Strength Rejoices in the Challenge

Last week, our Office of College and Career Readiness welcomed the first college representative ever to visit Cincinnati Classical Academy: Cadet Mary Arengo of the United States Military Academy at West Point. It was a fitting beginning. West Point is not simply another college. It stands as a living institution dedicated to discipline, courage, and the formation of leaders. Cadet Arengo, whose sister Sophie is an eighth grader here at CLASSICAL, offered our students a message that transcended the idea of military service itself. Her visit reminded us of something central to our mission and long championed by our friends at Hillsdale College: the call to “do hard things,” reflected well in their motto “Strength rejoices in the challenge.”

 

Many of our students are indeed interested in pursuing appointments to the service academies, and I have no doubt that in the years ahead we will regularly send graduates to West Point, Annapolis, the Air Force Academy, and other such institutions. Yet Cadet Arengo’s message extended far beyond those few who may feel drawn to a military vocation. She spoke to every student—future scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, engineers, teachers—about the universal human need to take part in something greater than oneself, to pursue a noble mission, and to challenge one’s character, intellect, and body.

 

This resonates deeply with one of our seven core virtues: perseverance. At Cincinnati Classical Academy, perseverance is more than the ability to grind through difficulty. It is the steady, courageous pursuit of worthy ends, even when those ends demand sacrifice, discipline, or discomfort. To persevere in noble tasks is, itself, a noble act. The struggle involved in doing hard things is not an unfortunate obstacle but part of the very process by which character is shaped.

 

The tradition of classical education has always insisted that the path to excellence is demanding. In his lectures to students at Yale in the early nineteenth century, Timothy Dwight observed that the human mind “grows strong by resistance.” We learn most deeply when we labor through the thing we cannot do easily. Hillsdale College has long echoed this truth, urging students to choose the more difficult good over the easier mediocrity. Their advice is simple but profound: do not be afraid of the hard things, for it is precisely those challenges that form the virtues needed for a meaningful life. Strength rejoices in the challenge!

Cadet Arengo’s own story embodies this principle. Acceptance to West Point requires more than academic strength. It demands physical endurance, discipline, leadership, and moral fiber. But it was clear from her presentation that what motivates her—and so many cadets—is not the pursuit of personal glory. It is the desire to serve, to commit oneself to a mission that transcends individual ambition. In this way, perseverance becomes a path toward belonging to a community, a nation, and an ideal.

 

Our students, whether or not they ever set foot on a military academy campus, can draw from her example. The hard things they face might be mastering Latin grammar, performing on stage, or handling the disappointments of adolescence with maturity. These are not trivial tasks. They are the daily training grounds for the habits of perseverance that will one day serve their marriages, careers, citizenship, and spiritual lives.

 

Perseverance is often misunderstood in a culture that prizes ease and convenience. We tend to assume that difficulty signals something is wrong. But the classical tradition understands that difficulty is often a sign that something genuinely worthwhile is at stake. A runner does not lament the resistance of the track; he pushes through it because he desires the strength on the other side. Likewise, a student who perseveres in reading Homer or solving a complex problem encounters a formative stretching of the intellect—a stretching that cannot occur if the task is effortless. Strength rejoices in the challenge!

 

At Cincinnati Classical Academy, we seek to cultivate in our students not only competence but tenacity. We want them to carry with them the conviction that noble work is worth doing and that the effort it requires is itself a reward. Cadet Arengo’s visit was a timely reminder that the world is in need of young men and women willing to embrace challenges rather than shrink from them.