A Fight To The Knife: Formal & Alt Ed’s Future (Part I)
John Coleman
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.
