If diligence in study is an act of love, and there are things other than school that we already love, then why, you may ask, must we diligently study what all the grown-ups have chosen for us?  What’s wrong with just pursuing what we already enjoy?  Why can’t we eagerly and attentively dedicate ourselves to those things all day? 

Answer: Because you are all uncivilized brutes and barbarians. 

Don’t worry—your parents and teachers and I used to be as well.  The reason we’re here is to make sure you don’t end up that way.

You see, the test of whether something is worthy of our diligent study, is not whether we’re interested in it, or whether we already love it.  Things don’t become good and worthy simply because we love them—only God does that.  Rather, we ought to love things, because they are good and worthy.

This is what Augustine was talking about when he said that true virtue is rightly ordered affections—loving the right things, in the right way, in the right order.  When we insist that you diligently study phonemes and declensions, revolutions and revelations, the history and the mystery of the world, all we’re really doing is giving you a taste of something better, a taste of what is good, in the hopes that through diligent study, you will come to love it on your own.

Sure, it is an acquired taste—that’s the whole point of school: To help you acquire it.  And you can stay uncivilized if you want.  But just remember the quote from Dante outside Great Hall: “Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.”