The virtue of detachment can appear negative at first glance. We can be detached from material possessions, and that’s hard. We can also be detached from our plans or our self-image: that’s perhaps much harder. But while detachment necessarily has a negative quality, requiring a breaking of sorts, detachment is necessary for very positive things, such as growth or love. One of the positive ends of detachment is for the sake of trust. We sometimes have to be detached in order to trust, and trust is important in a boy’s education, for we are dealing with a garden, not a dollhouse. A boys’ school cannot be a dollhouse, where we dress our dolls up, and our dolls do exactly as we wish. Such a picture might seem laughable, but how far away is this from real examples of boys not allowed to run around, to climb trees, or a host of other restrictions, all in the name of safety? Such a model of education threatens to smother our boys rather than cultivate their thriving. And so a better model might be that of a garden, where we indeed work the soil, prune and water our plants, but we do Read More …