There is a 2,000-year tradition along the same lines with regard to virtue. If you compel children to act more virtuously, they actually become more virtuous. In the biblical book of Proverbs, which scholars tell us was written more than 2,500 years ago, we read, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”29 In other words, if you compel a child to behave virtuously, then when he is an adult he will continue to behave virtuously.
