What comes out of the mountain
Where men first shed their blood?
Who thought Cuchulain till it seemed
He stood where they had stood?
(W.B. Yeats, “Death Of Cuchulain”)
Introduction
Educational Leadership requires a fundamental re-vision at our critical hour. After a century of wanton compromise with civil, economic, and social combinations totally antithetical to a life of the mind (and the soul), the teaching profession has exhausted the last reserves of whatever it is makes a chameleon change its color. The horse no longer can do circus tricks and will soon be turned over to the glue man. But, alas, we have a maturity problem, and the Educational Critique which has been so vocal for the last half-century has not proven to have the grit to get its ideas off the ground.
This fundamental re-vision requires teachers to completely break with the economic telos which frankly lies beneath all secondary reasons we put forth for formal education. Let us toss the telos as it is now, let us chuck out this economic motive. For once in our lives let us take those secondary reasons for education – the life of the mind, cultural preservation, community growth, what have you – and make them primary. We teachers are, at present, far too cowed and passive to be any use for this fundamental re-vision. We have been bred to be this way. Everything in our own schooling, and our own training to inflict that schooling on others, has bid us be sops; everything has militated that we not rock the boat, not offend, not challenge. We who were put upon this earth to form souls have adopted the worthless, effete values of the shopkeeper and clerk. For shame! We must be ranters and rebels at this hour. Won’t you join me?
To grapple with the enormity of the problem we face in formal education, we ought to develop a muscular and robust mind. We must rediscover our virility. It is on this account I have often chosen to use “man” and “men” over the more anodyne “person” and “people.”
There is, in fact, an energetic sexual dynamic to education. Towards this point I adduce the near-universal separation of the sexes in nearly all schools outside the Western world. I believe a fair share of the inert condition of alternative education this last half-century has to do with it being an almost-wholly female enterprise. Let us cherish those talents women bring to Educational Leadership, but let us not get swamped in sentiment. Let us realize that masculine vision and discipline will do a great deal towards instantiating the dynamite of feminine talent, heretofore moldering in irrelevance.
The social, cultural, religious, economic, and personal desolation of Western societies at present is, to a large extent, the direct result of attitudes which were instilled in our youthful education. In this, public, private, and homeschooling learning is guilty, for they are all at root the same system. No matter the good will and competence of those staffing these systems, alas, the work of modern pedagogy is far deeper than what is taught in class. Hell has its sub-basements, you know, and no matter how wholesome the curriculum, the hidden curriculum of Rockefeller schooling outwits the best of us.
By Rockefeller schooling I mean, of course, all the works and pomps of which that evil man has left on what calls itself the teaching profession, his education boards, his instructor training system, his teacher licensing scheme. Mainstream schools are a parody of life; private schools are a parody of that parody, and homeschooling lives in a parody of a parody of a parody. The each modality becomes more fatuous in proportion to the size of its mouth.
If the wheels of justice grind slow but exceeding fine, you ought to marvel at the wheels of injustice; they grind slower and finer still. By the many millions this thing we are given as formal instruction takes little boys and girls and turns them into its pliant minions staffing that vast apparatus of graft and fraud we call respectable society.
This system, funnily enough, is not long for this world. Modern education has run its course, it has served its masters well. What we’ve known as mass education will be swept away within the next twenty years to be replaced by a Zoomed world of nude credentialism. What is planned will not even make a pretense of learning.
Inside Baseball
I should want to anticipate some objections to my thesis ahead. This essay necessarily must deal in sweeping statements and provocative simplifications. The hour is grave and there is no time for niceties.
For a century we schoolmen have pawned our dignity and our vocations; arrah, we have hawked the very students in our charge in an hopeless negotiation with capital. One cannot play games with the devil any more than with God, and you come to find that three lifetimes and four of kissing Grushenka’s foot doesn’t earn one any respect. Thus is the whole cruel fate of simps. Teachers have time and again acquiesced to the demands of society, and the herdish polis cares only about dull commerce. We have in all this turned the vital magic of the classroom into a dead thing.
School is the modern Liberal’s religion. There is nothing wrong with this, for while Liberalism is a diverse and polyglot thing, every society must have a cult, and schooling is ours. What is wrong about schooling being our religion is not that it is a false religion but that it is a dead religion. We are all doing this thing we calumniate as “formal learning,” but we do not believe it. It is one thing to be an infidel, it is quite another to be an hypocrite; it is one thing to be an Hottentot at a jungle altar, it is quite another to be Cardinal McCarrick at a cathedral altar (The highest Catholic cleric in America who masked a lifetime of monstrous personal delicts, systematized clerical blackmailing, and embezzlement with a pious exterior)..
But the hour is late and there is no more time to compromise. That thing previous generations of less impressive teachers had the luxury of, that compromise of the telos of education with the trifling concerns of the middle class, there is no time for this, for the assumptions of the 20th Century are through.
We stand on the precipice of a new age. Mr. Musk and his sorts have millions of robots which will imminently eliminate the jobs the bourgeois so prize; everything from the Manhattan doctor to the restaurant dishwasher (my old trade) will be things of the past just a few decades hence. In fact, if you follow these sorts of socio-tech discussions, you’ll know the only thing which hampers this roll-out is that the suppos’d leaders of society dread the massive social upheaval this mechanization will provoke. And an education system which justified itself on learning mathematics because, “You won’t always have a calculator,” and natural science on, “You’ll need it for college,” and history on, “[silence]” can stall for time no longer. These motivational substitutions for cultural transmission and a life of the mind were cheap things and they’ve made us cheap in using them.
The point is that if we mean to restore the joy and value of the classroom and youthful learning – and youth is a time especially suited for this – we must be provocative. What follows is necessarily so, but it is not gratuitously so. Formal learning at present, public, private, and home, is completely unappreciated by the society it means to enrich. Some of this has to do with the traditionally dull interests and valuations of the middle class, and some of this has to do with what we teachers have allowed our profession to become. It takes two to tango. The point is that a situation is rapidly obtaining whereby society is going to question the value of formal education, and that dynamics are in play which if left unchecked will soon place this formative experience beyond the reach of all but the elite of the elite. This separation of formal learning from the masses will be for valuation reasons, not financial ones. Anyhow, the gravity of where our profession stands demands I be provocative. You do not doff your cap and speak of the weather when a man is on fire.
As for my pillorying of John Rockefeller, I need only adduce that man’s popularization of licensing of several occupations, and his manipulation of the middle class’s attendant desire for social approval, to affirm my low appraisal of that man and his legacy. There is no doubt that Rockefeller and his agents cynically and disgracefully took advantage of the people’s credulity to steer the artistic, medical, commercial, and especially the educational sectors of life away from the benefit of the average man towards the ends of strangers.
Finally, we address the question of those who do not care to be the pagan heroes or Christian saints I call upon at the end of this chapter. For these people – and they necessarily must be the vast majority of society – we turn over to the processes of culture. Culture is really a schoolhouse far more diffuse and powerful than any brick-and-mortar institution. It is for this reason we at Apocatastasis Institute have spent so much time this last decade of glory enriching this soil of life through a variety of interpersonal, spiritual, and artistic events.
If the culture is not rich, no roots of social betterment will long endure. Few and very few people have the mental, much less the spiritual, stamina for educational restoration and themes attendant thereto. It is for heroic and saintly pedagogues to so stun society with such virtue and erudition that they leave an imprint in culture. This done, it is the culture which will educate those many millions more than would ever have been in one limited teacher’s classroom were he to teach for an hundred years.
The Principle & Foundation
Often am I asked what it is we’re after in Connecticut. What would society properly learn’d would look like?
Years ago, in The Trotsky Train (2018), I answered this worthy question. Only when there’s stability to society, when men own their capital, when they memorize the poetry of the land, when local musical compositions and books proliferate, when the churches and mosques and meditation centers are packed each morning, then the scholar can take a cigarette break, but only for a minute before he’s back at it again. It is your work, it is my work. There is your end [telos] to education, there is your wealth, there is your success.
Grounding ourselves in first principles, it is the brag of Educational Leaders that we mean to reform all aspects of social life primarily through classroom education. By rearing a nation of agentic men and women the parasitic social combinations which obtain at present will wither away. An healthy society is formed from healthy people.
For what end do men have bodies? To love truth and virtue, to do good actions, and to dive headfirst into An Bhearne Bhaoil (“The Gap Of Danger” in Irish mythology where Cuchuainn fought, and where Cuchuainn died. “In danger’s gap fallen, At hand is thy life’s term; On thee plied be weapons, Not gentle the skill! One champion will slay thee; We both will encounter; No more shalt lead forays, From this day till Doom!”). A man has a body to live virtuously. If he has eyes it is to read holy books and look on beautiful things; he should often drink in icons and sunsets and babies and paintings, and thank his Maker. If he has hands it is to dish out dollars to bums; he has such to help his indigent brothers. A man has a body to do good. His hands are meant to hold pens, that he write true things. His throat is there so that he may say encouraging words. His thighs and biceps are installed so that he may build homes for the people of the land, that his fellows not become some rotten landlord’s battery. If he has legs it is to walk down the street that he may visit the forgotten elderly. His native patience will be put to use as he teaches the youth of the republic, and instructs the mentally retarded. He keeps his neck muscles in limber fettle, that he may observe any insect or plant, any man or angel which needs a hand when the chips are down. A man has a body to do good.
A man has a body to throw against bullies. Let us now dwell on this last point, for it is the choicest blessing the immaculate God may provide a soul. A man must be on his toes, however, for life only presents such an opportunity once, and only once, if the elect is given it a’tall.
Yes, if a man has a throat he will use it to out sing the tyrant; if he has a mind he will use it to run circles around the puny logic of the strutter; if he has arms it is to strangle and box and bless the enemy he’s knocked in the gutter; if he has a back it is to work night and day to undo his foe’s every work and pomp. Win or lose, a person has a body for one thing alone: to throw headfirst against the whips and tasers and shackles of pimps and their hirelings, and their systems of oppression seen and unseen. A man has a body to throw against bullies.
A child rightly formed is to grow up to be a saint. He is to be a martyr, red or white. He is to be a poet, a teacher, a warrior. He is to be Michael Fitzgerald and Joan D’arc; Kevin Barry and John Brown; Brian Willson and Florence Nightingale; Terrance MacSwiney and King Philip. A child rightly formed is to be an hunger striker. If a child grows up and does not have the spirit of insane sacrifice he is to be accounted an abject failure until such a time as he acquires this virtuous mien.
Thems me politics and thems me praxis. It is this thing we are building in Connecticut, nothing more than the task of all Educational Leaders. For this we need Educational Leaders.
The day of the poseur is over; the day of the stalwart has dawned. The instructors and students who will snatch the brand from the fire, they who will restore education that it be a human and holy thing once more, must steel themselves from two fonts: the pagan heroic, and the Christian holy. There is more than enough power in these things to win the day.
By Their Fruits
I say modern education has done its damage; there is nothing left to destroy. The behavior of society during the Covid-19 fiasco is all the proof one needs of the enduring legacy of compulsory education. A century of training youth to mindless obedience created the scared, pliant populations of the Western world. As we cowered for three years at spiky, red cartoons, as we injected ourselves with dangerous and novel concoctions, we remembered we were educated to the hilt. It is not for nothing that those communities which conformed most perfectly to the bogus mandates, shutdowns, and fearmongering were the most formally educated areas of the world. Our schooling bid us to be slaves, and slaves we became.
Well done, good and faithful servant, Rockefeller’s ghost says from hell, come and share your master’s joy. The late health debacle was the apotheosis of every cringing, servile, mindless lesson we were quietly taught those 15,000 infamous hours sliced from our youth. Like a Commedia in reverse, the wicked Virgil of Rockerfeller learning took the world through an arduous century of compulsory education to the Covided gates of hell. He must bow out before the final act, as the good Virgil did at Paradise in Dante’s poem.
Like every patsy in history, mass schooling will soon be cast aside. What will replace Rockefeller learning will either be something more inhuman still, or – if we have the back for it – an approach worthy of the name education. This settlement will be a fight to the knife, for if the devil has never been known to give up his pelf cheaply, his lust for souls is dearer still. Our educational system has never had for its aim anything except the cynical formation of men for its base economical and sociological ends. What will replace this bastard thing we call education will be worse still, and it will produce worse men.
The Failure Of Alt Ed
My knowledge of pedagogical history, and indeed my own life as a teacher, provide ample proof why the educational critique has fizzled and flopped after a century of erudite and passionate discourse. I have books on my shelf over a century old with people making the same complaints, and offering the same solutions, as your latest unschooling podcast and alt ed conference.
This situation has obtained because we schoolmen have not taken ourselves and our vocation seriously. We have allowed a supine and servile mien to characterize our behavior towards administration, students, and – astaghfirullah! – parents; we have allowed every financial huckster and civil busybody to slide into our profession and turn it towards their ends; we have tolerated the soulless and craven spirit of the middle class to be the standard by which all educational work is orientated. Educators at present are not taken seriously, and educators at present should not be taken seriously; no, not until we cop on and restore the raw principles of our calling. This begins with knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
Social trends, demographics, and technology will shortly eliminate the educational field as we know it. In this, schools stand in relationship to society in much the same way churches did two and three centuries ago. Formal education will soon find it no longer enjoys the favor it heretofore had from the ruling class.
Just as national churches were cast aside by the archons of days gone by once their utility had been exhausted, so now schools will soon be left to shift by their lonesome. It will be a fight to the knife whether what replaces the field as we know it will be a vast apparatus of naked job certification and credentialism, or a radically overhauled, decentralized, soul- and knowledge-based learning environment.
Every indicator points to the former as being the certain outcome. Men are content to not only have jobs, but to want them, to seek for them, to lust for them. To be a slave is one thing, but to want to be a slave is something altogether different. We have not only been bid to be consumers, we embrace our roles as lifelong babies who exist to have others serve us. It is one thing to be under the thumb of some rotten landlord, but to prefer “concierge apartments” to ownership betokens a different creature altogether. And on this last point, we stand not on a spiritual and theoretical observation but on data. Everywhere one turns apartments and condos are going up. When one sees such construction en masse it is not merely a sign of the free market, for the free market is dead and gone, it is with O’Leary in the grave. This construction is an indication of where the masters of the market mean to steer society, and – arrah – you come to find that society is content to be steered.
Modern Education’s DNA
It’s easy enough to spot the flaws in contemporary education, if education it be. Dare we count the ways? Yes, but only for a moment lest we lose ourselves in that dark wood.
Secularism is the gravest flaw of modern learning, of course, for it stunts the heart and mind of a child worse than organized religion does. Mind you, this secularism is just as present in 501(c)(3) private religious schools, and your bless’d homeschool co-ops and pods, as soon as your public outfits. It is at base the economic assumption which undergirds each approach, and there is nothing a’tall which will so hollow out the soul of man than commerce.
You may tack up as many crucifixes as you please, you may teach the youngest of young earth creationism, you may drill him for a decade in the ways of the Lord and your favorite political faction, but soon or late that child comes to believe that what really matters is the job which supposedly awaits his diligent completion of his academic cursus. It is the DNA of modern education which does the damage, not the external trappings. That DNA is commercial, and commerce is secular, and to be at base commercial and secular is to be at base unhuman.
Let us listen to Athans’ Solan who long ago told us in those famous Parallel Lives:
The man that boasts of golden stores,
Of grain, that loads his groaning floors,
Of fields with freshening herbage green,
Where bounding steeds and herds are seen,
I call not happier than the swain,
Whose limbs are sound, whose food is plain,
Whose joys a blooming wife endears,
Whose hours a smiling offspring cheers.
The chaos which is American spirituality may be heretical; it may sour delicate souls and alienate intellectual ones; it may waste tremendous cultural and material capital on crimes (or paying lawsuits related thereto); it may lazy out its good will and social heft on graft and mismanagement; it may do some things poorly, most things mediocre, and nothing well; Christianity may be in this generation and this nation – as I hold it – a parody and farce of the faith once given to the saints, but for all these delicts it does not leave atrophied an entire dimension of a man’s life, the spiritual. Yes, without a doubt secularism is the greatest crime of Rockefeller education.
On the heels of this, modern instruction cheats its inmates of ethnos, of tribal and national belonging, of that communal soul and mythos wherewith members of a community could draw deep draughts amidst life’s slings and arrows. If you don’t have roots, you have nothing, and foundations once destroyed, what can the just do?
On these points, lack of faith and lack of ethnos, we see hideous Liberalism come to full stature: the naked, atomized, lonely municep left to shift for himself in a world completely turned over to lawyers, moneymen, landlords, and like pimps.
With the immunity of the soul – what is called “holiness” in men and “religion” in society – left go to seed, the stage is set to turn the child into the bauble of strangers, for in his pretended education a host of anti-human vices and attitudes swept in.
We needn’t dwell on the dysfunctional disciples of the contemporary classroom. Look how they hold themselves; how they eat; how they speak; how their beady eyes avert your manful gaze; how they “ghost” and gripe and gossip. A nation of adult babies!
The publicly – i.e., commercially – educated of our day were formed to be public – commercial – citizens. This they were set to be; this they have become. With publicity comes its attendant mindlessness and cruelty, for the public individual is part of the herd by definition. He lusts for what it lusts for, and he fears what it fears, and he works for what it works for, and none of this is generous, none of it heroic.
The elderly are cashiered by the millions in rest homes, wasting their last gracely years out on television and inanity, and the public man walks by; in every funeral home in the nation there is a closet of unclaimed cremated remains, the public man does not care because the herd does not care. How many thousands, how many tens of thousands, have been done dirty by drugs legal and illegal? The public man cannot tell you because the public man does not care. He cares only when some friend or relation is carried off, and when he rallies for awareness and redress he learns quickly the loneliness of the saint, and this all too late.
This interpersonal and social impiety must at least partially trace its way back to the classroom, for youth are naturally generous. That this spirit does not grow to full charity in adulthood must be explained by the unspoken lessons he was given while a child, that child-turned-man come to believe such anti-social behavior is acceptable like as not came from a purported education which was stripped of humanity and stuffed with commerce.
The publicly educated rely on legality where once there was culture. He trusts to strangers in New York or Chicago his Ring’d safety and his guaranteed loan bequeathed by strangers for strange ends. The child-turned-man spit out from the Rockefeller classroom does not bother to know his neighbor but he is happy to pay private investigators and anonymous agencies to snoop on his fellows, and the parishioner he has known for thirty years he will “vet” with a third-party clique before accepting his aid in Sunday school or on the sports pitch.
We do not have a culture, though it was once the aim of our schools to transmit such. At least as guilty as Madison Avenue, modern pedagogy is responsible for our state of atomization. We no longer have a nation. Our suppos’d country is no such thing; we are all roommates who merely live around each other by the thousands and by the millions. Forsooth, the schooled of our day have lost not only their ethnos, but even their familial knowledge. Few modern people can relate anything of substance concerning their families beyond their grandsirs. The contemporarily educated do not see a poverty in this because no value was placed on verbing, actual community in their instruction.
Having had his concentration deliberately broken every forty-five minutes for twelve years, the modernly learn’d aimlessly go through life. They are so easy to con into a job because they cannot think long enough to realize the theft of their labor. The deliberate shattering of a modernly-educated mind every forty-five minutes for twelve or sixteen or eighteen years; the careful pairing of totally unrelated subjects without any effort to link the one with the other, totally incapacitates an intellect and makes it ripe for every New York huckster, and every Hollywood liar.
And what does all this disorientation produce? A cynical soul, soured to good and soured to God and soured to man, all just as John Rockefeller’s agents intended. One cannot love good and God and man, after all, and love commerce, itself the empire of the dead.
Now that we have seen the fruits of modern education, let us leave this dark wood. It stinks of sulfur and rings of cant, and its resemblance to the bourgeois is giving me the willies.
Cross Ends
The educational critique has been around as long as there have been schools. We see it in Rome as Cato The Elder gripes about the use of Greek pedagogues in the Late Republic, and we see it in the rich Arabs of Mohammed’s time who sent their youth to the countryside to be reared away from the corruption of the cities, and we see it at the Reformation with the rise of Bible-based readers and teaching orders and seminaries. And if we can scarcely believe that Horace Mann and John Dewey were indeed as raw-throated educational insurgents as your “Ed Punks” and Occupy University alum were of a decade past, we need only remember that the revolution not only eats its own, it also canonizes its foes.
Hope and reform spring from the human breast as soon as do cant and wrong. And so a long spit from our day, in the hurdy-gurdy of the 1970s, there rose up anew the perennial critique. This thing hailed from two separate streams of American culture, and these are more or less the communities in other lands who have gone in for alt ed; I speak, of course, of the conventionally religious and the counterculture. Only superficially are these pools at odds; they have much more in common that common perception lets on.
Still and all, alternative modalities of education began to gain traction in the 1970s and ‘80s. In the early years “homeschooling” and “unschooling” were used interchangeably (“deschooling” was also birthed at this time through the capable pen of Ivan Illich); by the 1990s your church sorts more or less became the homeschoolers, whilst the counter cultured parents became the unschoolers. Those communities stalemated for 20 years until the Covid days shook up everything; with the exception that with both communities growing, a necessarily larger and larger number of people of the one pool were dipping their toes in the other community. There was a certain tension building before Covid in homeschool circles about more and more explicitly secular families entering the mix, and vice-versa with your more unchurched unschooling sorts scratching their heads with religious skins hopping on board.
When the days of Covid came, those three sadsome years of masks, sanitizer wipes, and vaccines, the educational world as we knew it was blown sky-high.
You know, I said at the time – and this is in print and on cellophane and in servers – that history had thrown a Russian Revolution in the lap of educationalists with the shutdowns. It was an high-water mark for alt pedagogues, after all, or at least it should have been. That model we so detested, that thing which took the raw material of life – little boys and girls – and turned them with industrial precision into useless tax cows and consumers, was on the ropes. It was shuttered and moldering.
If schools, so called, had come by the 21st Century to justify their value to society merely on the basis of data-input, certification-output, then for once it began to dawn upon the general public if Zoom classes might not be the way to go after all. The Covid disruptions forced the field of formal instruction to admit what it had become: a card-punching, data-spewing social stamp. The mask was off the emperor. The vast apparatus of education, or what was purported as such, was seen to have value solely because the rest of the herd believed it had value. No one who taught grade-school classes at that time, or took as much, believed any serious learning was taking place. Like much from that hour, it was a farce which we were content to pantomime.
Those already inclined to be suspicious of modern education, particularly public schools, were soon joined during the Covid days by a bevy of raw recruits. A brand-new cohort was being exposed to the nature of public curriculum.
Whether or not they could articulate their dis-ease, Americans were suddenly confronted with the degraded nature of formal learning. For three years we witnessed the base utility – nay, we make bold to say the frothy fashion – of the topics broadcast into homes, the informality attendant with the online instruction of youth (which, in fairness, fell within the responsibility of slovenly Millennial parents, not teachers), all the grim meaninglessness of as education given over to being, as President Obama had said a decade before, “Job-ready on day one.” Yes, these were the days, after all, of Black Lives Matter and a certain spotlight which the transgender topic was enjoying, and – hold what one will about such things – these apparently had found their way into enough Zoom classes that more and more unimpressed parents were beginning to display themselves in unseemly ways at school board meetings.
Our foe was down for the count, the critiques we had been making for half a century were taking hold, and one more thing was in our corner: leisure time. The public had the time and ability to learn about Rockefeller learning, and its fundamental anthropological and philosophical errors, by way of easy access to related books, websites, and telephonic recordings.
Assisting this golden season was a wide array of adjacent sympathetic communities of diverse political, cultural, and spiritual approaches, groups who are innately suspicious of mainstream things in general, and especially anything having to do with the state. Podcasts a’plenty, likes and subscribes like you’ve never seen, Amazon men dropping off crates of John Gatto and Grace Lwyellen books hither and thither.
And people for once were not content to sit around and gripe; there was a boom in niche educational approaches. Even formal tertiary learning, the most neglected and retarded area of alternative education, saw great growth. Apocatastasis Institute, heretofore nearly alone in this sector, suddenly found many new siblings as dozens of creative schools, albeit online given the circumstances, were birthed into this world.
What became of this hour of vindication and apotheosis? Nothing, fughall, dust and wind. It withered within six months of the repeal of mask mandates and shutdowns. By the time Russia invaded Ukraine and the page definitively turned from the Covid chapter this circumstantial sun which shown down on alt ed had set. John Holt’s books began to gather dust as soon as the exercise bikes we all bought; podcasts like School Sucks and Tragedy & Hope, resurrected from a decade before, sank back into Interneted oblivion.
History had dropped an educational “Russian Revolution” into our lap. We had the initiative, we had the favor of the population, we had the means to get our message out to more people, and more receptive people, than ever before. Every metric was completely in hand, and yet all this momentum ran out when things went back to normal. Every metric was completely in hand, you see, every metric but one: bourgeois values.
There is a fundamental contradiction in alternative education. You see, this community is fundamentally a middle-class phenomena. It is the same contradiction one sees with everything the bourgeois involves himself in, be it politics, religion, philosophy, family rearing, social reform, or self respect. I speak, of course, of the collision between the deep-seated human desire to soar, to be excellent, to be free, and the stooping, cringing, lowering spirit which means to fit in. There is something of the former in alt ed, there is everything of the latter in the people who are drawn to alt ed.
Two opposite thoughts cannot occupy the mind at the same time, and two opposite spirits cannot claim the soul at the same time; when this situation apparently (though not actually) obtains in a host, be the subject a single organ, or lone man, a family, or an entire community, there will be an upset. When this occurs in a stomach, when one drinks a lemonade on top of a milkshake (as I once did as a boy, no less asway a MetroNorth train), the contradiction erupts as vomit; when this contraction happens in an individual, this results in a neurosis, a breakdown, or worse; when this happens in a family, we call this divorce; when this happens in a community, in alternative education, for example, we call this mediocrity.
Vision & Execution
And where does Educational Leadership fit into this lost opportunity? Leadership is needed primarily in the realms of vision and execution. Alt ed has heretofore been incisive in diagnosing the problem with Rockefeller education. It sees with laudable clarity its vapidity, its snuffing out of curiosity, its atrophying of the soul; such partisans see the bureaucrats and administrators of mainstream schools as the layabouts they are, and its teachers – in the kindest of moods – as apparatchiks as uninspiring as they are unmemorable; alt ed-ers have sagaciously documented the telos of state-sponsored learning, if such it be, and they have boldly shouted that the emperor has no clothes.
That bunch has done many things well, but there is one thing lacking: they have not accounted for the true labor it requires to establish their ideals as a social reality. It has always struck me as a queer thing that individuals who not only apprehend the problems of modern instruction, but have had enough grace to act on their beliefs vis. homeschooling, publishing, etc., are completely apathetic to the discussion of making their ideals get traction beyond their immediate families. These skins put in great outlays of time, energy, and more, often at a certain personal inconvenience, and yet they do not seem to have a vision of things beyond their nose. After all, what is the point of unschooling for five or ten years only to produce a soul who will be as interchangeable a worker as one marshmallow is to another? What is the point of rejecting “public school brainwashing camps,” as the cringy rhetoric goes, when child turns man only to become a content soldier or solicitor or stockjobber, as employable (to employ, lit. “to use”) as any other publically (public, lit. “commercial”) educated municep out there?
I once scandalized a Catholic lady by suggesting that the Church’s objection to prostitution and pornography – namely, that it is unseemly to commercialize the marital act, and the individual bodies so engaged – ought to be applied to all body parts and actions. If it is wrong to commercialize Suzie Q’s mammary glands in a porno, is it not wrong to commercialize her brain as a teacher? If it is wrong for Chad to coin his genitive organ on a stage, why is it not wrong to sell the labor of his hands at a fast food joint?
Yes, the woman immediately rejected my suggestion. Why was it shot down? Not because it was false, but because the consequences attendant upon forbidding wage labor, be it in the bedroom or in the factory, would make our present economic arrangements impossible. And while it might indeed be counter-cultural to reject something as commonly accepted as pornography, she reasoned, it would be madness to extend the principle, however valid.
So too, bereft of Educational Leadership, do we see the same daunting of educational critics. “Thus far, and no farther,” go their principles and their imagination. Yes, a child’s wonder ought to be preserved, but it is a bridge too far to want as much of a man; yes, the school day is a great waste of time, but let us ignore that a career of fifty years is a beast exponentially larger; yes, state education was demonstrably instituted to mold society towards certain beliefs and behaviors, but let us not speak of ridding ourselves of a lifetime of telephonic formation whose affects run far deeper, and are far more successful, than our grade school indoctrination.
We must cut to the nerve here. Various educational reform modalities have flopped about for fifty years. Never have they ever dented mainstream enrollment, never have they cared to, and certainly never has alt ed cared to produce souls any more inclined to upend this society of parasites than their fellow publicly educated municeps. This is because we are double-minded: we see the problems in society, we may even be able to articulate how formal education has been carefully used this last century to engineer this condition, but we also want our children to fit in to this society. We wish to secede in equal measure to our wish to succeed.
From Death Comes Life
Life heroically lived must necessarily suffer a winnowing away of posours. There is something of death in this, to know the withdrawal of erstwhile colleagues and the collapse of friendships; there’s something certainly of death in the many times larger crowd which walk on by, careless of the issues at hand, issues which very much affect themselves (if they but knew).
Forsooth, the obliviousness of the herd is a more bitter thing by far than the bites of jackals. For the jackals, allies-turned-enemies: forget them, we will not even speak of that crew; may their chains – and their cigars and their flannel shirts – sit lightly. But, arrah, to have society care less, say it ain’t so. The work of cultural restoration, and all the sacrifices thereto, is for the mass of men who incarnate culture, after all, and for them to mindlessly walk on by is a rough thing. Yes, these are hard things through and through, and only hard people will weather them.
To take the constant collapse of relationships professional and personal on the chin, to see the much larger mass of men hurry on towards respectability, legality, and slavery, and to know that as long as the heroic energy flows in one there is nothing but this dreary slog ahead, yes, the soul which forges on knows something of death. But, muscha, as manys the saint and sadhu has taught, only from death comes life, and if such a soul knows something of death in all this, it knows everything of life.
To speak as the rebel on the run, the gladiator in the arena, the insurgent with the incendiary, these are easy things, and they are fun things. Like everything easy and fun, they do not last. Manys the easy and fun floozy has learned this the hard way, when your tear-stained and coughing Suzie Q stands in a plume of motorcycle dust, watching Chad #14 drive off into the sunset.
The world of educational critique is much too given to this ease and fun, this talking hard and flitting on to the next distraction. It is for these reasons alternative education has been a marginal thing, that it is a marginal thing, that it will continue to be such, and that – so long as this myopia obtains – it ought to stay a marginal thing. I’ve noticed in various groups so-adjectived, “alternative” this’ and thats’, that there is a perverse pleasure people take in their irrelevance.
The hotel room Latin Mass and the political conference with eight people, the kitchen table homeschool and the surreptitious naturist hike, there is a warmth and coziness to such congregations, but men were not meant to pray and save, and they are not put on this earth to be warm and cozy. Such luxury produces slugs where there should be men; things – hardly can they be called human – which are equal part effete, selfish, and cruel. A life well lived is a life of vigor, and that means hustling, that good things be made available to as many people as possible for their benefit. This principle is as true for education as for anything else. The hour is far too late for smugness and isolation. There is work to be done.
Perhaps it is the satisfaction of sitting on the truth whilst the herd trot about. The Pharisee can only be a Pharisee, after all, if he and his fellows form a party, a clique; when everyone is a Pharisee we call this the bourgeoisie, and such democracy of the elect is no fun. I’ve seen my fair share of this in my time, and I imagine some of you have too.
Of Slaves & Saints
We in alt ed are not a serious bunch. That alternative educational communities cannot see the inherent contradiction of their ideals and their middle-class values is all I need to prove this. We so-knowledgeable grown ups are damaged by our schooling, and though we see incidental problems, the psychological dependence our pretended masters massaged us into is a tough thing to root out. Only the gods and saints of the past can get us out of this rut.
To be a slave is one thing; it is another matter entirely to want to be a slave. Robbed of his religion, his ethnos, and his pride, the modernly-educated are fit for nothing else, and – astaghfirullah! – nothing else they wish to be. This is the greysome legacy of Rockefeller education, as soon seen in public school as in private and home versions of the same.
Power Of Archetypes
In all this, what is to be the praxis of educational leadership? Vision, discipline, and execution are our watchwords, and these chiefly along the lines of the mythic, the heroic. These things stir in the breast of men from all times and climes, and if liquor and porno and trauma and carefully engineered discouragement have stunted these three things in people, they will never kill them in people. Our pretended masters know this, for the energies of many thousands of turncoats, those sadsome Svengalis of Madison Avenue and Hollywood, is given over to co-opting this very thing. They know the power of archetypes, and they do what they can to divert those energies onto some Disney Channel or superhero reservation.
Archetypes are powerful and intimate; they are, in fact, powerful precisely for their intimacy. As Rockefeller schools – public, private, or home, it’s all the same – exist precisely to castrate men and societies of men of their power, their agency; and as this same cruel system wars against genuine social intimacy, placing in succession before a youth an endless carousel of learn’d strangers – I say these archetypes are exactly what the doctor ordered.
Pagan, Christian, or Jew, the energy of these tales have fueled empires to the heights of greatness; the profundity of archetypes explains the charming and easy acceptance of the Christian saints by a population otherwise secular. I have known skeptical casts refuse to remove yard statues of the Virgin, and birdies have told me that Muslims and Baptists have thrown up prayers to St. Anthony the each time they misplace their bottle of Scotch.
Heroic archetypes pagan and Christian are so readily received because they are deeply rooted in the deepest aspects of our humanity. The stamina needed to snatch formal learning from the jaws of Zoomification and naked credentialism, from the chemically-dulled mind of the general population to whom we mean to minister, can only come from holy examples and archetypes.
We need teachers of this heroic cast and mien, they of vision and discipline and execution. Teachers are a painfully idealistic lot, at least at the start. Too often the souls of educationalist either burn out and move on, or they become chinless automatons. Educational Leaders need to foster professional environments which neither suffocate nor constrict the generous sorts who so often are done dirty in Rockefeller education, public, private, and home.
Something Altogether Different
It is wholly pointless for these heroic instructors to carry on in the present combinations. It is a fool’s errand to tarry there, and I the fool have done it long enough b’times to know it so. All have sold the pass, all want municeps where there once were men, all have run up the white flag to middle-class respectability. Let them be, they’re with O’Leary in the grave. There must be a striking out into something altogether different from the mainstream, and from what flatters itself as an alternative.
And what is to be this striking out? It is to have courage enough to roar not only at the errors of the mainstream schools, but to point out the flaws of the pretended alternatives; it is to have humility enough to not throw the educational baby out with the bathwater, to maintain and implement those aspects of mainstream education which are salubrious. The striking out of the actual teacher and student is to burn every bridge and despoil every good in each and all modality of education, public, private, Waldorf, Mason, Montessori, home-, un-, nature-, Classical schooling, etc., etc.
The trick in all this, you see, is to maintain vision, discipline, and maturity enough that this approach not collapse into a gobbledegook of sentiments without execution, the whole sad fate of the conservative and alt spectrums.
It is far too small a thing to let our critique and our salve fester in conferences and at kitchen tables. This insular spirit shows a lack of will and vision; it shows a lack of piety. Piety is a truly distorted word in our day. Properly understood, piety means moral and religious observance for the common, for the individual’s, good. It is this will and vision to enrich the common good which we who pretend towards betterment are lacking.
Earlier I used the expression, “mindless obedience.” This is a bad thing so long as it is mindless; obedience in se, however, is not a bad thing. In too many circles this distinction is not made, and that is why those circles are completely irrelevant no matter their fuss and feathers. To whom are teachers obedient? To our sciences, to our colleagues, to our students, to our neighborhood.
Call It Compassion
And here we run full-stop into a collision between rhetoric and reality. If skins are not daunted by the task at hand, many falter at this critical stage; here manys the promising work has buckled. You see, the temporary yielding of ideals to practical contingencies is like to strike the idealistic soul as a compromise. Don’t call this route compromise, for to compromise on principles is a genuine delict. Call it compassion and you’ll be closer to the mark.
There is a maturity problem at this hour. One place where this is evident are in reformist communities like alternative education. Good ideas are worth squat without the discipline, obedience, and the cotidian organization which makes schools hum along from day to day.
Steeled With Stories
And here the pagan ideal of the hero must give way to the Christian ideal of the saint; we must be the pagan hero in private, the Christian saint in public, and these two things are not opposed (if they but knew).
Yes, we must personally nurture the intransigence of the pagan gods as daily archetypes. For this the southern gods are too effete. The Rome which gave us the miserable LEGAL system could never offer anything inspiring to the soul. To the north and the east we must turn. We must lash ourselves to the post with Cuchulain, we must mount up with Loci at the Ragnarok, and if Arjuna must kill thirty-three million demons we ought sharpen our swords, that we help him the sooner.
Any man who sallies forth for educational restoration must steel himself with such stories, for the opposition he will receive from his fellow professionals and the general public will be overwhelming without them. These tales are amongst the finest products of the human soul; they have made many a people great when they were followed and sitting ducks for carpetbaggers and strangers when they were forgotten, and if we emulate them we’ll never go wrong.
It wasn’t until the miserable Reformation split the Hellenic-Hebraic marriage that what called itself Christianity, Catholic or protestant though it be, mind you, turned its back on the glories of pagan myth that Western Christianity started on its path of decline and eclipse. In the marriage of the pagan and the Christian, really the Hellenic and the Hebrew, there is a manfulness so seamlessly adopted by the monastics. As a child of the monasteries, schools ought to reclaim this symbiosis.
The Pagan Yields To The Christian
And now the bombastic meets the real; the ideal hits the cotidian. I have lately opened Apocatastasis Institute up to tutoring. While nothing a’tall is changing with the Institute’s other works, still and all, this is a thing which sits most uneasily on my conscience, I whose conscience is sizzled darker than a blackamoor. Everything in me roars against tutoring, I confess, for it strikes me as a compromise. For a decade, you see, I have said this modality exacerbates everything which is curdled in mainstream education, everything which has turned the sacred classroom into the haunt of apparatchiks. Think of tutoring’s commercial ethos, its lack of emotional bonds with the student, its fundamentally bourgeois future-preference, its reduction of education to base data-crunching, in every way this approach is worse than public schooling. No matter the competence of the tutor or the pupil, the deeper DNA of tutoring is what is rotten. I have said this for a decade, muscha, I say it now, and I should say it so long as I’ve breath in me.
But we must make accommodation for the state of society. A decade of this work has convinced me that the public, including those cock-of-the-heaps who mouth a great deal of the social, political, spiritual, and economic points we have spent a decade verbing in the classroom – simply cannot grasp the enormity of the work at hand. Let the Christian take the place of the pagan here; let us accommodate our neighbors so assaulted by fluoride, media, and telephonic waves. We must not scorn their simplicity, and we need all hands on deck anyhow.
Through no fault of the fluoridated public, men simply cannot grasp what we are up to. The work of authentic educational reform digs deeper than any of your religious, political, or economic solutions do; we enrich the culture in a society completely stripped of culture.
Why such a focus? For only when culture is established will any higher works of betterment obtain. It is, in fact, the inability to grasp this dynamic which explains the abject failure of the conservative, patriot, and truth movements, to say nothing of what conventional religion has let itself become amidst this struggle.
Yes, in accounting the general public in this manner, let us take the mind of the priests and missionaries down the ages who kissed the sores of the lepers, of the laymen who died by the bushel in manys the long-forgotten plagued hospital. It is, in fact, only with this spirit of holy condescension that a culture will take root.
So long as the adamantine pagan archetype dominates, educational reform will remain a little thing. Do this long enough and you ferment into a clique, a party; into puritans. It is only with Christian yielding to the brokenness of mankind – in this instance to the functional retardation of our fellows – that we will truly scotch the errors of Rockefeller education and what purports to be alternative education at present.
The End of the Matter
The dead can hear me, and to the dead I speak.
This head is great Cuchulain’s, those other six
Gave him six mortal wounds. This man came first;
Youth lingered though the years ran on, that season
A woman loves the best. Maeve’s latest lover,
This man, had given him the second wound,
He had possessed her once; these were her sons,
Two valiant men that gave the third and fourth;
These other men were men of no account,
They saw that he was weakening and crept in;
One gave him the sixth wound and one the fifth;
Conall avenged him. I arranged the dance.
(W.B. Yeats, “Death Of Cuchulain”)
When the dead arise, when the mythic incarnates, when schools cease being the haunt of mediocrity and become the seminary of culture, there will be fruits to see. Until then there is work at hand for educational leaders.
This essay has been about formal education, its complicity in the murder of a world, and what comes next. If what comes next is to be a wholesome thing, teachers are needed who will blend the best of the pagan and Christian mythos, tempered with tremendous condensation towards a public which is functionally impaired. This is a hard thing down amongst the dead, but your back is not broken and God gave you a body for nothing but to labor.
And as we cinch our very intestines atop a post, that we die upright as Cuchulain; as we load that last bullet for a sprint from the Four Courts, that we show traitors for who they are as did Cathal Brugha (An Irish Republican who single-handedly faced down hundreds of Free States soldiers).; as we wind up one last bola blow in that Rhode Island swamp with King Philip (A New England Indian who attempted to unite all the tribes in resistance to the European settlers. Ultimately his formidable confederacy was whittled away by bribery and attrition to just King Philip and a few supporters who made a last stand one autumn’s morning), that the Puritan run back to where he came from, we will smile the smile of the brave, knowing that the mythic incarnates b’times, and that better men than ever we were will soon follow anon.
Featured: Newspapers Over Books, by Joseph Christian Leyendecker (1910).
