Young men derive great benefit from learning to cultivate and care for living things. Agricultural work provides opportunities to learn discipline from hard, at times unpleasant work, and from the inflexible needs of living things which require constant tending. Agriculture entails attention to the particular characteristics and qualities of living things, and involves a man in a process that follows its own imperatives and is in many ways outside of his control. This cultivates virtues that are very different from those encouraged by an engineered world, where men have the illusion of mastery by design, and learn to disregard the natures of things, and in the end even of themselves.