Tethered to the Mast: What Odysseus Teaches About Student Virtues

Painting: Ulysses and the Sirens by John William Waterhouse, 1891, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (public domain)

To be “tied to the mast” means to bind yourself ahead of time against a temptation you already know you cannot resist in the moment. The phrase comes from Book 12 of Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus has his crew lash him to the mast so he can hear the sirens’ song without steering the ship to its ruin. For parents and teachers, that ancient story offers a surprisingly practical picture of how students grow in virtue: with wise counsel, chosen limits, and trusted people who will keep them tethered to the mast.

One topic comes up again and again, at homeschool and charter school conferences across the country and in parent-teacher meetings at Scholé Academy: training students in their scholarship skills. Note-taking, diligence, organization, and other such student virtues are a challenge that unites parents, teachers, and students alike, especially as a new academic year begins.

In this post

• Scholarship Skills: The Student Virtues Every Family Wrestles With
• How the Four Cardinal Virtues Shape Student Virtues
• Why Teenagers Still Need the Voices of the Past
• Odysseus and the Sirens: The Story in Book 12
• What Does “Tied to the Mast” Mean?
• Tethering Your Student to the Mast This School Year
• Frequently Asked Questions

Scholarship Skills: The Student Virtues Every Family Wrestles With

Parents and teachers describe the same struggles. Students wrestle with disorganization, both in physically organizing their books, papers, and desks and in taking clear, relevant notes. They miss deadlines. They have trouble identifying key concepts in reading selections, understanding the difference between homework and studying, building study plans, setting priorities, and making sense of their grades. Many educators admit that the very thought of training students to be mindful of these practices can breed frustration, apathy, and a lack of engagement.

We all have a role to play in shaping these scholarship skills, or student virtues: the “soft skills” that are not content-based and cannot be taught by following a textbook or a particular curriculum. They cannot be memorized by rote, nor are they a fixed set of legalistic checklists (do exactly this; avoid exactly that). Their cultivation requires supervisory discernment, balancing the long-term developmental needs of each student within each short-term assignment or project. Because these skills are such a nebulous area, it is all the more challenging to help students apply them accurately and consistently.

A key part of developing these student virtues is recognizing their true point of origin: spiritual virtues. To be clear, no one will find “disorganization” on a list of spiritual vices or “good note-taking” on a list of spiritual virtues. But there is a real connection between the cultivation of spiritual virtues and the behaviors we see in people.

How the Four Cardinal Virtues Shape Student Virtues

The thought of cultivating spiritual virtues in these future adults can easily become overwhelming, especially when their behaviors demand our attention. So often we want to curb bad behaviors rather than consider what might be fueling them. As parents and teachers, our focus needs to be tweaked. Our priority should be discipleship, not disciplining behaviors.

Each student needs the cultivation of four key spiritual virtues: prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice. In The Four Cardinal Virtues, the philosopher Josef Pieper writes that these basic virtues “can enable a man to attain the furthest potentialities of his nature.”

So what do the four cardinal virtues have to do with student virtues and scholarship, and how can we cultivate them in our students? Pieper writes a great deal about each one and cautions against boiling them down into succinct definitions. The more we refine them into bite-sized chunks, the more likely we are to misunderstand their breadth and depth. For the sake of brevity and clarity, though, an introductory definition of each shows its connection to student virtue:

• Prudence appears in a student’s ability to make right decisions in work, thoughts, actions, and relationships. Prudence in turn begins to cultivate the other three virtues of temperance, fortitude, and justice. (For a fuller treatment, see prudence as right judgment and living in reality.)
• Temperance in action is prudence worked out in the inner self. We encounter temperance in our internal dialogue: the essence of who we are and our being rightly related (correctly oriented) to Christ Himself. We often call this simply “attitude,” that which informs how each of us carries out relationships and actions. (See also temperance and the harmony of the soul.)
• Fortitude, typically defined as bravery, determination, or courage, is another place prudence shows itself. The development of a student’s integrity and determination to pursue right decision-making is the obvious connection. Will the student do what is right in the small things (choosing priorities) and in the larger things (making moral decisions)? (Read more on the gift of fortitude.)
• Justice is prudence at work most commonly in a student’s relationships with others: peers, teachers, parents. How does a student learn to accept authority, respect others, be obedient in his tasks, and respond to others with compassion? These are evidences of justice being worked out.

Scholarship skills and student virtues, then, are not separate from the moral life. Once we understand that spiritual virtues are the genesis of student behaviors, the next question follows naturally: how can we practically cultivate these virtues in our students and, through them, develop their scholarship skills?

Why Teenagers Still Need the Voices of the Past

Anyone who has taught teenagers since the late 1990s can say this with confidence: the world has changed a great deal, but teenagers have not. They wear different clothes and different hairstyles. Yet they still struggle with many of the same scholarship issues their parents faced, and the struggles of Generation X in its own teenage years were, in large part, identical to those of the modern teenager. We could likely go all the way back to antiquity and find the same struggles. (Did Aristotle’s famous student, Alexander the Great, complete all of his assignments on time? One suspects he did not.)

The idea that history sheds light on the present is not a novel one. It is largely why we continue to value the lessons of Aristotle, the Apostle Paul, and others, and why their words still resonate. Man has never found a way to conquer the struggles of one generation and keep them from reemerging in the next. We seem to fight the same wars and struggle against the same selfish desires in every era. So we return to the voices of the past, asking what their responses might teach us. This is one of the quiet gifts of teaching virtue in the classical Christian classroom: students meet their own temptations in the great books, long before they have names for them.

When we search for answers to the scholarship challenges facing the twenty-first-century teenager, history and literature give us a window to the past. And where better to look than Homer? His works are riddled with the worst temptations, vices, and snares the world has ever known. Surely some nuggets of wisdom are tucked away in these early works.

Odysseus and the Sirens: The Story in Book 12

One story in particular serves as a helpful allegory for fostering student virtues. It lies in Book 12 of Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus and his men, on their way home, stop to speak with Queen Circe. A perilous passage lies ahead: they must sail past the sirens, the mythical temptresses said to lure men to their deaths with their beautiful voices. Odysseus wants to hear their haunting, enchanting song, even knowing his fate could be sealed by it, and he looks to Circe for insight.

Circe gives him detailed instructions, explaining where to go, what to avoid, and how to survive the dangers along the way. She advises Odysseus to plug his men’s ears with wax so that no man will hear the irresistible songs and be tempted to steer the ship off course. Odysseus may listen to the sirens’ sweet songs only if he is tied to the mast, and only if his men will ignore his pleas to be set free.

As the story goes, the crew sets sail and carefully follows Circe’s instructions. Odysseus breaks a large, round chunk of wax into small bits and kneads them in his fingers. “Once I’d plugged my comrades’ ears with wax, they tied me hand and foot onto the ship, so I stood upright hard against the mast. They lashed the rope ends to the mast as well, then sat and struck the gray sea with their oars” (lines 226 to 230).

The sirens sing to Odysseus of his victory at Troy and of their knowledge of the world. He pleads with his men to untie him, but they obey his original orders and bind him more tightly to the mast. They all pass the enchanting island unscathed.

What Does “Tied to the Mast” Mean?

To be tied to the mast is to accept a restraint in advance, while your judgment is clear, so that you cannot act on a temptation when your judgment is clouded. Odysseus did not trust his own willpower against the sirens. He trusted his earlier, wiser self and the men who would hold to it. Today the phrase, along with “tie yourself to the mast” and “lashed to the mast,” describes any commitment that protects us from our own weakness.

Odysseus’s success in this undertaking was threefold, and each part maps onto the formation of student virtues:

1. He sought wise counsel. Although he was an experienced voyager, he asked Circe for help and devised a plan for success. This is prudence: right judgment that looks ahead.
2. He named his weakness and placed restrictions on himself. He knew he was not strong enough to withstand temptation and would need to be tied to the mast. This is temperance: ordering desire before desire can disorder us.
3. He relied on others who would not be tempted in the same way. The crewmen had softened wax in their ears and were immune to the sirens’ song. This is the gift of community: no one grows in virtue alone.

Tethering Your Student to the Mast This School Year

As you help to train and develop your student’s virtues and scholarship skills this school year, perhaps you, too, can take a lesson from The Odyssey.

• Consult wise counsel. Talk with your student’s teachers and other trusted voices to determine which scholarship skills need attention this year. At Scholé Academy, supplemental tutoring can be part of that counsel for a student who needs steady help with study habits.
• Devise a realistic plan. Use that insight to set the right guidelines in place for your student, even if it means doing things differently than in previous years.
• Choose restrictions together. Discuss with your student which restrictions they may need to place on themselves to cultivate these virtues and skills. The sirens of our age are often glowing screens; the questions raised in seeking authentic wisdom in an age of artificial intelligence are a good place to begin that conversation.
• Build accountability. Work together on the accountability plan your student needs while forming new scholarship habits this year.

Remember that students should not feel they must rely entirely on themselves to banish bad habits and overcome their struggles. Despite what they may say, they will need the wise crewman who ignores their pleas and keeps them “tethered to the mast.”

That is the kind of partnership Scholé Academy’s instructors hope to offer families: live, online classes where teachers know their students, notice their struggles, and help them form lasting habits of study and virtue. If your family is looking for that kind of help, we invite you to explore our course catalog or browse upper school courses for your teenager.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does “tied to the mast” mean?

It means binding yourself in advance against a temptation you know you cannot resist in the moment. The phrase comes from Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus has his crew tie him to the ship’s mast so he can hear the sirens’ song without steering the ship to destruction.

Why did Odysseus tie himself to the mast?

Odysseus wanted to hear the sirens’ song, but Circe warned him that it lured sailors to their deaths. Following her counsel, he had his men plug their ears with wax and tie him to the mast, with orders to ignore his pleas until the ship was safely past.

What are the four cardinal virtues?

The four cardinal virtues are prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice. The classical and Christian tradition calls them “cardinal,” from the Latin cardo (hinge), because the rest of the moral life turns on them.

How can parents help students build good study habits?

Begin with discipleship rather than discipline. Seek counsel from teachers, make a realistic plan with your student, agree together on helpful limits, and stay close as the accountability partner who keeps them on course when motivation fades.

For more on Odysseus, and on the pride that nearly kept him from home, see Odysseus’ Fatal Flaw: Pride, Humility, and the Hidden King of Advent. For another picture of undistracted study, read Learning Like Mary in the Age of Martha.