: what can I do, and how can I live, so as to contribute to a wholesome civilization? — rather than what do I need to make others do in order to fix society’s ills?

The civic victim tends toward angry activism — demanding that others make changes, always pointing the finger and agitating and complaining, rather than seeking to build something meaningful and beautiful within oneself, come what may.

You’ll notice that the heroic idealism I’m describing is chiefly oriented toward one’s own conduct, whereas the victim has ideals to be sure — but those ideals tend to be directed toward those around him: how others might be fixed or changed in order to make things better.

The hero’s ideals are extraordinarily high, but it’s important to note that they are ideals which he applies to himself, and not to others — unless others seek his assistance. If you have high ideals and apply them unasked to others, you become a scold, and a nag, and are generally insufferable. (I know I’m treading the thin ice of hypocrisy in writing this. My excuse is that this was drafted as a commencement address I was, in fact, asked to give.)

Being an insufferable moralist is the opposite of maintaining heroic individual idealism. Think of this kind of idealism one that makes you happy and durable within yourself — not presuming to control, create, or destroy for others.

I’ve told this story before, but I remember an early morning hike in the School of Infantry in the Marine Corps. There were hundreds of Marines in the early pre-dawn, with easily a hundred pounds each of gear, standing around, shifting uncomfortably under the weight as they anticipated with dread the next five, six, seven hours of marching up and down mountains in the brutal sun — after which their shoulders would be cut and bleeding, and their feet would look more like hamburger. The feeling as we staged for that march was one of despair and dread.

I remember standing in front of those Marines and making this exact argument to them: No matter what, you have to go through this hike today. But you can change how you experience the hike. You can choose to be its victim, or you can choose to conquer it.

As a victim, you’ll suffer the same number of miles, the same pounds. But in you, they will build no lasting dignity. They will represent no achievement — just another thing done. For the heroes, however, it becomes a story. It becomes an accomplishment. It becomes a capacity built, a depth of character. It becomes an opportunity to see a beautiful morning in Southern California, to watch the sun come up over the mountains, to rejoice in the strength of your body and to add to it, to put a little weather on your wheels — to become just a little more experienced and wise.

This is a choice each of us faces today. Whatever comes next, whatever challenges, whatever opportunities, we have the choice to live heroically or to live as a victim. I propose we set our ideals for ourselves ruthlessly high, and then pursue them with the vigor and joy appropriate to heroes.

In 2007 I was finishing up the Marine Corps’ School of Infantry, my last stop before joining an infantry unit in the operational forces, or “the fleet” as we called it. I was the “guide” for my platoon which meant that I was the trainee responsible for overseeing some of the more mundane duties necessary for the functioning of a training platoon.

That particular morning we were hustling out of the training barracks and onto the “grinder” where we staged our gear in preparation for a 20km hump through the mountains of Camp Pendleton. Most of us were carrying over 100lbs including our packs, body armor, and weapon systems, but depending on the specific job (rifleman, machine-gunner, mortar-man) some were carrying much more.

Early mornings in Southern California’s coastal mountains are beautiful and fragrant with chapparal, and we saw many—probably all of them—during our time in training to become infantrymen. But that morning, overpowering the fresh salt and chapparal in the air was a sense of dread and fear. We all knew that the next several hours would be physically miserable. The packs would chafe on shoulders and hips and the body armor would leave raw and bloody patches where they rubbed our sides.

And our feet. We all knew by that point how feet could look like a packet of ground beef when pulled from the boot at the end of a long and heavy movement.

Because I was the guide, I was responsible for getting all the Marines in place with their gear, and as I did so I kept running into the mopey and sluggish aspects of men who dreaded what was coming next and had adopted a posture of sullen resignation. Dreading the pain of the coming hump myself, but grating under what seemed to me a prevalent unmanly attitude, I gave the platoon a quick pep talk in which I simply explained the fundamental binary under which men of arms always labor: we will suffer what comes next no matter what. The only choice is whether to suffer in the spiritual equivalent of the fetal position, or with the hardy defiance appropriate to United States Marines.

Many times since then I myself have been beaten into a posture of sullen resignation. But I thought then, as I think now, that it’s better to let reality give you the beating than to volunteer to do it to yourself.

I remembered this anecdote recently when I came across this passage in one of Pindar’s odes celebrating the Olympian Hieron of Syracuse. (trans. William H. Race)

Great risk
does not take hold of a cowardly man.
But since men must die, why would anyone sit
in darkness and coddle a nameless old age to no use,
deprived of all noble deeds? No!
that contest shall be mine
to undertake.

The classics are full of this kind of exhortation. You can hardly crack the spine of a Loeb without encountering some call to arms, to excellence, to glory, to love.

“Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus.” — “let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love.”

That subjunctive voice signified by the telltale “amus” and “emus” ending issues the exhortation. It says: this is the way to live. This is the way to glory. Let us do praiseworthy things together.

And this is why we should protect the classics and do our best to transmit the love of them and the languages in which they were written to our children. The classics give us a great and enduring language for the human will to excellence and glory. They are languages increasingly out of tune with our ironic age, but then, so too is the excellence of character and beauty of life that they exhort.

Those Marines, more than most, speak a language which Pindar spoke. Closer to the hard consequences of reality than many, they enjoy the privilege of crafting glorious defiance to pain and to risk. My hope is we can give them, and everyone whose soul is capable of resonating with the exhortation to greatness, the opportunity to hear that call.

In 2015 I was still a year away from leaving active duty in the Marine Corps. Part of a larger unit which was deploying that year, I was responsible for commanding a contingent of Marines which would be spread across the ships and battle space.

The time leading up to a deployment is called a “workup”—it’s a period of months, often seven to nine, when Marines train especially hard and often simulate deployed conditions in order to test and prove readiness. These are especially hard months for the families as the Marines spend a majority of their time away from home and in the field. It’s a deployment before the deployment.

As it happened, our unit was spread across multiple locations up and down the West Coast. I was with a group in Washington while others in our unit were back in California. Late one evening we learned that a convoy of ours in California had encountered trouble during a storm up in the coastal mountains. At a sharp bend in the road, a 7-ton truck had slipped off the road out over a dead drop and had fallen into the ravine below. Marines died.

This initiated the process whereby we notify the next of kin. As it happened, one of these, the wife of one of the dead Marines, was a young woman, also a Marine, who was with our larger group in Washington. I remember when the chaplain pulled her out of formation to break the news.

Months later I was on an amphib making for the Middle East. My unit was spread out across multiple ships and the helicopters buzzed above and around the ships in the Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) like bees around the hive. Every day the tilt-rotor Osprey bustled between the ships, and sometimes ventured from the ships to whatever land we were nearby.

One afternoon there was an accident. The notoriously finnicky Osprey had been transporting a group of Marines ashore when it malfunctioned upon landing. The euphemism for this kind of thing is a “hard landing.” I say euphemism because normal people would call it a crash. Several Marines died. Those back on the ships waited helplessly to learn the names and contemplate their next mission on an Osprey.

The mood throughout the ARG was low. We were headed for the Middle East under the inauspicious mantle of multiple casualties and the shooting hadn’t even started yet. I felt that as a commander there was something I needed to do or say, but as to what, I was at a loss. I turned, as often before to the handful of books stuffed into my sea bag and found Constantine Cavafy’s poem, “Ithaca”— a poem addressed to a latter day Odysseus on the subject of his voyage home. We were on a voyage; we were veterans; and we were like Odysseus: subject to the punishments of fate.

I remember pulling together the small group of Marines on deck one evening. We said some prayers for the dead and their families and then read the poem. This was a poem for us. It offered the only kind of encouragement we could likely stomach at the time: a rugged encouragement to value the vicissitudes of the adventure for their own sake.

                  Ithaca            
(trans. Daniel Mendelsohn)

As you set out on the way to Ithaca
hope that the road is a long one,
filled with adventures, filled with understanding.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
Poseidon in his anger: do not fear them,
you’ll never come across them on your way
as long as your mind stays aloft, and a choice
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
savage Poseidon; you’ll not encounter them
unless you carry them within your soul,
unless your soul sets them up before you.

Hope that the road is a long one.
Many may the summer mornings be
when—with what pleasure, with what joy—
you first put in to harbors new to your eyes;
may you stop at Phoenician trading posts
and there acquire fine goods:
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and heady perfumes of every kind:
as many heady perfumes as you can.
To many Egyptian cities may you go
so you may learn, and go on learning, from their sages.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind;
to reach her is your destiny.
But do not rush your journey in the least.
Better that it last for many years;
that you drop anchor at the island an old man,
rich with all you’ve gotten on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

Ithaca gave to you the beautiful journey;
without her you’d not have set upon the road.
But she has nothing left to give you any more.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca did not deceive you.
As wise as you’ll have become, with so much experience,
you’ll have understood, by then, what these Ithacas mean.

That is the first homecoming poem. An old Greek word for “homecoming” is “nostos,” and its where we get the word “nostalgia” which combines “nostos” with “algos,” which means “pain.” I had hoped it would do for the Marines what great poems so often do for me: tie a visceral experience to the hope of an idea, and ground a beautiful idea in reality.

The second homecoming poem is one I wrote many years later—years after returning home safely myself; years after reuniting with my family as those fallen Marines were never able to do. I’ve written about this poem before, in a different context.

Knowing I had decided to leave active duty after that last deployment, my family had moved back east to wait for me. After all the dust settled and I had processed out, I drove cross country from California to Michigan in my old stick-shift Dodge Dakota I called the Colonel. When I pulled my truck to a stop in front of the house for the first time in a year, the garage door began to open and my eldest daughter, who was seven at the time, tumbled underneath it as she sprinted to greet me. Some things are too beautiful and terrible to write.

As it happens, it’s difficult, even in moments like these, to forget those who do not come home. Years after that homecoming, and after years of that distillation that time affords, I tried to imagine what this kind of non-homecoming might be like. This poem considers one possibility among a million — one version of who a fallen Marine’s parents were, what their life was like, who his widow was, and what became of her after he died. It’s not a proud and hopeful poem like Cavafy’s. But it does share some element of bewildered resignation to the inevitable.

                   Supposed to Last

West of Litchfield just a couple miles
          then south at the dirt road Oak Grove—
this piece was corn or soy until Dean retired
          and in a stroke of genius that would have made 
a rich man rich, but for him 
          just kept the bank and USDA at bay,

he dug a hole for the septic tank and field,
          ran power to the parcel at the corner,
and it wasn’t long before a trailer wheeled
          in and Cross Roads Acres Mobile Home
Community was born. By then, he’d had 
          a stroke, Julie had cancer, and their boy was grown.

They had a few bad years with the medical bills
          and sold the farm in bits. The old brick house
was last to go and when it did they filled
          a mobile home with what would fit and trashed
the rest. Their son got married and joined the Marines,
          driving seven-tons, he grew up fast.

On the phone they told Dean all about 
          the accident: long days, sleepless nights, and the rain—
It wasn’t the first time that heavy equipment 
          slipped from the road and tumbled down the ravine
at the big curve above Las Pulgas, it’s just 
          that this time the load that spilled was Marines. 

After all the formalities were done, their son’s 
          widow came to visit them. All she
had now was life insurance and at twenty-one 
          faced a big old world with a hole at its heart
like a little girl on the edge of the Grand Canyon
          looking at all that space but not a spot for her.

Dean and Julie wanted to help, but having nothing 
          left to give, just invited her to stay.
For now at least, a piece of their lost Marine.
          He walked her to the empty unit noticing as they passed
the siding cracked from cold and curled from heat. 
          It’s just vinyl, you know. It’s not supposed to last.

Happy memorial day.

Rather than speak in generalities, I’ll take a single mission — the Barbary Corsair — and walk it all the way through: who runs it, what the week looks like, what the year looks like, where the students actually put their hands and eyes on the real, what it might cost, and how it all compares to what a year of private schooling (or the per pupil funding which public schools expect from the taxpayer) runs these days. The Barbary mission is the most ambitious of the ones I’ve sketched. If this one can be done, in my mind at least, the others can be done.

The Mentor

The mentor does not need to be a consummate polymath — someone who knows Ottoman history, Mediterranean navigation, Arabic, French, and small-boat sailing. I think these folks exist but they’re too busy leading extraordinary lives for you and me to know them. For this job, the mentor is a Socratic foreman much more than a subject matter expert. You don’t need to know in advance everything the students need to know, but rather, you need to be capable of inducing them find out. He, or she, or you need a broad, general intelligence; an active and sympathetic imagination; a sense of wonder combined with some daring and patience. That’s plenty.

The mentor meets with a small cohort of students each week to check on their progress, ask questions, and give them pointers for the work ahead. This weekly briefing model will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has run a platoon, a small company, or a household. The mentor receives the students’ plan, asks some hard questions, redirects where necessary, tells a couple stories, and assigns the next week’s tasks. That is the heart of the role.

Find a former member of the military with some leadership experience or a retired history teacher who has the good sense not to lecture. An engineer or tradesman with a humanities streak — the contractor who reads Herodotus, the machinist who plays chess — can do it, and often brings a temperament suited to the practical constraints of the missions. Consider a small business owner or homeschool dad or mom who have already led their own kids through something ambitious. Grab and , or , and make them pinky swear to do it. Or if you’re a parent, you might do it as an investment in your own children and as a service to the others in the cohort.

On the other hand, someone ambitious might make an educational business out of this and set out a shingle as a mentor. (Ivan Illich imagines just such an arrangement as the heart of education). One could recruit multiple cohorts at a time and by charging a couple thousand per student earn a decent living.

The Cohort

Three or four students. Not one and not a dozen. One student working a mission alone is a tutoring arrangement; it misses the thing that makes the whole model work. Twelve is a classroom, and the whole point is that this is not a classroom. Three or four is a small company of scholars — enough that they overhear each other, enough that they compete and collaborate, few enough that the mentor can actually see each of them together every week.

You might recall John Henry Newman’s comment on the residential quality of a college:

“When a multitude of young men, keen, open-hearted, sympathetic, and observant, as young men are, come together and freely mix with each other, they are sure to learn one from another, even if there be no one to teach them; the conversation of all is a series of lectures to each, and they gain for themselves new ideas and views, fresh matter of thought, and distinct principles for judging and acting, day by day.” (The Idea of a University, Discourse VII)

This is what we seek from the small cohort. No, this isn’t a college. But also, you don’t have to be an expert to admit that Newman’s principle applies to humans not just college students.

How about this: the cohort works together on Monday afternoons, from three to five. I’ll describe those two hours in a moment. As described in Part 1 of Expeditionary Education, each kid has a job, usually ten to fifteen hours a week, and athletic training of some kind, six to ten hours a week. On top of that, they are giving eight to twelve hours a week to the mission itself — two of them with the mentor and the others scattered through evenings, Saturday mornings, and the odd afternoon. This is the week of a serious young person. It’s full but not crushed, and it definitely refrains from monopolizing the students’ lives with a homogeneous educational environment.

The Weekly Rhythm

Monday, at 3pm (it could be any day or time). The cohort gathers at whatever room has been secured — a barn or workshop; a study with maps and mahogany; a parish hall; a living room; a teepee; a house boat…you get the idea. The first hour is a mission update:

• Orientation

• Mission brief by the students.

• Where things stand right now

• What they’re working on

• What they’ve completed

• Requests for information or gear

• Feedback / Questions from the Mentor

• General discussion

• Next step resourcing

The second hour is a time to work with the mentor present to help. Same room, same table, but now the kids are heads-down on the mission, and the mentor is present but not directing. This is the bullpen. One kid is pulling up a chart of the western Mediterranean, trying to pin down where Barbarossa actually operated from. Another is down a rabbit hole on nautical navigation. A third is on Duolingo practicing French numbers, because he realized last week he could not count in French, and that is a problem if you intend to haggle for supplies. They work in parallel. They overhear each other. The mentor circulates, glances over shoulders, and asks the occasional question. He is a coach watching his players scrimmage.

At some other point in the week, the cohort gathers in the bullpen for a second working session — a Wednesday evening, a Saturday morning, student-coordinated, no mentor. This mission should not monopolize their lives the way many schools today do. Managing a mission alongside the normal routines and commitments of a good life is something we should be modeling. Schools typically model how one lives as a workaholic: spend all day at the office then take your work home and spend the evening doing it. Expeditionary education should be the opposite.

Encounters with the Real

We want this to be a rich experience… not simply thinking about things and calling that learning. These experiences permeate the mission and bring the student’s body into contact with the thing he is studying.

Down at the marina. We’re learning about pirates…we need to know about boats and the water. Part of the mission is learning how to sail—setting up that experiential touchstone that integrates the learning. The students spend time on a small sailboat. A Saturday morning here, an afternoon there. They learn what tacking feels like, how much the water resists you, how a boat heels and when to let it. Someone has a small sail boat on a lake near you. The judicious deployment of a six-pack, or some manual labor as a trade should get the job done.

Under the stars. Three or four evenings across the semester or year, the cohort goes out to a dark field to learn the sky. They find Polaris. They shoot a star’s altitude with a homemade cross-staff or a borrowed sextant and work out their latitude within a degree.

The professor’s office. In the fall the kids begin a crash course in French with a professor at a nearby college, arranged by the mentor or a parent. Six sessions, aimed at a specific real use: ordering food, counting money, asking directions, reading a sign, haggling politely. Enough grammar to keep learning on their own. In the winter, the same in Arabic. The point is not fluency but just enough to whet the interest and enable the mission. (Fluency comes later when the student has learned to love learning).

What the professor sessions also teach is what a scholar looks like. Sitting across a table from someone serious…that is part of the formation too... an invitation into the world where adults love something and give their life to it.

The Trip

Late spring or early summer. The cohort flies from Chicago to Marseille. They have been preparing for nine months. They have their plan, their routes, their phrases. They have experience in small boats, small unit tactics, nautical navigation, knots, and astronomy.

Two nights in Marseille — the Vieux-Port, the Château d’If, the maritime museum. Then south along the Provençal coast by rental car, to the small towns the corsairs raided. They camp, they hike the approaches, scope out the egress, etc. Disclaimer: don’t actually let them raid any villages and carry of hostages. You can’t say I didn’t tell you. French campsites run 15 - 20 euros a night in the shoulder season. The kids cook most of their own meals: bread, cheese, eggs, a market run in French…you know the drill.

Then the ferry. An overnight crossing to Tunis, deck seats rather than a cabin. The kids stand on deck at night under the stars they have learned and watch the coast of Africa come up out of the sea at dawn. Four or five days in Tunisia: the Tunis medina, Carthage, La Goulette, Sidi Bou Saïd, a day trip to Bizerte. Hostels in the medina at $7 - $25 a bed. Street food at $3 - $8 a plate. An overnight ferry back to Marseille. Fly home.

Ten days. An itinerary the kids planned and the mentor approved (nudged in the right direction). A crossing of the Mediterranean in both directions on the same sea the corsairs sailed. Bring the parents if you can afford to. Bring siblings…they can double as hostages in a pinch.

The Money

The actual trip is the biggest cost variable but my research and experience tell me that something like the following is feasible: a mentor and three students traveling in the shoulder season:

• Round-trip airfare, Chicago to Marseille: $3,000 for four

• Round-trip ferry, Marseille to Tunis, deck seats: $1,400 — Direct Ferries (Marseille–Tunis)

• Compact rental car in France, five or six days: $500

• Campsites in France, four nights: $150 — Camping Les Cigales, Cassis (Marseille Tourism listing)

• Hostels in Tunisia, four or five nights: $400 — Dar Ya Hostel, Tunis medina (Booking.com)

• Food, ten days: $800

• Museum admissions and local transport: $200 — Bardo National Museum (Wikipedia) / Château d’If official site

• Insurance, passport fees, contingency: $400

$6,850 for four people, or about $1,713 per student. Let’s build in a buffer and call it $2k each.

A private school in most American markets runs $10k - $30k per student per year. Per-pupil spending in public schools is almost never less than $10k /annually. The Barbary trip costs 10% of what a family pays for a year of private classical school, or 20% of what a taxpayer funds for a year of public school.

The Barbary mission is the expensive one. The other ideas I shared in Part 1 will likely be cheaper. The banquet costs groceries or ammunition. The altarpiece costs materials. The drag racer costs what you can salvage. Across a year the full cost of Expeditionary Education — mentor stipend, trip, materials, insurance — comes in at a fraction of private school tuition.

What This Requires of You

Three or four families who want this for their children more than they want the safety of the homogenous. You or someone else in your community who fits the mentor profile. A room to meet in on Monday afternoons. A willingness to let your fourteen-year-old handle harder things than he or she has handled so far — a tiller, a star chart, a conversation in French, a night on a ferry crossing the Mediterranean.

Okay—hope this helps put some meat on the bones. If you try this and don’t tell me about it, I’ll be disappointed.

What follows are some ideas I’ve been working on recently for my own children but also because I’m curious about how and if this kind of thing could work…and even work at some sort of scale. I’m very open to feedback. Let me know what you think.

Disintegration and Purposelessness

Much of contemporary schooling teaches subjects in isolation, disconnected from any animating or integrating purpose. Students pass through history, mathematics, science, and literature as discrete objects rather than as tools with which to accomplish something real. The inevitable question, “Why do I need to know this?” goes unanswered or teachers tie themselves into knots attempting an answer. The subjects have been severed from any purpose that would make them self-evidently necessary.

I should note that my thrust here isn’t that we need to create some sort of utilitarian framework or rationale for everything we learn in or out of school. Of course, many of the things we study are appropriate objects of pleasure per se. But for those who are quick to raise the objection of utilitarianism, I’d counter that there’s something perverse in asking students — especially young students — to engage in the kind of abstraction that might be useful or even pleasant to an adult when thinking about education. It would be like asking a child to play a game but not allowing them to create a narrative within the game. Or to play a sport but not allow keeping score.

It’s also relevant to note that the great thing about the human capacity for intellect and reason is the exercise of our agency in doing things in the world: making beautiful buildings, building a family, building a business, making beautiful art. To say that our education should in some way participate in this native drive to exercise our agency isn’t to reduce education to some sort of utilitarian model. On the contrary it invites education to correspond to and enable the human drive to achieve, to act, and to create, and to strive toward the transcendent.

An Experiential Method

Thomas Aquinas observed that nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses. The imaginative faculty—what he called the “storehouse of forms”—must be furnished through authentic, embodied experience. When students spend their formative years in passive, disembodied consumption of abstracted content, the storehouse is populated with shadows rather than substances. Learning remains theoretical because it was never rooted in encounter with the real.

I’ve written about this epistemological claim and the cultural consequences for getting it wrong before.

So what would an integrated, motivated, and experiential education look like? Here’s a stab at it:

Expeditionary Education

The educational approach uses a particular mission to galvanize the student in learning. The mission, and one’s inherent desire to achieve or accomplish it, turns all the “subjects” one needs to learn into aids in accomplishing the mission rather than burdens to be endured.

Expeditionary Education is a collaborative self-study program built on a simple insight: when a student has a mission, (it’s experiential) learning ceases to be something inflicted on him and becomes something he pursues (it’s motivated). History, geography, mathematics, science, literature, and language are no longer isolated “subjects”—they become instruments essential to accomplishing a concrete objective (it’s integrated). The student’s own desire to succeed drives him deeper into each discipline than any curriculum map could compel. With time and maturity, a student who has developed an intimacy with the objects of learning can take pleasure in them for their own sake rather than as instruments.

Program Structure

The program rests on three pillars, each essential to the formation of a capable, self-directed young person:

1. Missions

Students receive missions—historically grounded or practically challenging scenarios that require them to research, plan, and execute a complex undertaking. Each mission is designed so that its successful completion requires the student to acquire knowledge and skills spanning multiple traditional academic disciplines. The student does not study these subjects because a syllabus requires it; he studies them because the mission requires it.

Students meet with a mentor or guide who assigns missions, receives weekly briefings on progress, and guides the student(s) toward the resources, people, and tasks necessary to stay on track. The mentor is not a lecturer. He is a guide who challenges, redirects, and holds the student accountable. If a mission requires travel, the student plans the itinerary and briefs it to the mentor for approval.

I think this will work best if the students work in small cohorts—groups of 3-4.

2. Work

In addition to their mission work, students hold a job. This is not optional or incidental—it is a core element of the program. Work builds real skills, teaches real lessons, and is hugely important for vocational discernment. The students learn how to show up on time, take direction from a boss, deal with difficult people, manage money, and understand the relationship between effort and compensation. A young person who has worked a real job carries himself differently than one who has not. He understands the working world from the inside, and he has earned his own money—a formation in responsibility and self-reliance that cannot be replicated through academic exercises.

3. Athletics

Students train and compete in athletics. The body is not an inconvenience to be managed while the mind does the real work—it is the foundation upon which intellectual and moral formation is built (see the epistemology article). Athletic training teaches discipline, perseverance, the acceptance of physical discomfort, and the experience of both victory and defeat. Competition forges character in ways that cooperative exercises cannot. A student who has pushed his body to its limits has a storehouse of forms that no amount of reading can supply. Gymnastics and wrestling seem to me to be the premiere forms.

How It Works

Mission Assigned

The mentor assigns a mission—a historical scenario, a practical challenge, or a service project with a clear objective and real constraints. The student must determine what he needs to learn and how to learn it. The missions are carefully conceived so that taken in their totality, students will enjoy a broad, liberal education in all the fundamentals in addition to a rich series of experiences and achievements.

Mentor-directed, Student Conducted Research & Execution

The student pursues the knowledge and skills required by the mission. He reads history, studies maps, learns mathematical principles, acquires language skills, consults experts, and develops practical competencies—all driven by the requirements of the mission itself. Modern tools and resources are available at the mentor’s discretion.

Weekly Briefings

Each week, the student meets with the mentor to brief him on progress. The mentor evaluates the student’s work, challenges his assumptions, redirects where necessary, and points him toward additional resources, people, or tasks. This is not a lecture, though sometimes the mentor might enlist the aid of specialists to provide the students lectures on things they need for their mission. Those specialists might be a local welder, French teacher, appliance repairman, police officer, Chemistry professor, etc.

Mission Brief Delivered

The mission culminates in the delivery of a complete plan, presentation, or executed project that demonstrates mastery across all disciplines the mission required. The student briefs the mentor and where appropriate, a broader audience, then actually completes the mission to the extend resources permit.

Okay, enough of all that. What is an example?

Example Missions

The following are examples. There will be some trial and error regarding how many missions students can actually handle each year and whether it’s advisable to pursue more than one mission at a time.

Mission 1: The Barbary Corsair

Scenario: You are a Barbary corsair looking to make a name for yourself by raiding a village on the coast of France. Plan your expedition and submit a full mission brief. You may use modern tools to learn what they would have known.

Subject Components:

• History — Piracy in the Mediterranean, Ottoman-European relations, the Barbary states

• Geography & Cartography — Mediterranean coastlines, port towns, prevailing winds, sea routes

• Literature — Primary sources, period accounts, cultural context and details

• Nautical Navigation — Mathematics, celestial navigation, tides and currents

• Language — Arabic and French, enough to operate and negotiate

• International Travel – trip planning, language practice, site exploration

Once the plan is good…actually go there and visit the places. Such a trip would cost a fraction of annual private school tuition.

Mission 2: The Banquet

Scenario: Plan, organize, and conduct a banquet for the families in the cohort. Everything—food, entertainment, decorations, logistics—is your responsibility.

Subject Components:

• Mathematics — Budgeting, quantities, cost-per-head calculations, purchasing

• Home Economics & Culinary Arts — Menu planning, food preparation, dietary considerations

• History & Culture — Traditions of feasting and hospitality across civilizations

• Communication & Leadership — Coordinating volunteers, making invitations, public speaking

• Art & Design — Decorations, table settings, printed programs or menus

• Music & Entertainment — Selecting or arranging live entertainment, planning the program of events

Then have them actually host the banquet.

Mission 3: The Drag Racer

Scenario: Build and race a drag racer car or go-cart. Design it, source the parts, construct it, and compete.

Subject Components:

• Physics & Engineering — Aerodynamics, force, friction, power-to-weight ratios

• Mathematics — Measurements, tolerances, gear ratios, speed calculations

• Mechanical Arts — Welding, fabrication, engine mechanics, tool proficiency

• Budgeting & Procurement — Sourcing parts, managing a build budget, vendor negotiation

• Safety & Regulation — Understanding race rules, safety requirements, and compliance

• History — The development of automotive engineering and racing culture

Just do it.

Mission 4: The Altarpiece

Scenario: Construct, decorate, and donate a traditional altarpiece to a church or chapel. The work must be historically informed, liturgically appropriate, and crafted by your own hand.

Subject Components:

• Art History — The tradition of altarpieces from medieval through Baroque periods, iconographic conventions

• Theology & Liturgy — The purpose and placement of the altarpiece in worship, symbolic meaning

• Woodworking & Craftsmanship — Joinery, carving, finishing techniques, material selection

• Painting & Gilding — Traditional techniques in tempera, oil, or gold leaf application

• Mathematics & Geometry — Proportions, perspective, structural calculations

• Communication — Coordinating with the recipient parish, presenting the finished work.

Those examples give you a sense of the idea. I know it seems structurally crazy given the forms we’re used to in contemporary education. But I think it might be more of a recovery of what the classical world already understood: that the formation of a young person requires the integration of body, mind, and character through encounter with the real. The Persians trained their sons in riding, archery, and truth-telling as a single program. Plato insisted that gymnastics and music were the twin foundations of education. Aquinas’s epistemology demands that the intellect be furnished through the senses. The three pillars of this program—missions, work, and athletics—are simply the practical application of these ancient convictions.

A student who has planned a banquet, built a race car, and held down a job while training as an athlete has a storehouse of forms that no amount of classroom instruction can replicate. He has done things. He has failed and recovered. He has managed money, navigated unfamiliar terrain, built something with his hands, fed people, and pushed his body past the point of comfort. He does not need to be told that history, mathematics, or geography matter—he has used them.

He already knows.

Some months ago I wrote an essay called “Effort as Innocence.” I had been inspired by a young student who jumped on the pullup bar and for an agonizing stretch of time struggled against gravity to attempt a single pullup. She didn’t know that she couldn’t do one…not even close…but exerted effort as if she was right on the cusp of victory.

“This little girl had demonstrated a particularly beautiful and delicate form of innocence—one most of us adults lose as we come to grips with the world and learn to make our way in it. It is innocence, very close to naivete, which does not know that it cannot succeed. Also, it is partly humility because it is not overly concerned with failure.”

I’ve been thinking recently of another aspect of effort. Not effort as innocence, but effort as a source of pleasure. I don’t mean to say that the object of our effort is the source of pleasure, but that effort itself is pleasurable. Let me explain.

I’ll always be grateful that my high school made me memorize the following lines from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”:

Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Say what you will of Ulysses (and Dante certainly gives him a rough go in the Inferno) Tennyson’s rendition of him sparkles with energy, ambition, and charisma. This is a man who can galvanize the hearts of men to do great deeds.

I particularly like the verbs Tennyson deploys in the poem. Ulysses does not call his friends to row. He calls them to “smite” the sounding furrows. He does not urge his comrades “to try.” He urges them to “strive” and “not to yield.” Big difference between “trying” and “striving.”

Long before Deadpool invoked “maximum effort,” there was Ulysses crushing maximum effort for himself and everyone around him….even, or perhaps especially, when it was a pretty bad idea:

When I read or recite Tennyson’s lines, something stirs in me, something that wants real challenges, real hardship, real effort and that looks at the relative ease of contemporary life with something like scorn and regret. I loved my time in the Marine Corps because of the constant demand for extraordinary effort. That effort itself was a source of pleasure and it also brought into sharp contrast other more civilized forms of pleasure like a cold drink or smelling good after a shower.

Of all the promises and perils present in the advent of artificial intelligence, one of the real perils is perhaps one of the most counterintuitive. AI, in some spheres, threatens to deprive us of the pleasure of effort.

Seeing new countryside on foot has always been pleasurable. And once upon a time it used to be one of the only ways to see it. The rush of technological advancement has meant that we can now see new countryside quickly and easily from a car window, or, even more easily, from a photo on the internet. But while this makes new countryside easier and more accessible, all but those who set out on foot with their sustenance on their back have lost the old pleasure of the effort. It turns out, that easier does not mean more pleasurable.

Of course, it’s not AI which has deprived us of the pleasure of effort while backpacking or hunting for game. That was accomplished with other, more analog technologies.

But there are forms of effort which AI certainly does threaten. Don’t get me wrong, it can do amazing things. It can make mundane tasks disappear in a tornado of competence, efficiency, and organization. But it can also read difficult texts for you, write difficult essays for you, and even lessen the inventive effort required of the imagination in creative work. If these sound like advantages from a workaday world point of view, I suggest they are disadvantages from an effort-hedonist’s point of view.

I confess, sometimes I like doing things the hard way. I cut the grass on parts of our property with a scythe. I like the blisters that form in the humidity. I like the sweat running down my body. I don’t do it because it’s strictly necessary to do it that way. I do it for the pleasure. If a machine did it for me, could I find as rich a pleasure in easier pursuits? Would they register as easier without the sharp contrast?

It is not only for the service rendered to intellectual integrity and to shaping wholesome habits of mind and heart that I applaud those schools and families who keep AI out of children’s’ education. It’s also because those children ought to have the opportunity to experience the rich pleasures of effort. They ought to be given a chance to hear Ulysses’ exhortation to great effort and to respond with a spirit willing to “strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

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Book VII of Plato’s Republic recounts the famous allegory of the Cave, in which Socrates describes to Glaucon a people chained and immobile within a cave, their captivity passed in watching moving shadows cast on the wall before them. Not knowing any difference, they consider the shadows, the images on the wall, to be reality itself. Mistaking the image for reality is, in fact, one of the ways in which the cave dwellers can truly be called prisoners. They are chained by their own incapacity to recognize the real — trapped, if you will, in an epistemological cell.

If we can imagine, as Plato did, one prisoner escaping and making his way out of the cave, we would be watching the very act of education. True to the word’s etymology — a leading out — the prisoner’s education leads him out of the cave, where images masquerade as reality, into the broad light of reality itself. This is the work teachers in the classical renewal have undertaken to do, and it’s one of the biggest jailbreaks in history.

Aquinas and the Imagination

Even if you appreciate the analogy, you might yet protest that your students don’t inhabit actual caves, and teaching them is not as simple as dragging them into the light. How does this ascent from the shadows in the cave toward real enlightenment work in actual education?

For the answer to this question, I suggest we turn to Thomas Aquinas. Drawing on his Aristotelian formation, Aquinas offers a framework which yields an eminently commonsensical answer to the question of how we can help our students with their jailbreak from the cave of ignorance. Breaking their bonds requires directing their attention and appetites away from the false images which enervate and pervert the imagination and instead nourishing the imagination on the whole food of physical experience.

Yes, Aquinas proposes that a capable intellect is predicated upon a well-formed imagination. In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas refers to the imagination as “a certain storehouse of forms received through the senses” (I, Q.78, A.4). He notes that “intellectual knowledge is caused by the senses” (QQ.84–85), which provide our “agent intellect” the raw material upon which to act. Once we have abstracted the forms from our sense experience, they provide the building blocks of reason, allowing us to construct definitions, to see likenesses between things, and to make distinctions.

Without the work of our senses harvesting real forms, our reason is left with only shadows with which to work — and shadows can be deceptive. Hilaire Belloc puts it this way:

“The truth is that secondary impressions, impressions gathered from books and from maps, are valuable as adjuncts to primary impressions (that is, impressions gathered through the channel of our senses), or, what is almost always as good and sometimes better, the interpreting voice of a living man….Well, I say, these secondary impressions are valuable as adjuncts to primary impressions. But when they stand absolute and have hardly any reference to primary impressions, then they may deceive. When they stand not only absolute but clothed with authority, and when they pretend to convince us even against our own experience, they are positively undoing the work which education was meant to do.” (“Reality,” in First and Last)

Without the discernment that comes from a rich physical experience, our reason lacks the capacity to distinguish between shadows on the wall of a cave and real things in the light of day. Simply put, we require broad physical experience to have a well-formed imagination. And we require a well-formed imagination to reason well.

But outside the frame of Plato’s allegory, is there actually a problem with an imagination formed by counterfeit impressions rather than real, sensible experiences? Yes, and it might be worse than you think.

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The Danger of False Forms

Consider the consequences of an electorate whose political judgments are formed not by experience and the reasoned judgments derived from experience, but by a series of impressions curated by the phone or TV. Consider the capacity of an individual to make prudent judgments who might have seen something on TikTok a thousand times, but never encountered it in reality.

Take a horse, for example, or a gun. The safe, sterile, screen-bound versions of these things do not quite prepare one for their severe power or equip one to handle that power prudently. Consider the transhumanist movement’s gospel of infinite biological malleability, which dissolves under contact with the actual limits of embodied existence.

In each case, right reason is preempted from acting by the fact that it lacks an imagination full of authentic forms derived from sense experience of reality. The practical result of this move back into the Cave is likely to look like an electorate increasingly susceptible to “narrative” and incapable of discerning between true and false; the ascent of ideologies which are not responsible for justifying themselves in relation to nature and facts; an increase in raw expressions of emotion, violence, and hubris without the check of natural consequences. None of this bodes well for the harmonious activity of a civil society. And all of it sounds increasingly familiar.

When we consider that the average teen spends about seven to nine hours on a screen each day, that virtual reality, social media, and video games successfully create alternative “realities,” and that as the virtual expands, young people’s physical encounters with reality contract, we ought to consider whether our educational efforts are oriented toward the cave or toward the bright light of day. If the problem is an imagination stocked with false or deceptive images, the solution is to fill it with authentic forms.

Physical Education as Epistemological Foundation

A corrective — not a cure-all, mind you — but a corrective, is vigorous physical education (PE). While childhood is increasingly sedentary and screen-mediated, PE ought to be a crash course in primary impressions. PE provides direct sensory encounters: proprioception, spatial reasoning, force, and resistance. It gives children a direct experience of things before asking them to think about things. It begins to build self-knowledge by introducing effort, fatigue, capability, and limitation, all authentic forms which populate the imagination.

Far from a distraction or a way of “burning off” extra energy, PE is an epistemological partner with the rest of the curriculum. In mathematics, students practice abstraction from embodied spatial and quantitative experience. In rhetoric, they handle the human dimension informed by their own experience of passion, ambition, and limitation. The gymnasium and the playing fields become the laboratory where students encounter and experiment with the virtues they study in history, literature, and ethics. If nowhere else, at least in PE class, students should make physical contact with reality, thereby initiating the epistemological process of turning experience into forms in the imagination which then become the building blocks of reason.

If true education is like a jailbreak from the cave, we should be careful to lead our students toward the light of reality rather than simply into another cell decorated more to our taste. This means that our education renewal must engage the body through sense experience, building a strong epistemological foundation, or it risks serving students the riches of our intellectual heritage as mere shadows on the wall. We don’t want students who can parse Virgil’s Latin but have no experience of the striving, the weariness, and the achievement unfolding across his pages.

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The call before us, then, is not simply to add PE to the curriculum or to devote more time to it. These are practical measures that may or may not follow from a proper understanding of its role in education. Physical experience serves as an essential epistemological foundation for the formation of human beings capable of encountering reality as it is.

When our students move their bodies through space, learn what their muscles can and cannot do, feel the difference between effort and ease, victory and defeat, and grapple with the innumerable complexities of team dynamics — they are not taking a break from learning. They are learning in the most fundamental way possible: through direct encounter with the real. The call, therefore, is not to settle for mere games and activities, but to implement a rigorous, meaningful physical education program that maximizes student experience of reality and is augmented by deliberate reinforcement of the virtues taught throughout the entire curriculum.

There’s a jailbreak underway, so roll up your sleeves. We have work to do.

I was recently a guest on a podcast and was asked about the role parents and teachers play in establishing a culture of responsible physical stewardship. I.e. how do they cultivate physical discipline? This post from a couple of years ago summarizes my sense (and experience) of how discipline actually works.

Several years ago, when I was still on active duty in the Marine Corps, I published a short article about leadership in the Marine Corps Gazette. I proposed then, and still think now, that the best foundation for leadership is friendship—specifically friendship understood as a mutual striving for the same good. A leader worth his salt unites his followers in a voluntary commitment to pursuing the good together.

For example, as Marines, that meant extreme physical fitness and strong moral character so we could rely on one another in difficult circumstances; it meant countless hours honing tactics and individual skills so we could anticipate each other’s actions; it meant sharing a love of country and each other so we could trust one another implicitly. If your supposed subordinates do not share with you a vision and commitment to a particular good, then leadership is not really the name for the relationship.

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For those who have genuinely made a commitment and joined this kind of friendship, there is no external discipline that is more effective than one’s own conscience—no consequence for failing that is graver than self-reproach. When it happened that I did have to administer discipline, I was simply holding them accountable for achieving their own goals and commitments.

The principle of friendship is actually at the root of all discipline, including that maintained by parents and teachers. A vocation to teach or to parent is a vocation to lead and the same principles of leadership apply. Adults must offer children a compelling vision of the good along with an invitation to join them in pursuing it. This happens first through the example adults set. A parent’s behavior is the first model a young child has to emulate and will almost inevitably shape what the child considers to be good. This is a mercy because the parent needs no special talent or skill of persuasion to capture the child’s admiration. It is also, for the very same reason, a formidable responsibility.

As the child grows older, adults may come to rely less on the child’s inherent desire to imitate and instead introduce invitations to pursue the good together. This might look like showing a child how to make his bed or doing the chores alongside him. For teachers it will mean modelling the virtues you hope your students will develop and challenging them to grow by striving to do the same yourself. All discipline starts with this leadership by example because there is no friendship unless you’re pursuing the same good together.

One way to think about this approach to leadership and discipline is through the lens of rhetoric, the art of persuasion. Classical rhetoric defines three appeals: the first is logos or the appeal to reason; the second is pathos, the emotional appeal; finally, ethos is an appeal rooted in force of character. Does the person making the appeal command my respect and trust? A good argument will contain all three, but the heart of charismatic leadership and discipline is the appeal of ethos.

Bureaucratic vs Charismatic

It is important to make a distinction between bureaucratic and charismatic discipline. Bureaucratic discipline takes many forms: a proscribed consequence administered by a distant authority; a meaningless activity that embarrasses and demeans; or even an abstraction like adverse paperwork. At its heart, it denies the personal connection between the leader and the follower. It is abstract and impersonal and can never accomplish true discipline. Usually bureaucratic discipline creates resentment and active antagonization.

Charismatic discipline, on the other hand, is rooted in the friendship between two people. It requires the leader to earn the right to discipline the subordinate by first modelling the good, then inviting the subordinate to join in its pursuit. In schools, this begins with the admissions policies. A school must be clear about what it is for. Any environment containing people who do not want to be there will resemble a prison rather than a school. Persuasion is the key. For teachers and students who want to be there, when a young person does something wrong, he or she risks the friendship you have cultivated together. If you’ve done your job well, that friendship is too valuable for them willingly to risk it for long.

With adults, the disciplinary mechanism is the same: we entered into this work or commitment voluntarily. Each one of us serves the mission in a particular capacity. You have failed to live up to your own freely engaged ideals or are otherwise impeding the ability of others to pursue the mission in their proper capacity. The point here is that you use their own ideals to effect the discipline. If you don’t share ideals, you are not friends and probably should not be in a working association together.

The 19th-century Italian priest John Bosco is a prime example of charismatic discipline. In his ministry to orphaned and homeless youth in Turin, he pioneered many of the principles described here. He is said to have convinced the guards of a juvenile detention center to allow him to take every inmate on a daylong excursion in the countryside. He had spent the week giving them a retreat and had established a good rapport with them. Bosco simply impressed upon the young men how important it was that they not run away once they were outside the gates, and that he trusted them not to. At the end of the day, against all expectations, every boy returned with the priest.

Ultimately, approaches to discipline that fail to recognize and appeal in an age-appropriate way to the inherent freedom and dignity of the person being disciplined will not last. And if this charismatic approach sounds too soft to work, remember that in my experience it is the only approach hard enough to galvanize Marines in the most severe circumstances.

This is the kind of discipline our leaders and schools need to develop.

One final illustration: Gen. John A. Lejeune led Marines in Europe at the end of World War I, including in their final charge across the Meuse River just hours before the armistice was announced the morning of Nov. 11, 1918. In his memoir, he described asking a young Marine amputee in a field hospital, “What induced you to cross the bridge in the face of that terrible machine gun and artillery fire when you expected that the war would end in a few hours?” The Marine responded that their commander had called them together just before the attack and said: “Men, I am going across that river, and I expect you to go with me.” The young Marine then told the general, “What could we do but go across, too? Surely we couldn’t let him go by himself; we love him too much for that.”

,This article first appeared at the Dallas Morning News

The first time was in high school when my class’s reenactment of Xenophon’s anabasis in the middle of winter wearing only togas and sandals turned a little too realistic. Xenophon and his buddies ended up stranded in hostile Persian territory and made a grueling march through snow-filled mountains to the Black Sea.

We did not encounter any Persians on our trek through a small section of the Poconos, but the snow did its job anyway. Our school mates ambushed us with snow balls near the end of the hike (as the Greeks were ambushed) but the snowball fight was fairly mirthless given the despairing realization many of us had about the sorry state of our feet.

The second time was when I was guarding an ammunition supply point in South Korea with the Marine Corps. I’ve never experienced anything close to what my brother Marines did in the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, but this second brush with frostbite gave me a renewed respect for those Marines. They battled the Chinese Communists for days in brutal weather, sometimes -54 Fahrenheit, were outnumbered ten to one, and executed an horrific but controlled withdrawal. It was during this battle that the famous Chesty Puller quipped: “All right, they’re on our left, they’re on our right, they’re in front of us, they’re behind us…they can’t get away this time.”

Neither experience of frost bite was much fun, but at least the second had the dignity of duty rather than just raw teenage machismo. Not that I object to raw teenage machismo. I learned some important lessons from it.

Sometimes Michigan winter makes it feel like our only options are frostbite or huddling inside in a kind of tech-enabled hibernation. Those of us with kids are especially tempted to surrender hope of healthy outdoor recreation to the sub-zero temperatures and buckets of snow. Think of all the cold weather gear, how long it takes to bundle up (especially toddlers), not to mention that the roads can be dicey.

But despite all the gear, the roads, and even the lingering effects of frostbite, I still think Michigan’s winters are best experienced by getting out there. My reasons fall into two chief categories. The first is utility. The second is pleasure.

Regarding utility, consider that when we brave the elements they begin to teach us valuable lessons about how to handle them well. True, nature can be an unforgiving teacher, but it always tells the truth and rewards those who have learned its lessons. The first time I developed frostbite, for example, I learned that will alone was not sufficient to endure the elements and emerge unscathed. I also learned that a trek through the snow is better in boots than in sandals.

We increase our functionality in winter weather the same way we increase our fitness: by pushing against our limitations and gradually adapting to greater and greater capacity. We learn which gear works and which doesn’t; how cold is too cold; how long is too long; and how to be comfortable and capable despite the elements. No amount of study can teach this knowledge. These are lessons only imparted by experience.

But here’s the catch: as we become more capable in the outdoors, nature begins to reward us with greater and greater of its pleasures. The hunter in the tree stand knows the quiet of sunrise and sunset in a way the indoorsman can only guess at. Same with the cross country skier observing the perfect crust of snow or the riot of paw prints in the underbrush.

Have you ever noticed the enjoyment and warmth of seeing a familiar face in a crowd? Learning to identify the trees and animals around you creates the same kind of enjoyment whenever you’re outside. If you already know the summer leaves of Michigan’s trees, the winter invites you to learn them by their bark. The oak, the maple, the locust, the cherry, the walnut, the sycamore, the beech—all different, begin to reveal themselves when we spend a little time in the snow just noticing them. This is its own kind of pleasure: to see our home state with its high-contrast light, not through a window or from the road, but where the snow, the light, and the sharp air all have things to say.

I admit that you might miss the latest headline or notification on your phone while you’re becoming more capable outdoors and enjoying those distinctive pleasures unavailable except through direct experience. In my view, those terms are acceptable. And if you do go out—I recommend boots

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If you explore the University of Michigan’s campus on foot, you might end up retracing the steps of the poet Robert Frost. The university’s sixth president, Marion Leroy Burton, succeeded in luring Frost to Ann Arbor for year-long residencies on three different occasions. The first was in 1921 and saw Frost living on Washtenaw Street in a house which you can now visit at The Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village.

Ann Arbor and Michigan’s campus have changed since 1921 when Frost first lived there, but on foot is still the best way to see it. An avid walker, Frost’s perch on Washtenaw placed him between Michigan’s quad and the Huron River. His poem “Acquainted with the Night” was written while he lived in Ann Arbor and describes the old Washtenaw County Courthouse Clock:

And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

The courthouse and clock tower that Frost saw no longer exist, but a new clock tower stands on campus which is named after the U-M president who first brought the poet to Michigan. Burton Memorial Tower looms over the quad, two hundred limestone-clad, Art Deco-inspired feet tall, and holding one of the world’s largest Carillons which you can hear chime every fifteen minutes.

Unlike Frost’s ambivalence in the poem, this clock sadly has proclaimed, at least once, that the time was indeed wrong. The tower saw tragedy in 1987 when U-M Regent Sarah Goddard Power ended her life by jumping from the eighth floor. When she jumped she might have been looking at the Power Center, the new theatre her in-laws had recently built just a couple hundred feet from the tower on land that in Frost’s time was likely dotted with little houses.

Frost was U-M’s first Fellow in Creative Arts and received a generous stipend with very few strings attached. While not responsible for teaching any classes, Frost was a regular fixture at student and faculty meetings and held court in various faculty houses around Ann Arbor as streams of students came to admire him.

Something of an insomniac, Frost was known to prowl the streets of Ann Arbor late at night. His book, New Hampshire, was published in 1923 shortly after his year in Ann Arbor and includes his famous “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” We can’t know for sure, but it’s entirely possible that the snow and the woods which feature in the poem were inspired by one of his late night walks in Ann Arbor.

During his time on campus Frost’s celebrity reached such a pitch that a local drug store named an ice cream novelty after him. You might cross the quad and indulge in a “Frost-bite” on your way to a football game. Once Michigan’s president suggested that a poetry reading by Frost in Hill Auditorium might draw more of a crowd than a simultaneous football game. Frost doubted this very much because, as he said, he himself would skip the reading for the game.

The Power Center is a jumble of concrete and glass which hosts many of the wonderful shows which the University attracts. Securing tickets to a show there inevitably involves one in a game of hide and seek. The show hides inside the Power Center while ticket holders seek to find their way in. The architect playfully, let us assume it was playfulness, disguised the doors so that approaching patrons are greeted by uniform sheets of reflective glass with no apparent point of entry. I’ll give you a tip from hard-won experience: follow the sidewalk until it terminates at the glass wall and then feel around for a handle. With any luck someone on the inside will take pity on you and push open the door admitting you to the esoteric pleasures within.

If you despair of the architect’s playfulness and need an aesthetic warm up after the frosty brutalism, you might wander over to the Nickels Arcade—not an arcade for video games, but the older, more dignified kind of arcade: an arched, covered passageway. Here, the cold concrete and glass give way to warm brick and stone, an inviting entrance, and little shops purveying simple, earthy pleasures like tobacco, coffee, and antiques. With construction of the Arcade concluding in 1918, I expect Robert Frost often traversed the passage on his long walks for a brief reprieve from Ann Arbor’s frequent rain and snow.

The Arcade borders campus on its western edge. If you make your way east, past Ingalls Mall (where the tower stands), past Burns Park and the Graduate Library, you’ll eventually cross Washtenaw Avenue and might spot four ropes hanging from a metal structure near the sidewalks which connect nearby footbridges, dining halls, and dormitories. Just a little further east and you’ll see the cemetery on a slight hill in front of you. Near the cemetery is a Tudor style building with timbers embedded in plaster on the upper stories. And near the door to this piece of old England in Ann Arbor rests a massive tractor tire.

If the ropes and tire seem out of place, come by on a Monday morning before dawn and you’ll likely see midshipmen and cadets in camouflage and boots flipping the tire then sprinting off to climb the ropes. The Tudor building is called Observation Lodge and now serves as home to the University’s various military officer training programs.

Those programs first started in 1917 with World War One raging, and they continue to this day. I don’t know if Frost saw students drilling or training on his walks around campus and town, but I suspect he did.

As a young Marine, I was stationed a couple of years at the University of Michigan. Our home back then was called North Hall and it had housed officer programs on campus since World War Two. It was demolished several years ago, but in my time, from the old buildings’ front steps in the early mornings we would make our way on foot all around campus, the arboretum, and the Huron River valley. We often carried packs or logs and were usually gone by the time the sun rose.

I have been one acquainted with the night. 
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. 
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

Day or night, the best way to see a place, and to know it, is on foot. And because of those early mornings in rain or snow, I have the streets of Ann Arbor in common with Robert Frost.

Children spend a great deal of time indoors and connected to computers both at school and at home. Until the curtain was pulled back during COVID’s year of school at home, many parents assumed that the schools and the computers were all part of a happy collaboration for their children’s benefit. When COVID revealed that for many this was not the case, the reaction against content which many parents found objectionable was swift and significant.

But content always takes a form, (every message exists in a medium) and as Marshal McLuhan articulated, the medium, in fact, is the message.

So while parents have exerted a significant effort to remedy the ill content, much less has been done about the form or the medium.

My interest in the body’s role in education is not simply because fitness is wellness and I wish children to be well if they can be. It is also because I think the radical passivity of a sedentary, desk and screen-bound childhood has the strong potential to miseducate and malform one for a happy life.

I’ve written a great deal on the topic of fitness, outdoorsmanship, and education and have founded a company (Iliad Athletics) dedicated to infusing childhood with more activity outside. As part of my effort to restore some balance to the form or medium of childhood experience, I recently published an article in the Dallas Morning News which lays out a blueprint for the role of PE in every student’s general education.

A Blueprint for Fitness Gen Ed.

In his book, The Politics, Aristotle distinguishes between general and mechanical education. He explains that mechanical education is the kind which serves some vocational purpose, whereas general education seeks to teach fundamentals that are shared by all regardless of vocation.

The language we use to describe this distinction may have changed, but we still discuss the right balance between the two, and at what age one or the other should dominate. Nevertheless, most of us in education both acknowledge the distinction between general and vocational education and hope to help students become well-rounded and career-ready.

While the conversation usually focuses on academics, I propose that the same distinction applies to physical education as it does to every other area of human growth and development, and that general physical education ought to contribute to lifelong fitness in order to facilitate a thriving human life.

When we consider what constitutes general physical education, we should focus on the universal--what every person needs to know, and to be, in order to cultivate fitness, which is simply an extension and amplification of wellness. General education for the body is like reading, writing, and arithmetic. These are core capacities which are deeply functional. It is difficult to thrive in life without them.

What does this look like?

The well-rounded or generally educated body is one well prepared and adapted for meeting the various, unscripted, physical challenges in life. Acknowledging that, as with academics, we are not all equally gifted physically, and in some cases even suffer disabilities, general physical education should seek to maximize one’s functional physical potential.

But meeting the challenges of life is, if you will, a minimum threshold for any kind of education. Take literacy, for example. While it’s important that one read road signs, instruction manuals, and contracts, we also hope that developing skill in reading and writing might unlock rich pleasures, and opportunities for leisure, recreation, and ambition.

Just so with the body. A generally educated body can navigate the daily challenges of life, but can also unlock forms of recreation, adventure, and enriching experiences available only to the physically capable.

What PE program accomplishes this? It must be one that emphasizes general fitness education rather than specialization, and it must contribute to three chief areas of growth.

First is knowledge. Students need to know what fitness is and how the body moves and functions properly. Some of this knowledge work can happen in other classes where students learn conceptually about nutrition, anatomy, and health. But PE class should contribute practical knowledge of biomechanics and how one cultivates lifelong fitness.

Second is skill. Knowledge is necessary but not sufficient to achieve the object of physical education. To take responsibility for our fitness, we need to know how, and to have developed the skills, for doing so. Coaches Jim Cawley and Bruce Evans describe fitness as a combination of ten general physical skills. A coherent PE program should have a plan for developing them all through regular practice. The physical skills are:

• Cardiovascular endurance

• Stamina

• Strength

• Flexibility

• Power

• Speed

• Coordination

• Accuracy

• Agility

• Balance

A passable measure of a PE program’s success or quality would be demonstrable student improvement in the 10 physical skills. An essential part of an educator’s effort to increase student skill in any one area involves testing and candid feedback. Therefore, an essential part of physical skill development is testing or benchmarking against objective standards of performance.

The third, final, area of growth in a general physical education program is the cultivation of habit. If we fail to impart constructive habits through education, we have failed to equip the student for a lifetime of self-governance. To paraphrase, each student’s freedom from dependency upon us or upon a system like school, depends on the integrity of the habits cultivated while still in school. Do they have what they need to do for themselves?

Knowledge, skill, and habits don’t just happen in one year. As children grow, they become capable, intellectually and physically, of new things. An eight year-old who is a proficient reader is nevertheless unlikely to do well with Shakespeare, or an essay by William James. An eight year-old with an excellent squat has years of play and exercise in a growing and changing body to integrate that squat fluently into a number of more complex movements and activities. The squat is fundamental and should return year after year in new, age-appropriate use cases.

A good PE program, therefore, is a spiral rather than a line. We don’t begin with movement on all fours and advance to some specialized physical activity. We cycle through the physical fundamentals in engaging ways every year, developing them in the growing body and reinforcing the knowledge, skills, and habits of caring for and maximizing the body’s potential.

Scholars, administrators, and parents regularly debate what curricula best serve students’ general education needs. My contention is that PE should occupy a prominent place in every child’s general education. Furthermore, it should foreground functional movements and avoid excessive physical specialization. It should communicate knowledge, develop skills, and culminate in a habit of responsibility for one’s fitness. Finally, it should contribute as much as possible to removing the barriers of illness and inability from human happiness and thriving.

Physical education is at the heart of human formation for a free and peaceful life.

This article first appeared in the Dallas Morning News.

I hope the kids in the STEM schools are safely indoors and working on the app for picking up sticks. The ones in the classical schools are busy inside reading about the great sticks of history and then having “dialogues” about them. For the uninitiated, a dialogue is where students get to practice dominating a conversation and feeling right whether they are or not.

But while they were all busy with that, our son went down and helped Keith with the sticks.

Turns out, even in the field, definitions matter. Some of the sticks were actually tree trunks and needed the guy with the chainsaw, so I came down to buck and haul the big stuff.

Now, Keith knows I work in education and that I’ve founded a school. (trying to quit) As I fueled and oiled the saw, Keith told me how, up until high school, he had attended a one-room school just a couple miles from where he now lives—out in the Michigan countryside. By the time he reached high school, there was a big consolidated school, and all the older kids started going there.

I was curious and asked him how the one room school worked. He looked at me a little quizzically before shrugging and saying, “It was good. The teacher would tell you what you needed to know, then you’d do your work while she was telling other kids what they needed to know to do their work.”

“What if you got stuck?” I asked.

Keith, patient with an obviously stupid question: “well, there were lots of kids around. Some older, some younger. Some smarter, some dumber. Someone could always help out…or you’d just figure it out.”

Someone call the DOE. I’d like to nominate Keith as the first education laureate of the United States. Is there a presidential common sense medal?

I won’t detail the virtues of the one-room school here, and of course, it’s not the only workable model. But there is a great deal of promise in the micro-school movement. Others have written long and well about this so I’ll simply note the obvious strengths all of which derive from the principle of subsidiarity:

Subsidiarity - locally crafted solutions implemented at the lowest feasible level.

1. Increases the accountability and dignity in the relationship between teachers & parents.

2. Increases relevance and social & cultural coherence of the teaching and learning.

3. Facilitates logistical adaptation to local conditions (rather than one size fits all).

4. Reduces expenses while increasing compensation (at least potentially)

As I quietly wrapped my head around all the implications about student performance conveyed by Keith’s comment, he launched into a story about his father who grew up just a couple miles from where we were standing.

When Keith’s father was only eight years old or so, his father died and left his wife with six kids and a farm to figure out. Apparently when the local authorities discovered this, they sent a couple cars to the farm and told the mother to pick three kids to keep and that the others had to go into an orphanage. When the little ones heard this, they bolted.

Keith told me that his eight year old father hid in the hayloft of the barn with a little brother. Eventually one of the social workers climbed the ladder in the barn, found the two boys and stashed them in the back of the government car. Next stop: an orphanage in Coldwater, Michigan.

Because one of the boys was eight and the other was six, they were split up into age-segregated quarters. Each night, Keith’s dad would sneak out a window and across the grounds to the building where they kept the younger kids. He could always find his brother by listening outside the windows for someone crying. Apparently, the six year old just couldn’t stop crying. They would sit by the window together, the younger boy inside, his older brother outside, until Keith’s father had to sneak back to his own quarters. This continued for several months and then, one day, the crying stopped.

The older boy kept making his trip night after night, searching for his little brother, but he couldn’t find him again. Years passed, and eventually he left the orphanage as a young man not knowing what had happened to his little brother. Had he hardened his little heart and stopped the tears—and lost his brother in the process? Was he dead? Adopted? Transferred to another orphanage?

Keith told me that many years later his father was a grown man working in a machine shop. A fellow machinist noted Keith’s unusual last name and told him that his sister had married someone close to his age with the same last name. There are some big holes in my understanding of the story, but eventually the two men met, compared notes, and sure enough, half a life later, the two state-orphaned boys had found each other.

Keith’s father came to learn that his little brother had been adopted by a couple who came to the orphanage and saw the boy who could not stop crying. They didn’t know he had a brother—and anyway, they gave him a shot and tried to dry all those tears.

I don’t know what impressed me the most as I heard all this. It might have been the intense localness of it all. This whole story played out within a 30 mile piece of southern Michigan. Keith represents one generation of many… just an American family in the same place, living, suffering, dying, telling stories.

Another thing that struck me was the vexed role of the government in his story: good, bad, ugly. I couldn’t detect any resentment as he told the story. I wonder if his father could have told about hiding in the barn or losing his mother and siblings with the same even keel?

And finally, Keith is one of many older gentlemen who live on country roads in Michigan. He has stories to tell, and I bet he’s not the only one. Between the algorithms and the dialogues in school today, I’m betting the younger generation is not going to hear most of those stories. But I think, generally speaking, it would be better if they did.

This is a short note I recently wrote for the Iliad Athletics newsletter, The Strenuous Life. The Strenuous Life is not a substack—but formally represents the work of my company, Iliad Athletics. Happily, in this case, my work and my cultural interests overlap.

I thought I would share it here because the topic is in close conversation with many of the essays which have appeared in Adam’s Curse over the last several years. Take for example, the series of essays on the educational importance of experience, or primary impressions:

Building the Experience Library

The heart of our work is to help folks live free and peaceful lives—in other words, to be happy. It’s ambitious, yes. And you can never force it, but we’re convinced that strength, confidence, a sense of purpose, and the willingness and ability to serve others are all essential ingredients for a happy life.

Our contribution is through the humble discipline of physical education. In our approach to PE we strive to develop capacity in strength, confidence, and all the other essentials through physical training and character development.

And while we know that our work is vitally important, it does not stand alone. Ideally, in PE we develop physical potential and confidence while simultaneously creating a rich source of experience on which students draw in their other classes, relationships, and work.

Contact with nature helps build students’ library of experiences. So does confronting a physical challenge and the desire to quit. So does navigating the stresses of working as a teammate in a physically involved Tactical Decision Game. All of these are core components of our PE curriculum and build an “Experience Library” which each student has earned.

In the family or the classroom, that “Experience Library” is always available for reference. Connecting a concept or idea to a child’s experience is a classic aid to memory and intensifies the impact of the lesson. Those experiences help students understand the historical and literary figures they encounter. They give them physical touchstones for abstract ideas in math and science. In short, they provide multiple handles to assist in a child’s overall growth and education.

Understood in this way, PE should be an integrated part of a whole curriculum—a resource on which other teachers and parents can draw; a partner in cultivating student excellence; and a prominent contributor to overall school culture and discipline.

This is not PE as busy work, or even as a way simply to encourage student health. Of course, we think their health is vitally important and that PE can, and should, give them the tools to cultivate it for a lifetime. But done well, it is also much, much more than that.

It is at the heart of forming the young for the capacity to live free and peaceful lives.

Thank you for supporting our vital work.

I recently finished reading ’s book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Many of us of child-rearing age are reluctant to roll up our sleeves and make strong arguments about how poisonous a screen-mediated childhood is for the young. To do so is likely to make us sound judgmental to others and perhaps even to dredge up regrets we have about decisions we might have made when raising our own children which we now think might have harmed them. These are the worst kind of regrets.

Jonathan Haidt does us all a service by having the courage to tackle the arguments and propose simple, pragmatic fixes. His credentials as a mainstream public intellectual are a bonus: they lend the argument a certain legibility and credibility to a larger audience than is typical for tech-skeptic takes, and he can reach and appeal to those who might be more concerned with credentials than with arguments.

But even acknowledging the insulation that mainstream credentials can provide, I think it took a great deal of courage for Haidt to write this book. He lists a number of culturally accepted habits and behaviors on which many (most?) contemporary parents rely and claims they directly contribute to an epidemic of mental illness among children. This is heavy stuff. Luckily for us, he brings receipts. But I have to imagine this is an unwelcome argument to hear both for parents and those in the tech industry.

By the way, how did screen-mediated childhood come to be so widespread and socially acceptable? My guess is that it’s because parenting can be hard and the attention-monopolizing power of screens makes it a little easier…at least for a time. A cost deferred is one that is easy to ignore especially if kids are competing with busy work schedules. All of this is so easy to rationalize. “I have to do all this work in order to provide for my family and take care of my kids. I can’t do the work if my kid won’t be quiet or needs too much of my time and attention. The screens reduce their demands on my time which allows me to provide for them better….”

Or something like that.

Haidt pays readers the compliment of assuming we love our children and are therefore willing to makes sacrifices for their good. If we have made some of the mistakes he names in the book, as he acknowledges he has, knowing the truth about them is all the nudge we need in order to change. He seems to think that if he makes a compelling argument about a looming threat to our children and shows us how to keep them safe, individually and as a society, that we’ll take action to do so. Let’s prove him right.

What to do?

Haidt’s Recommendations:

The Anxious Generation offers positive advice in addition to its many warnings. Haidt encourages more free play, more childhood risk taking, fewer scripts and more individual agency. He offers policy interventions such as minimum ages for social media accounts, restricting phones in schools and at home, and increased accountability for tech companies and the social engineering efforts of app developers.

Others:

In addition to Haidt, I’d encourage you to look at and ’s work in this area. I find their essays to be a healthy combination of challenge and encouragement. No month goes by without lists of actionable items to help shift life away from screens and toward the real. Most recently, they help us all prepare for a real Christmas.

Also, offers the kind of reflective essay that holds an argument up so it glitters in the light—often with the happy effect of conviction. Here is an example: “Life Cannot Be Delegated.”

Finally, in my own work, I have built a school and now a business both aimed in slightly different ways at giving back to children the gift of the world. Years ago I helped build Saint Martin’s Academy, which traded screens for manual labor on a farm as well as rigorous athletics.

Now I have built a physical education company, Iliad Athletics, which seeks to enlist schools in deploying strenuous physical exercise in the war against the colonization of our attention. The urgency, intensity, and intimacy of the body at battle with its own abilities in nature is like a field hospital in the war for self-possession. It might not heal every malady, but it provides an immediate reprieve from the battle. If nothing else, the body in nature tells us the truth which is more than we can say of screens which so often tell us only what we want to hear.

Our approach seeks to give children the knowledge, skills, and habits to cultivate fitness for the rest of their lives. If we can achieve this, we will have created a tether to reality through experience; a hedge against the predations of mental illness; an occasion for healthy challenge and risk taking; and some grounds for community and friendship.

Semper Fidelis.

I have a plaque in my office with a quote from the famous Marine Corps officer John A. Lejeune (1867-1942). It reads “The relation between officers and enlisted men should be that of teacher and scholar.” I received this plaque while on active duty in the Marine Corps and always strove to realize its ideal as an officer. But since leaving active service and becoming a teacher I have come to believe it offers as much illumination and inspiration to teachers as it does to officers. The plaque’s text is an excerpt from on of Lejeune’s many beautiful reflections and exhortations on leadership:

“The relation between officers and enlisted men should in no sense be that of superior and inferior nor that of master and servant, but rather that of teacher and scholar. In fact, it should partake of the nature of the relation between father and son, to the extent that officers, especially commanding officers, are responsible for the physical, mental, and moral welfare, as well as the discipline and military training of the young men under their command who are serving the nation in the Marine Corps.”

I am fortunate in my personal and professional life to have served in these three capacities: as a father, a teacher, and an officer. Lejeune’s call to see the similarities between each of these vocations is a welcome reminder of their gravity and sacred character.

Occasionally I find myself speaking to a group about teaching or leadership and on such occasions I often resort to a story that Lejeune tells in his memoir. He was a general officer in World War I and involved in the final offensive in the early hours of November 11th, just before the armistice was signed. I’ll quote the entire passage from his memoir, The Reminiscences of a Marine (1930).

Immediately following the Armistice, I visited the wounded in the Division Field Hospitals. It was heartbreaking to see these brave men who had been maimed and mutilated a few hours before the cessation of hostilities. I talked to each one of them. It was marvelous to witness their fortitude, their cheerfulness, and their fine spirit. I asked a man who had been badly mangled by a shell to tell me how and when he had been wounded. He said he was on duty in the telephone exchange of one of the artillery regiments, and the message came over the wire, “It is 11 o’clock and the war is—.” At this point, he said, a shell landed and burst in the room, killing his “buddy” and seriously wounding him. So far as I have been able to learn, these were the last casualties of the war. The shell was doubtless fired a second or so before 11 o’clock, and reached its mark a few seconds after the clock had struck the hour which brought peace to more millions of people than had any other hour in the world’s history.

On a bunk nearby was a Sergeant of Marines whose leg had been so badly mangled by the fragments of a shell that its amputation was found to be necessary. In response to my inquiry, he told me that he had been injured by a high explosive shell just after he had crossed the bridge over the Meuse during the last battle of the war. I asked him if he had heard before the battle that the Armistice would probably be signed within a few hours. He replied that it was a matter of common knowledge among the men. I then said, “what induced you to cross the bridge in the face of that terrible machine gun and artillery fire when you expected that the war would end in a few hours?” In answer, he said, “Just before we began to cross the bridge our Battalion Commander, Captain Dunbeck, assembled the companies around him in the ravine where we were waiting orders, and told us, ‘Men, I am going across that river, and I expect you to go with me.’” The wounded man then remarked, “What could we do but go across too? Surely we couldn’t let him go by himself; we love him too much for that.”

I have always felt that the incident I have just narrated gives one a better understanding of the meaning and practice of leadership than do all the books that have been written, and all the speeches that have been made on the subject.

The danger in quoting this passage during a talk is the very likely chance that I’ll be choked up and unable to continue for a few moments. It’s a story with a severe kind of beauty. I can’t add anything to it other than to say that leadership in the field, family, or classroom which lacks the fundamental aspect of shared humanity, familiarity, and purpose which we call love, is a counterfeit of the real item.

Discipline built on any other foundation is really just coercion. And the verbs “lead” and “coerce” have very different definitions. Human beings, even very small ones in the classroom, should be led. I know this is difficult to do. Probably the hardest part is the fact that you cannot fake it. Pretending to care when you don’t is perhaps the only thing more fatal than not caring in the first place.

There is no substitute for the spiritual, in war. Miracles must be wrought if victories are to be won, and to work miracles, men’s hearts must needs be afire with self-sacrificing love for each other, for their units, for their division, and for their country. If each man knows that all the officers and men in his division are animated with the same fiery zeal as he himself feels, unquenchable courage and unconquerable determination crush out fear, and death becomes preferable to defeat or dishonor.

Fortunate indeed is the leader who commands such men, and it is his most sacred duty to purify his own soul and to cast out from it all unworthy motives, for men are quick to detect pretense or insincerity in their leaders, and worse than useless as a leader is the man in whom they find evidences of hypocrisy or undue timidity, or whose acts do not square with his words.

I published “The Agamemnon Effect” three years ago and share it again today with a few edits and updates, as a reminder to myself and an invitation to all of you.

The hustle gospel, commonplace in American work culture and pushed by many corporate leaders, urges us to pursue success in the workplace with a relentless, at-all-costs attitude. Long hours? Frequent trips? Distracted or non-existent family time? All necessary parts of achieving the new American dream. Most of us simply stay on the hamster wheel to bankroll our endemic consumerism. But others, perhaps the most ambitious, seek to control other people. Control over one’s self is harder, and apparently less gratifying. But whether goaded by wealth or power, the practical result is often the same.

As the work-from-home trend accelerated, it was common to hear gripes from leadership that people just don’t want to work hard anymore. No doubt, this is sometimes true, and the black hole of web surfing and social media has enervated many who might once have been highly efficient. But the phenomena of quiet quitting and the great resignation signal that something is rotten in our relationship with work.

Relentless ambition on the one hand, and hopeless malaise on the other characterize more of us than we might care to admit. This is a both a cultural problem and leadership problem, though leaders are always responsible for the culture in their companies. Often the most motivated to succeed, leaders are generally the reason for, and the first victims of, what I call the “Agamemnon Effect.”

A few notes about Agamemnon should make it clear why. A famous, rich and powerful king featured in Homer’s epic poetry, Agamemnon built a coalition of forces that successfully sacked the city of Troy. The Iliad is in part the story of his leadership such as it was. His legend lives to this day immortalized in verse…. But that legend is strewn with the bodies of those sacrificed to the ambition and success he enjoyed while he was alive, and the warning his life and unhappy death conveys to us is longer lasting than any other of his feats.

Agamemnon’s leadership was adversarial, manipulative, and downright destructive. In order to recruit Odysseus, the engineer of the Greeks’ eventual victory over Troy, he resorted to threatening the life of Odysseus’ son Telemachus. Then, when the Greek forces were preparing to set sail for Troy, Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods in order to secure safe passage. The dishonor he showed his best warrior, Achilles, cost hundreds, perhaps thousands of men their lives. After winning the war, Agamemnon returned home flush with his recent success only to be murdered by his now resentful wife and her lover.

Perhaps this doesn’t sound like any workplace saga you’ve experienced? I hope not. But there are a few parallels between Agamemnon’s life and the experience of many in contemporary work culture. The consistent theme here is human sacrifice.

In the chronic grind of climbing the success ladder there is often an uncounted human cost for the individual as well as for families and communities. Of course, there are circumstances which might require a singular focus on one’s work for a time. And certainly, hard work is crucial to developing character and achieving one’s full potential, not to mention shaping the world around us for the better. But all too often, work culture threatens to edge out other legitimate claims on our time and obfuscate the ultimate purposes of our lives.

Perhaps there are no corporate altars where acolytes must bring their children to sacrifice for the next promotion as Agamemnon did his own daughter, but there is a certain kind of human sacrifice when parents are chronically absent or distracted from their children’s lives due to work.

Or what about socking away money in a retirement account for ourselves while our kids are growing up and the financial needs of the family are greatest? Probably because there is no promotion or bonus attached to reading the kids a story rather than helicoptering over the phone so as not to miss an email, it is very easy to give children the short end of the stick. After all, work knows how to get what it wants from us, whereas, especially when they are little, our kids generally don’t know how to ask for what they need most desperately.

Since first writing this essay several years ago, another example of human sacrifice, one which masquerades as work in order to excuse itself, has spread like a plague. It is the plague of malaise that keeps parents glued to their phones on the sidelines of youth sporting events, at the dinner table, or even while driving the car. No one believes that this is necessary for work or for pleasure. But we use work to excuse this severing of experiential ties with our kin.

A question many parents might ask is whether the success of their business, or career, or retirement account, comes at the cost of sacrificing their own family life. And if we’re asking that question we might as well consider the culture of the companies we have created and whether our leadership contributes to forcing others to sacrifice their families too.

Children are not the only casualties, though they are the most vulnerable. If divorce rates are any indicator, marriages are also victims of the “Agamemnon Effect.” Estrangement, loneliness, and malaise are the hallmarks of family life and marriage when work is the chief focus.

When Agamemnon is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra, he harvests the crop he sowed for years by abusing his family for the sake of his success. Having murdered his daughter, abandoned his wife, and alienated his friends, Agamemnon dies miserably, surrounded by enemies in his own homeland. This is quite a price to pay for the glory of his victory in Troy. How many of us risk these most precious and vulnerable relationships with our children, spouses, and friends while we live our lives on one of two treadmills: ruthless pursuit of financial and career success, or fear and insecurity over losing the job?

Whether working from home, the jobsite, or the office, we tend to be absent and distracted. At that temporal horizon of death which we all share, I doubt that the particular achievements of a career will provide any comfort. Nor will the social media updates you never missed. If you led an organization well, it should be strong enough to thrive without you. If you built things and created well, your creations should stand on their own. If you made good deals, there are legions ready to take your place and make new deals. Only in your family and among your truest friends are you fully irreplaceable.

For many parents, career and family are in constant competition for attention. As a leader, Agamemnon lived his life this way and made others do so as well. Justice is the virtue of giving to each his due, and the fact is that Agamemnon was an unjust king. Leaders today need to acknowledge the human costs (or benefits) of the culture we create, and make sure that unlike Agamemnon, we strive to be just kings.

In the Marine Corps, we would often say that “You can pretend to care, but you cannot pretend to be there.” In that context the usual implication was that we should be working longer hours. But does it not also apply to our families?

Of course it does.

This article first appeared in the Dallas Morning News at https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2022/10/16/the-agamemnon-effect/

Most teachers I know want their students to be good. I don’t mean in the classroom—though that’s nice if you can get it. I mean that as teachers, they consider the highest part of their calling to be the cultivation of their student’s capacity to live a good life. Most consider that a virtuous character is at the heart of the enterprise and that mere data transfer, or trading in facts, falls far short of the teacher’s true vocation which is to help students live virtuously.

Of course, human lives occur in time and space so there are lots of things useful to learn which contribute to our ability to live virtuously in our particular time and space. Often we think of general education, liberal education, or the core of the curriculum as consisting of universally human things as well as things necessary for cultural literacy.

So far so good.

But suppose we’re interested in getting as good at this as possible. There are at least two parts which will require our attention. The tactics and techniques which contribute to effective teaching: we might call these pedagogy. And the things which we will teach: the curriculum.

We can, and should, have long conversations late into the night with bright friends and dim lights about the curriculum.

But as regards pedagogy, we have a bit of a problem.

Those of us with a proclivity and capacity for words, numbers, or abstractions tend to go into teaching. We fall in love with a discipline, with a text, perhaps even with the charms of academic life, and consider teaching the best way to cultivate this love—certainly the best way to make a living while maintaining close proximity to it.

Our fluency at manipulating ideas and language shines in the classroom where, even if we aspire for them to live virtuous lives, the immediate problem we propose to solve is the students’ lack of facility with the concepts or structures we handle so well. After all, we need to get them through the curriculum.

But I’d like to propose that our own proficiency with language and ideas can sometimes inhibit the effectiveness of our teaching. Often it is difficult for those with a talent for language to understand or relate to those whose intelligence and reason are less verbal. Or even, for those who are less intelligent. Teachers tend to be people well suited to the classroom and its methods. But not every student is.

Please don’t mistake my argument as denigrating words, abstractions, or reason. They are all essential for every human.

But can you be certain, though the mechanic might be less adept with language, that the natural law does not speak as clearly to him as to you? Your reason shines in an essay or a lecture. Is it not reason that shines through the work of his hands?

I’m not talking about degrees of refinement, but about being good.

My concern about pedagogical approaches fashioned by the academic for the academic is the possibility that for many students these approaches often introduce a fissure between the “content” of the curriculum and the object of cultivating the good life, like a sword thrust severing the two. This is surely the opposite of what we intend in our impassioned defense of curricula.

But we are vulnerable to this possibility on account of the classic distinction between deeds and words and the ever present danger—temptation—to separate the two.

St. John Henry Newman preached a sermon on the Christian life entitled “Promising Without Doing.” In the sermon, Newman notes what our common sense corroborates: it is easier to say or think something than it is to do or be something. So too with our approach to teaching and our students’ capacity to learn.

Are we like the misguided one Newman describes who “thinks that the characteristic of a religious man is his having correct notions?” He continues, “it escapes him that there is a great interval between feeling and acting.” Substitute “religious” with “educated” and I fear you will have described the vast majority of our pedagogical efforts.” We want our students to be good but rely almost entirely on telling them to be good, or on defining the good with words and texts.

Let me offer an example to try and illustrate the problem and suggest a path toward a solution.

I wrote some time ago about the concept of trust in the Marine Corps: Marines will often say of the title Marine that it must be earned and is never given. One of the Corps’ doctrinal texts entitled Warfighting, describes trust as essential to the life-and-death functioning of leaders and units. “Trust,” it says, “is a product of confidence and familiarity. Confidence among comrades results from demonstrated professional skill.”1

In the sermon I quoted earlier, Newman states the same principle: “Nothing but past acts are the vouchers for future.” Don’t trust me because I tell you to trust me—talk is cheap. Trust me only if my actions have consistently merited your trust.

If we want students to be good, they need practice being so. And since students seem to know their Newman better than us teachers… they know that talk is cheap… you can only get them so far in the classroom. I suggest a pallet of pedagogical approaches which includes the the use of words (whether in mouths, books, or screens, etc), as is so common today, but also includes a heavy dose of experience—allowing the natural law to speak to students through nature and not just text. This is wildly uncommon today despite widespread compulsory schooling.

Sometimes my friends in the classical school movement hear in this suggestion an argument against the great books, the great conversation, and against intellectual virtues and beauty. Not at all. Rich, embodied experience of the real is both prelude and accompaniment to the great song of learning whether it’s occurring in a soul that more resembles a full orchestra or a simple folk guitar.

One thing I’ve read both in nature and great books is that the simple folk guitar can be sublime.