Skip To Main Content

The Four Temperaments

The Four Temperaments
Bob Schaffer, Headmaster
Along their journey to graduation, all Liberty scholars become acquainted with the ancient Greek teacher Socrates who famously urged his students to “know thyself.” It’s an instructive axiom for life and comes in handy, particularly through the last week of the school year. 
 
Indeed, the hour has come. Final exams, unit tests, due dates, academic awards, and graduation render ample homage to Liberty’s emphasis upon the intellect. Yet, as we conclude our 25th-anniversary year, the school’s objective toward tempering the heart and firming the will are accentuated, too.
 
To the point, a large delegation of LCS instructors, last February, attended a classical-schools conference in Phoenix that galvanized our collective resolve to educate well-rounded students. 
 

One lecturer there spoke of the Four Temperaments invoking age-old qualities for mastering life’s obstacles and burnishing virtue.
 
These core temperaments constitute the nature of the soul and add clarity to how intelligence must be properly directed along virtuous channels. They are the choleric, the melancholic, the sanguine, and the phlegmatic. 
 
Though insufficient space is budgeted here to expound upon the Four Temperaments, much, fortunately, is written about them for anyone who wants to learn more.     
 
Liberty’s professional classroom educators have devoted themselves with one accord to forming up students to be right thinkers and moral doers. These young Americans will never be abandoned as orphans. 
Their attachments to the heights, depths, and breadth of learning in the Western tradition will guide them through intrepid, prosperous lives and connect them always to their alma mater. Their hearts will rejoice. They know themselves.