Self-Mastery and Interior Freedom

The following essay first appeared as an article in Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack publication, Men in the Making. For more articles like this one, you can visit his page here. Subscribe to stay up-to-date on his writing.

A More Complete Goal

Parents and teachers often limit the goal of education to transferring information about the world and training in skills to prosper within it. Certainly, these are important parts of a complete education, but they are not the whole.

A more complete understanding of a boys’ school’s mission involves the formation of the whole person. We want our graduates to be professionally competent, yes, but we also want them to have the integrity and self-mastery necessary to be on the path to personal fulfillment—becoming men whose thoughts, desires, words, and actions are aligned with the truth of their nature.

Such a task is literally impossible. No one can actually form another, just as no parent can really make his baby fall asleep. Nevertheless, parents working with educators can provide the necessary aids to growth in integrity and self-mastery.

Presenting an Attractive Ideal

In the first place, parents and teachers can present the ideal of self-mastery to boys in an attractive manner. When the ideal of integrity is set before young boys, they immediately recognize it as a goal worthy of pursuit. We can start by encouraging our young men in all their noble professional and personal aspirations, helping them understand that such goals can only be attained through self-mastery. For example, a young man may aspire to be a great lawyer, but unless he develops the discipline of good study habits and adherence to a schedule, he won’t be able to fulfill that dream. He may want to run a marathon, but without the discipline of daily training and pushing his endurance, he won’t make it to the finish line on race day. Helping students develop self-mastery, including control of the appetites that get in the way of achieving a goal, will not only help them reach their aspirations but also encourage them to have higher aspirations than they would otherwise.

The environment of both school and home is a powerful means of helping students develop self-mastery. Part of the challenge is creating an environment in which order, discipline, and consideration for others are the norm and expected of everyone. Unspoken assumptions play an important role in helping students internalize standards, to see them not as arbitrary rules that bind them, but as meaningful virtues that liberate them. When boys see their parents and teachers striving to grow in self-mastery themselves, they will view such growth as part of becoming the men they want to be.

In forming such a culture, parents and educators should be particularly attentive to the little things. Focusing on self-mastery in small, ordinary matters—waging small struggles against one’s own comfort to raise the overall tone—goes a long way toward preventing more significant cultural and behavioral problems. This is another expression of the “broken windows” theory of crime prevention: when you address the little things quickly, you are less likely to face bigger, more intractable problems down the line. Just as modesty is the virtue by which we create an environment conducive to genuine self-giving love, maintaining the tone of a school is necessary to create an atmosphere in which the student is subtly encouraged toward the goal of integrity.

In all this, teachers should keep in mind that the goal is not exterior compliance (following the rules), but growth in interior freedom. The goal is not for students to obey out of fear of punishment, but to be freed from their whims and wayward desires so they can freely use their energies and aspirations to serve others. I’m reminded of an anecdote told by Armando Valladares, a political prisoner for 22 years in Castro’s Cuba. In his book Against All Hope, he relates the harrowing story of being confined to a cage outdoors by his jailers and not given food for days at a time as a form of punishment, meant to break his will. When he was finally given nourishment—a cup of unappetizing soup—he would regularly eat only part of it and pass the rest back to his jailers through the bars. His reasoning was that if he ate the entire portion, he would be enslaved to his jailers and would do anything they instructed him to do, however they wished. But by maintaining the interior freedom to pass part of it back, he could be confident that he was still his own master.

The point is not to compel students to meet standards imposed by the school, but to help them reach the point where they freely choose to struggle against their own comfort-seeking and selfishness to serve the greater good of the school community. It must be an interior-driven process, not one driven by the arbitrary enforcement of rules by those in charge. However, students and teachers working together to uphold a school’s tone and culture of respect implies a relationship of trust, not an adversarial relationship of “us against them.” Students must trust that what is being asked of them comes from a genuine concern for their own good, not from a mania for order or propriety on the part of those exercising authority. Thus, the all-important question for the school is not whether these standards are enforced, but how. The goal is for the boy to want to tuck in his shirt even when no one is watching, because he is motivated to maintain the tone of the environment. As a result, maintaining discipline must be guided by patience, kindness, persuasiveness, and understanding, not by the severity of rules and their enforcement. The aim, after all, is for the student to internalize a code of conduct for the greater good, acting on his own and without compulsion.

Whenever I see students with untucked shirts, dragging shoes, and flagging ties, I remind myself that while we treat them as men, we judge them as boys, not the other way around. If a teacher understands that gaining the trust of the student is essential, we must, in turn, trust the student and his integrity, if not always his judgment in any particular moment. We must trust that he aspires to the goal of becoming a man of integrity. We know that by emphasizing internal formation rather than external compliance, our school may look a bit messier, but this is a price worth paying when we keep in mind the end goal.

Three Battlefields of Growth

As we help our sons and students grow in self-mastery, here are three battlefields on which they, with our help, can wage a war against their laziness and selfishness, and so grow in self-mastery:

1. Dressing for others;
2. Punctuality without the need for school bells or hall monitoring;
3. Charity and respect in one’s language.

Exercising self-mastery in each of these domains requires the same tools: order, discipline, and consideration for others.

Maintaining a dress code expresses that—contrary to current popular culture—what we wear should not be driven primarily by one’s own comfort, fashion, or vanity, but by a conscious effort to improve the tone of our environment. By wearing a coat and tie, for example, a student expresses respect for others and raises the tone of the academic environment, conveying a sense of dignity and seriousness to his work as a student. Moreover, it communicates respect for his teachers and fellow students. A school dress code helps students internalize the idea of dressing for others rather than for oneself. Such an idea forms an interior disposition of being more concerned about others than about one’s own comfort.

Likewise, being punctual to class and appointments communicates deference to others and basic respect, acknowledging that we are not uniquely important—that the time of others is just as valuable as our own. Making the effort to be on time, even without the aid of school bells, helps form a habitual consideration for other people.

Language is perhaps even more important in creating a tone of mutual respect and consideration for others. The battle here is not just about excluding foul or abusive language. Language creates tone. How I talk about other people conveys and shapes my attitudes toward them. While we should certainly curb foul and offensive language, we should also correct demeaning or gossipy language, which is equally insidious.

Becoming Obsolete

In the end, the goal of parents and teachers is to become obsolete. We must decrease in regulating them, and they must increase in regulating themselves. Our hope is that our boys become self-sufficient and independent, motivated by their own desires to serve God and others rather than by the fear of punishment for misbehavior. If a young man has been living under a regime of oppression rather than trust, when he moves away from home, his newfound freedom often leads to throwing out the old rules and doing away with the standards he was forced to follow. By forming them in and for freedom, the opposite may result: when they leave home, they will want to change the ruler—now themselves instead of their teachers and parents—without discarding the rulebook.