In his American Interest blog entitled “Sun Tzu: The Enemy of the Bureaucratic Mind,” Walter Russell Mead provides an eloquent, prescient exposition of Sun Tzu’s seminal work. Near the end of the essay he writes, “The Art of War is a handbook for living in an uncertain and dangerous world.” Throughout, he stresses–rightly, in my opinion–that educators should seek to cultivate the art of judgment, not the application of rules. Courage, modesty, judgment: these are the virtues young persons will need to make second nature in order to live well in the modern world. I see this line of thought running through Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and reaching its full flowering in The Essays of Montaigne.