Tag: self-control

Counsels of the Wise, Part 8: Aiming at the Intermediate or Aristotle’s Moral Virtues

We’ve traveled far in this series on restoring the forgotten goal of prudence or practical wisdom to our educational goals. We established the necessity of prudence alongside moral virtue as constituting the intellectual virtue that accompanies and regulates all the moral virtues by deliberating about what is good or bad for human beings. A Christian and classical education must provide for this instruction in moral wisdom, without which life has no real direction. Prudence thus restores a practical dimension to education that is not utilitarian.  We’ve also explored how the underpinnings of prudence are instilled in the young through practice

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model of areas of the brain, frontal lobes for attention and willpower

Educating for Self-control, Part 2: The Link Between Attention and Willpower

In my last post on educating for self-control, I laid out a Christian case for the importance of self-control from the New Testament, citing Paul’s famous fruit of the Spirit and Peter’s not-as-famous virtue list in the first chapter of 2 Peter. Then we delved into the roots of self-control as a concept deriving from early Greek philosophers, before turning to what it might look like to develop a school for self-control, rethinking how our schools should be set up if supporting self-control is a chief goal. In particular, we referenced the British educator Charlotte Mason, as she discussed “the

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Educating for Self-control, Part 1: A Lost Christian Virtue

If there’s any virtue that Christians need, especially in contemporary society, it’s self-control. We have available to us more seductive entertainment, more well-advertised temptations and even more innocent pleasures (like unhealthy foods, which end up being not so innocent in the long run…), than any other people at any time in the history of the world. The average 1st world Christian experiences a higher “standard of living” than the richest kings of the ancient world and middle ages. Our prosperity itself may be the greatest weapon the enemy ever devised. And unfortunately, at such a moment, self-control is one of

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