May I suggest: for many on the Right the correct career path is to do things and then teach others as one winds down. Myth is full of aged mentors. In a primitive society it is the job of the men too old to hunt and fight to hang out with the boys and pass along tribal wisdom.
Also, unruly students are more likely to respect those who did something outside of academia and then came back to teach future generations. Being able to say "Here's how I applied this theorem sniping jihadists, or building skyscrapers, or raising cattle, or playing in a rock band, or running for office..." gets attention.
What you have written here is excellent. It has been my conclusion after much research that the English language has the "u" in words like mould and colour for excellent reasons. The international standard is not the American approach, which was pushed very hard after the war against the Confederate states because the Union tyrants wanted to demolish the culture of their perceived enemy. I'm not a fan of the Yankee spellings.
Saw what you did there with Aristophanes and his play "The Frogs." Well played.
You are doing well by using the parables of Jesus in your work. I wrote a long bit about it on my phone-mediated substack SpacePriveNews which is still the pinned essay there.
The simple fact is that by reading and hearing the words of Jesus and doing them, we are able to build upon a solid foundation. Which, as Jesus notes, is key to knowing whether your building is going to stand up against the storms and vicissitudes of coming years, or whether it is going to fall.
Thank you for your inspiring words. I myself did a bit of time as a college professor and as a tutor. It started when I was still in high school and got a paying gig at the University of Kansas teaching debate and extemporaneous speech. This led to drama and to post-graduate work as a community college adjunct professor. I enjoy teaching students. I am loath to work with bureau rats.
If you look at the money spent on "education" since 1979 when Jimmy started the department thereof, the huge expansion has been in administrators. There are more bureau rats than ever, and they have too many "in service" days for my taste. I don't want to serve them ever again.
How you feel about teaching is how I feel about writing. I would be unable to bear not writing, so I write. I don't expect very many people to read what I write, but those who should are going to do so. God provides. Praise God. Amen.
Something I've wondered a lot about education is to what extent the history curriculum should be rewritten to focus on the history of the left (possibly via regulation, which is still possible even in a mostly privatized or state run system).
It strikes me that a big part of the sickness of society is that the education system creates left wing children somehow - probably not deliberately - and that maybe we need to just get firmer with fixing that at its root by giving kids a _real_ education in the history of communism, of national socialism, of the Great Leap Forward, of North Korea, the Jacobins, and all the other hard-left revolutionaries that have existed in the past few centuries. Perhaps combined with much more time spent on business simulation and the seeds are sown, as the parable would have it, for kids to become young adults with a much better appreciation of why left wing ideas are wrong and lead so reliably to such terrible outcomes.
But maybe it wouldn't work. Hard to say really what causes all this.
I teach history, and I think an explicitly ideological approach is wrong and ineffective. I think it's better to simply offer a wider range of sources than typical and open their minds to possibilities they had not previously considered. The friction this creates as it rubs against what they already think they know definitely creates some sparks.
Formal education is any intentional process of cultivation done according to a plan to arrive at some end. There are certainly traditional forms of that.
It's administered by teachers. I think most teachers are not overly political, certainly not intentionally indoctrinating children (a few do), and that the root causes of youth leftism are to some extent natural and not created. But that doesn't mean it can't be fixed.
After all, a big part of leftism is revolutionary change and overthrow of existing systems. It's natural that this is attractive to young people, because they start out in life with relatively little, they aren't a part of the system nor particularly dependent on it, and they're searching for an answer to the question of "how can I demonstrate that I'm a good, well socialized person? how can I make my mark?"
The incorrect teaching of history surely doesn't help (nazis were right wing etc) but it's not enough by itself.
As useful project for the right would be to somehow promote the masculine tradition of teaching. Among the greatest minds of the west were teachers. Plato, Augustine, Copernicus, and more recently Tolkien and Lewis. No one can dispute their masculine virtues (particularly the latter two, as they were Veterans of the horrors of the trenches of the Great War).
The monasteries of Europe were the origin of the University system of the west, and the monastics were seen as great spiritual warriors in their prime (many still embrace this aspect of the vocation, though it is not seen-much less celebrated-as it once was).
All that is to say that being an educator has historically been a position of honor for a man, and likely will become that again in the future. Seizing the opportunities of the present to restore such a notion should become a priority of the new right.
As for specific ideas, that will be a collaborative effort. Becoming a part time instructor at a trade school is one option. Or even taking a few days a year to offer a special presentation at a home school co-op.
Another would be for those in the arts/entertainment world to write characters that reflect the aforementioned characteristics as part of the story in some way. The first time I remember feeling truly motivated to learn for the sake of learning (rather than just to avoid consequences for poor performance or bad grades from my parents and teachers) was watching the scene in Tombstone when Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo verbally spar in Latin. Being educated was a status marker for the both of them and made them in certain ways superior to all of those around them. Finding creative ways to promote such an ideal should be a major strategy moving forward.
As always, your writing is thought provoking, inspiring, and valuable. Thank you again for sharing your gift with us. Let us all keep up the good fight as best we can, with the humility to accept with grace that the glory is not ours, for victory in our endeavors should glorify, above all, God.
I will focus in what we agree on, which is that it's to America's loss that the teaching profession has always been devalued since colonial times. Our greatest capital is human in terms of capital considered broadly as decency and productivity.
> I learned on my own and did fine. School is a racket. Teachers are idiots. You can learn on the internet. It’s not my job to make sure anyone else has an education; I did it, so can they. Back in my day we didn’t even have YouTube. Now there’s AI. I used to skip class and get high all the time and it worked out for me. Just do what I did.
Partially, yes, that's me. But. I would like to make it easier for others than it was for me. On that, we agree.
> a persistent, viscous contempt for education and everything associated with it
Also me. I do not think there is any use in populating the broken, backwards, technocratic model of public schooling with better people. Many currently employed in that system *were* better people, once, before the system broke them, as it was designed to do to them as well as the product.
How you, and a handful of others I know, survived and persisted in spite of that design is a mystery to me. But it is a basic and obvious observation that there are not enough people with the particular character necessary to do so. Just as you observe that there are not enough people with my particular character capable of evading that system and teaching themselves.
I don't believe in the *entire program* of public education, either its overt ideal as presented to the public or its not-so-covert actual purpose (the purpose of a system is what it does). Because I don't believe in cognitive homogeneity. Ironically I agree partially with the designers of this system: we do not need to "raise the masses" to be "men of letters" etc. etc., I'm sure you know the quote.
There is absolutely no use in attempting to turn people into scientists, philosophers and mathematicians who are best suited to digging holes and picking vegetables. Or even those best suited to running a shop or working a machine.
There is very little mystery about which young people are suited to what kind of work. I doubt you're much confused about which of your students are good candidates for your extracurricular activities. I bet you could identify them in contexts that don't require imprisoning every last child in the country and subjecting them to 12 years of pointless psychological abuse designed mainly to convince them to be deferential to their managerial masters.
So, cutting that rant short because I'm sure you get the point... While I agree we need more teachers, when I think of what the word "teacher" means to me, it's a person who has the ability to identify young people ready and able to learn something, and who points them in the right direction, steers them away from wastes of their time, and provides guidance, encouragement and resources to help them thrive in their studies.
I already do that, a bit, in my own field of expertise. I'm not very good at it. The same ornery disposition that drove me to efficiently sideline the school system so I could focus on what I wanted to learn also leaves me little patience for teaching anybody but the most willing and able.
But there are others who are better at it. They're making youtube videos, and writing articles, and giving online classes. I think all we have to do is foster them, legitimize them, and legitimize the people who study under them. Half of this task is already complete: the old institutions have done an excellent job of delegitimizing themselves, leaving the field open for competition. The last thing we need to do is reoccupy those institutions. All we have left to do there is finish *burning them down.*
If someone wants to get serious about building something new, and by serious I mean putting money, land, expertise and manpower behind it, I'm ready, willing and able to help (I even happen to have some expertise in edutech, to the extent that's needed). But it needs to be a new model, or rather a very old pre-technocratic model, not a recapitulation of this ridiculous assembly line for obedient wagies.
I’m not sure how people are getting the impression that I support public schooling or think its a good idea even it theory. One of the major themes of my essay was that the ‘system’ itself is a creature of liberalism and a mechanism for perpetuating the ideology. At best, a public system should exist to warehouse people to be taught very basic skills, but to otherwise by put out of the way of people who want to learn elsewhere.
> I’m not sure how people are getting the impression that I support public schooling
I don't think you do, but the thrust of your article seemed to be that you want others to take the route you've taken and attempt to dismantle/fix the system from within, and that's my main point of contention.
Like I said in the end, I'm very interested in building the parallel institutions you've mentioned. I don't necessarily think those require professional teachers, or at least not many of them. In fact I'd rather see them populated by retirees and apprentice-master relationships.
> At best, a public system should exist to warehouse people to be taught very basic skills
I don't think we need this at all. It's trivial to teach basic literacy and numeracy to all but the dullest of students. It is a true marvel of the modern age that we have a system that struggles to do this for a *decade* only to fail one third of the time.
Other basic skills - life skills - are best learned through experience, in the home.
The best way to keep the other kids out of the way of potential scholars is to give them something useful to do. If there's one thing that is almost universally true about children before the school system gets to them, it's that they love - beg even - to learn, participate, and assist in basic tasks. All you have to do is say yes, and be patient when they're more harm than help at first.
I don’t work in a public school, nor would I advocate anyone else doing so. I’m not within. I teach at a private school, but there are a lot of ways for people to participate in education, as a career or on a voluntary basis, that don’t even involve working in a school.
The problem with everyone learning at home- those who are essentially unteachable- is that it would require a full restructuring of the economy to make that happen. Parents, or more likely parent, have to work. They’re not warehoused for their benefit, but for the good of those whose homes they would be breaking into were they unsupervised all day.
Separating the pretense of education from the warehousing function might be useful. What they do now is like libraries and transit also having to be homeless shelters.
I can see that as a transitional model, at least for one generation, until we can get something approaching sane homes and work again.
But temporary institutions have a weird habit of becoming permanent and perpetuating the problem they're meant to solve. So it would take care and a hard expiration date.
(aside, and no offense intended, but I don't have a very high opinion of private schools either, which mostly seem to be the public school model but for rich kids)
Am I mistaken in my understanding that "liber"=free+"al"=pertaining to, hence pertaining to free(dom)? So, it seems to me that someone or entity that depends on the coercion of the state is not liberal. Is my reasoning faulty? Is it your contention that if liberalism did not exist then there would not have been Marxism, socialism, the New Deal, progressiveism et al? I understand if the "free-will" question is too big to answer. I do think that we can be allies, but I take offense when you and others disparage true liberalism. Take care.
I concur that parallel structures are what's needed and where the tides are heading. I sense the Librarian is making a general call to 'teaching' and how that teaching manifests itself is up to those who heed the call (some of the ways you mention above). And while I don't identify as Right (or Left) I am firmly in the reformer camp and with the Librarian in that this is indeed a men's issue - a corrective to the current dominate manifestation of schooling, which is almost entirely a female sport.
Something akin to decentralized schooling as opposed to systematized learning is where my mind has been lately. I've been involved in education here and abroad for about a decade, and while I love learning / education / mentoring I abhor what "school" has become.
I think there's a place for centralization, when resources or facilities are necessary to learn something (e.g. labs, archives). That is what I would like to see built. But really there was a working model for all of this that stood the test of time, before Enlightened technocrats came along and remade everything from scratch in their own image. We can make it work again, and it will for the most part be decentralized.
I was a disinterested student and did not thrive or fail. I was lucky enough to have a father who demanded I belong to a “service organization.” I did the cubs and scouts back when we would carve staffs and battle each other on elevated planks. I joined a military styled organization at 12 called Air Cadets that may have saved me from a life of meandering meaninglessness. I was engaged by the environment as I was nonplussed by the hippy dippy high school. Range, sport night, drill and honour guards, ground school, technical training, gliding and powered flying scholarships but mostly structured challenges and discipline. I think a Military Academy would be a valuable option for many and hope the movement to charter schools may offer an educational experience suited to idle hands and unengaged minds
"Others are able to push through, but develop habits of thought and action that render them unable to really thrive; they’re the ones who Chat GPT every essay only to pass through adulthood with the vague sense that they’re missing some vital part of themselves, and are choked out by dull consumerism and its attendant perversions."
I think this is me: i cruised through school with an auto-transmission (i am european, we do not use those devil machine here), always getting the maximum with the minimum.
Then, when school ended, i missed greatly that i did not dive deep enough: sometimes, i find miself re-reading the art book or regretting not being able to read in greek anymore.
I missed someone that forced me to study: requiring a good grade was too easy.
I think you nailed it when you pointed out your Biblical Greek class is voluntary: the half-measure school mandate, i.e. you are forced to be there but not to be good, is deleterious.
I think i did a lot better in Uni because I was forced to be good, but not to be there.
Superb. I’m a Ph.D and former college professor. I teach philosophy for a public charter high school now. It’s hard work, and humble work, but it’s more rewarding and more important than college teaching. I’ve got great Christian (Catholics and orthobros) colleagues and we are bringing many out of the Cave. Thanks for this brilliant and encouraging essay.
> I can already see the comments. “I learned on my own and did fine. School is a racket. Teachers are idiots. You can learn on the internet. It’s not my job to make sure anyone else has an education; I did it, so can they. Back in my day we didn’t even have YouTube. Now there’s AI. I used to skip class and get high all the time and it worked out for me. Just do what I did.”
I’m largely self educated, but all too often run into cases where I need things distilled and explained rather than read the raw documentation. Many of those talking about “learning on their own” are relying on others who took the time to create videos or articles distilling down and explaining concepts and interconnections. At a deeper level, there are times there is no substitute for a knowledgeable person who can answer questions, or figure out where you are struggling with an explanation and try a different tack.
Great essay! Education is by far the biggest blind spot of conservatives. Many of the leading lights truly believe that they learned everything on their own, that all teachers are Marxist pedophile groomers, and that universal homeschooling is the solution. I’ve devoted so many essays to debunking these utterly stupid notions, and I’ve had editors pass on them because my common sense founded in decades of experience was just too much.
I actually think most influencers have the makings of being good teachers. This is pretty much what they do with their videos and poasting. It’s mostly foolish snobbery, laziness, and misguidance that keeps them out of the classroom.
So be it, we’ll do what we do while doing some of what they do, and hopefully our readers take the hint and rethink education. It’s a creative career that allows for more autonomy and leisure than most jobs. And with school choice emerging in the red states, there will be plenty of opportunity to revive our educational institutions (I’ll avoid saying “systems” as well). If we can pull ourselves away from the Libs of TikTok outrage porn, we can actually make a real difference in a big way.
I'm lucky enough to be the owner of a complete 1922 set of Journeys Through Bookland. It's one of many venerable literature anthologies compiled starting in the 1800s and early 1900s to form children's minds. Maybe if a publisher could take on the project of updating and printing one of those kinds of series...
So many younger students fall "on the spectrum" of ADD, ADHD, autism, etc. that teachers have to be expert in what was formerly considered "special ed" simply to keep a classroom from falling into chaos. Educational cat-herding before the subject taught can even be approached. And don't get me started on the brain-breaking volume of work that teachers have to do every evening from 6-to-9 pm when the rest of us are watching movies. I speak from experience. I taught a free lighting workshop once and 1 or 2 of the 18 in attendance actually did well. The rest wanted to play with the lights for pix of their non-binary friends. Nice essay, thanks.
This is very enlightening! Jesus was a teacher. Not perhaps in the traditional academic sense but in the truest sense of the word - someone who elevates others by becoming a light in their lives.
Thanks for this. I could say a lot in your support (!), but will make two points.
First, education and culture are intimately related and one of the worst aspects of late modernity is the abysmal standard of culture. But the education giving rise to that culture must draw on deep and true spiritual sources.
Secondly, one way the Jesuits successfully recovered large parts of Europe for the Catholic Church in the 16th and 17th centuries was by setting up schools which were so good that elites of the time, regardless of their own religious beliefs, wanted their sons to attend them.
There is surely something to be learned from this, and I have to admit that the elite aspect of it is very important.
Anyway, thanks for another well-written and impressive article. I can tell you’re a good teacher.
May I suggest: for many on the Right the correct career path is to do things and then teach others as one winds down. Myth is full of aged mentors. In a primitive society it is the job of the men too old to hunt and fight to hang out with the boys and pass along tribal wisdom.
Also, unruly students are more likely to respect those who did something outside of academia and then came back to teach future generations. Being able to say "Here's how I applied this theorem sniping jihadists, or building skyscrapers, or raising cattle, or playing in a rock band, or running for office..." gets attention.
That’s entirely true. I’m not necessarily recommending a traditional academic LTG for teachers at all. Anons in the Classroom!
What you have written here is excellent. It has been my conclusion after much research that the English language has the "u" in words like mould and colour for excellent reasons. The international standard is not the American approach, which was pushed very hard after the war against the Confederate states because the Union tyrants wanted to demolish the culture of their perceived enemy. I'm not a fan of the Yankee spellings.
Saw what you did there with Aristophanes and his play "The Frogs." Well played.
You are doing well by using the parables of Jesus in your work. I wrote a long bit about it on my phone-mediated substack SpacePriveNews which is still the pinned essay there.
The simple fact is that by reading and hearing the words of Jesus and doing them, we are able to build upon a solid foundation. Which, as Jesus notes, is key to knowing whether your building is going to stand up against the storms and vicissitudes of coming years, or whether it is going to fall.
Thank you for your inspiring words. I myself did a bit of time as a college professor and as a tutor. It started when I was still in high school and got a paying gig at the University of Kansas teaching debate and extemporaneous speech. This led to drama and to post-graduate work as a community college adjunct professor. I enjoy teaching students. I am loath to work with bureau rats.
If you look at the money spent on "education" since 1979 when Jimmy started the department thereof, the huge expansion has been in administrators. There are more bureau rats than ever, and they have too many "in service" days for my taste. I don't want to serve them ever again.
How you feel about teaching is how I feel about writing. I would be unable to bear not writing, so I write. I don't expect very many people to read what I write, but those who should are going to do so. God provides. Praise God. Amen.
Thank you very much.
Something I've wondered a lot about education is to what extent the history curriculum should be rewritten to focus on the history of the left (possibly via regulation, which is still possible even in a mostly privatized or state run system).
It strikes me that a big part of the sickness of society is that the education system creates left wing children somehow - probably not deliberately - and that maybe we need to just get firmer with fixing that at its root by giving kids a _real_ education in the history of communism, of national socialism, of the Great Leap Forward, of North Korea, the Jacobins, and all the other hard-left revolutionaries that have existed in the past few centuries. Perhaps combined with much more time spent on business simulation and the seeds are sown, as the parable would have it, for kids to become young adults with a much better appreciation of why left wing ideas are wrong and lead so reliably to such terrible outcomes.
But maybe it wouldn't work. Hard to say really what causes all this.
I teach history, and I think an explicitly ideological approach is wrong and ineffective. I think it's better to simply offer a wider range of sources than typical and open their minds to possibilities they had not previously considered. The friction this creates as it rubs against what they already think they know definitely creates some sparks.
Formal education is administered by the Left; what else would you expect it to do?
Formal education is any intentional process of cultivation done according to a plan to arrive at some end. There are certainly traditional forms of that.
It's administered by teachers. I think most teachers are not overly political, certainly not intentionally indoctrinating children (a few do), and that the root causes of youth leftism are to some extent natural and not created. But that doesn't mean it can't be fixed.
After all, a big part of leftism is revolutionary change and overthrow of existing systems. It's natural that this is attractive to young people, because they start out in life with relatively little, they aren't a part of the system nor particularly dependent on it, and they're searching for an answer to the question of "how can I demonstrate that I'm a good, well socialized person? how can I make my mark?"
The incorrect teaching of history surely doesn't help (nazis were right wing etc) but it's not enough by itself.
As useful project for the right would be to somehow promote the masculine tradition of teaching. Among the greatest minds of the west were teachers. Plato, Augustine, Copernicus, and more recently Tolkien and Lewis. No one can dispute their masculine virtues (particularly the latter two, as they were Veterans of the horrors of the trenches of the Great War).
The monasteries of Europe were the origin of the University system of the west, and the monastics were seen as great spiritual warriors in their prime (many still embrace this aspect of the vocation, though it is not seen-much less celebrated-as it once was).
All that is to say that being an educator has historically been a position of honor for a man, and likely will become that again in the future. Seizing the opportunities of the present to restore such a notion should become a priority of the new right.
As for specific ideas, that will be a collaborative effort. Becoming a part time instructor at a trade school is one option. Or even taking a few days a year to offer a special presentation at a home school co-op.
Another would be for those in the arts/entertainment world to write characters that reflect the aforementioned characteristics as part of the story in some way. The first time I remember feeling truly motivated to learn for the sake of learning (rather than just to avoid consequences for poor performance or bad grades from my parents and teachers) was watching the scene in Tombstone when Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo verbally spar in Latin. Being educated was a status marker for the both of them and made them in certain ways superior to all of those around them. Finding creative ways to promote such an ideal should be a major strategy moving forward.
As always, your writing is thought provoking, inspiring, and valuable. Thank you again for sharing your gift with us. Let us all keep up the good fight as best we can, with the humility to accept with grace that the glory is not ours, for victory in our endeavors should glorify, above all, God.
I will focus in what we agree on, which is that it's to America's loss that the teaching profession has always been devalued since colonial times. Our greatest capital is human in terms of capital considered broadly as decency and productivity.
> I learned on my own and did fine. School is a racket. Teachers are idiots. You can learn on the internet. It’s not my job to make sure anyone else has an education; I did it, so can they. Back in my day we didn’t even have YouTube. Now there’s AI. I used to skip class and get high all the time and it worked out for me. Just do what I did.
Partially, yes, that's me. But. I would like to make it easier for others than it was for me. On that, we agree.
> a persistent, viscous contempt for education and everything associated with it
Also me. I do not think there is any use in populating the broken, backwards, technocratic model of public schooling with better people. Many currently employed in that system *were* better people, once, before the system broke them, as it was designed to do to them as well as the product.
How you, and a handful of others I know, survived and persisted in spite of that design is a mystery to me. But it is a basic and obvious observation that there are not enough people with the particular character necessary to do so. Just as you observe that there are not enough people with my particular character capable of evading that system and teaching themselves.
I don't believe in the *entire program* of public education, either its overt ideal as presented to the public or its not-so-covert actual purpose (the purpose of a system is what it does). Because I don't believe in cognitive homogeneity. Ironically I agree partially with the designers of this system: we do not need to "raise the masses" to be "men of letters" etc. etc., I'm sure you know the quote.
There is absolutely no use in attempting to turn people into scientists, philosophers and mathematicians who are best suited to digging holes and picking vegetables. Or even those best suited to running a shop or working a machine.
There is very little mystery about which young people are suited to what kind of work. I doubt you're much confused about which of your students are good candidates for your extracurricular activities. I bet you could identify them in contexts that don't require imprisoning every last child in the country and subjecting them to 12 years of pointless psychological abuse designed mainly to convince them to be deferential to their managerial masters.
So, cutting that rant short because I'm sure you get the point... While I agree we need more teachers, when I think of what the word "teacher" means to me, it's a person who has the ability to identify young people ready and able to learn something, and who points them in the right direction, steers them away from wastes of their time, and provides guidance, encouragement and resources to help them thrive in their studies.
I already do that, a bit, in my own field of expertise. I'm not very good at it. The same ornery disposition that drove me to efficiently sideline the school system so I could focus on what I wanted to learn also leaves me little patience for teaching anybody but the most willing and able.
But there are others who are better at it. They're making youtube videos, and writing articles, and giving online classes. I think all we have to do is foster them, legitimize them, and legitimize the people who study under them. Half of this task is already complete: the old institutions have done an excellent job of delegitimizing themselves, leaving the field open for competition. The last thing we need to do is reoccupy those institutions. All we have left to do there is finish *burning them down.*
If someone wants to get serious about building something new, and by serious I mean putting money, land, expertise and manpower behind it, I'm ready, willing and able to help (I even happen to have some expertise in edutech, to the extent that's needed). But it needs to be a new model, or rather a very old pre-technocratic model, not a recapitulation of this ridiculous assembly line for obedient wagies.
I’m not sure how people are getting the impression that I support public schooling or think its a good idea even it theory. One of the major themes of my essay was that the ‘system’ itself is a creature of liberalism and a mechanism for perpetuating the ideology. At best, a public system should exist to warehouse people to be taught very basic skills, but to otherwise by put out of the way of people who want to learn elsewhere.
> I’m not sure how people are getting the impression that I support public schooling
I don't think you do, but the thrust of your article seemed to be that you want others to take the route you've taken and attempt to dismantle/fix the system from within, and that's my main point of contention.
Like I said in the end, I'm very interested in building the parallel institutions you've mentioned. I don't necessarily think those require professional teachers, or at least not many of them. In fact I'd rather see them populated by retirees and apprentice-master relationships.
> At best, a public system should exist to warehouse people to be taught very basic skills
I don't think we need this at all. It's trivial to teach basic literacy and numeracy to all but the dullest of students. It is a true marvel of the modern age that we have a system that struggles to do this for a *decade* only to fail one third of the time.
Other basic skills - life skills - are best learned through experience, in the home.
The best way to keep the other kids out of the way of potential scholars is to give them something useful to do. If there's one thing that is almost universally true about children before the school system gets to them, it's that they love - beg even - to learn, participate, and assist in basic tasks. All you have to do is say yes, and be patient when they're more harm than help at first.
I don’t work in a public school, nor would I advocate anyone else doing so. I’m not within. I teach at a private school, but there are a lot of ways for people to participate in education, as a career or on a voluntary basis, that don’t even involve working in a school.
The problem with everyone learning at home- those who are essentially unteachable- is that it would require a full restructuring of the economy to make that happen. Parents, or more likely parent, have to work. They’re not warehoused for their benefit, but for the good of those whose homes they would be breaking into were they unsupervised all day.
Separating the pretense of education from the warehousing function might be useful. What they do now is like libraries and transit also having to be homeless shelters.
I can see that as a transitional model, at least for one generation, until we can get something approaching sane homes and work again.
But temporary institutions have a weird habit of becoming permanent and perpetuating the problem they're meant to solve. So it would take care and a hard expiration date.
(aside, and no offense intended, but I don't have a very high opinion of private schools either, which mostly seem to be the public school model but for rich kids)
How is the "system" itself a creature of liberalism if it is run by the state? Was God's giving Mankind free will a gift or a curse?
Liberalism is the ideology of the state, and state schools are a- if not the- prime instruments of that ideology’s perpetuation.
May I revise? I do not take offense, I'm turned off when liberalism is disparaged.
Am I mistaken in my understanding that "liber"=free+"al"=pertaining to, hence pertaining to free(dom)? So, it seems to me that someone or entity that depends on the coercion of the state is not liberal. Is my reasoning faulty? Is it your contention that if liberalism did not exist then there would not have been Marxism, socialism, the New Deal, progressiveism et al? I understand if the "free-will" question is too big to answer. I do think that we can be allies, but I take offense when you and others disparage true liberalism. Take care.
I concur that parallel structures are what's needed and where the tides are heading. I sense the Librarian is making a general call to 'teaching' and how that teaching manifests itself is up to those who heed the call (some of the ways you mention above). And while I don't identify as Right (or Left) I am firmly in the reformer camp and with the Librarian in that this is indeed a men's issue - a corrective to the current dominate manifestation of schooling, which is almost entirely a female sport.
Something akin to decentralized schooling as opposed to systematized learning is where my mind has been lately. I've been involved in education here and abroad for about a decade, and while I love learning / education / mentoring I abhor what "school" has become.
I think there's a place for centralization, when resources or facilities are necessary to learn something (e.g. labs, archives). That is what I would like to see built. But really there was a working model for all of this that stood the test of time, before Enlightened technocrats came along and remade everything from scratch in their own image. We can make it work again, and it will for the most part be decentralized.
I agree. Perhaps I could have phrased that better. Decentralization to me it's a movement away from Departments of Education, government schools, etc.
I would love nothing more to help build an experimental school.
I was a disinterested student and did not thrive or fail. I was lucky enough to have a father who demanded I belong to a “service organization.” I did the cubs and scouts back when we would carve staffs and battle each other on elevated planks. I joined a military styled organization at 12 called Air Cadets that may have saved me from a life of meandering meaninglessness. I was engaged by the environment as I was nonplussed by the hippy dippy high school. Range, sport night, drill and honour guards, ground school, technical training, gliding and powered flying scholarships but mostly structured challenges and discipline. I think a Military Academy would be a valuable option for many and hope the movement to charter schools may offer an educational experience suited to idle hands and unengaged minds
"Others are able to push through, but develop habits of thought and action that render them unable to really thrive; they’re the ones who Chat GPT every essay only to pass through adulthood with the vague sense that they’re missing some vital part of themselves, and are choked out by dull consumerism and its attendant perversions."
I think this is me: i cruised through school with an auto-transmission (i am european, we do not use those devil machine here), always getting the maximum with the minimum.
Then, when school ended, i missed greatly that i did not dive deep enough: sometimes, i find miself re-reading the art book or regretting not being able to read in greek anymore.
I missed someone that forced me to study: requiring a good grade was too easy.
It's a hard thing to get young people to understand. Many never do.
I think you nailed it when you pointed out your Biblical Greek class is voluntary: the half-measure school mandate, i.e. you are forced to be there but not to be good, is deleterious.
I think i did a lot better in Uni because I was forced to be good, but not to be there.
Superb. I’m a Ph.D and former college professor. I teach philosophy for a public charter high school now. It’s hard work, and humble work, but it’s more rewarding and more important than college teaching. I’ve got great Christian (Catholics and orthobros) colleagues and we are bringing many out of the Cave. Thanks for this brilliant and encouraging essay.
Thank you so much and for the work you do. It must be a great school if they even have a philosophy class.
> I can already see the comments. “I learned on my own and did fine. School is a racket. Teachers are idiots. You can learn on the internet. It’s not my job to make sure anyone else has an education; I did it, so can they. Back in my day we didn’t even have YouTube. Now there’s AI. I used to skip class and get high all the time and it worked out for me. Just do what I did.”
I’m largely self educated, but all too often run into cases where I need things distilled and explained rather than read the raw documentation. Many of those talking about “learning on their own” are relying on others who took the time to create videos or articles distilling down and explaining concepts and interconnections. At a deeper level, there are times there is no substitute for a knowledgeable person who can answer questions, or figure out where you are struggling with an explanation and try a different tack.
Great essay! Education is by far the biggest blind spot of conservatives. Many of the leading lights truly believe that they learned everything on their own, that all teachers are Marxist pedophile groomers, and that universal homeschooling is the solution. I’ve devoted so many essays to debunking these utterly stupid notions, and I’ve had editors pass on them because my common sense founded in decades of experience was just too much.
I actually think most influencers have the makings of being good teachers. This is pretty much what they do with their videos and poasting. It’s mostly foolish snobbery, laziness, and misguidance that keeps them out of the classroom.
So be it, we’ll do what we do while doing some of what they do, and hopefully our readers take the hint and rethink education. It’s a creative career that allows for more autonomy and leisure than most jobs. And with school choice emerging in the red states, there will be plenty of opportunity to revive our educational institutions (I’ll avoid saying “systems” as well). If we can pull ourselves away from the Libs of TikTok outrage porn, we can actually make a real difference in a big way.
https://thefederalist.com/2025/02/06/texas-school-choice-bill-will-help-teachers-and-students-alike/
This made my day. Amen.
We need a Western Children's Canon.
I'm lucky enough to be the owner of a complete 1922 set of Journeys Through Bookland. It's one of many venerable literature anthologies compiled starting in the 1800s and early 1900s to form children's minds. Maybe if a publisher could take on the project of updating and printing one of those kinds of series...
So many younger students fall "on the spectrum" of ADD, ADHD, autism, etc. that teachers have to be expert in what was formerly considered "special ed" simply to keep a classroom from falling into chaos. Educational cat-herding before the subject taught can even be approached. And don't get me started on the brain-breaking volume of work that teachers have to do every evening from 6-to-9 pm when the rest of us are watching movies. I speak from experience. I taught a free lighting workshop once and 1 or 2 of the 18 in attendance actually did well. The rest wanted to play with the lights for pix of their non-binary friends. Nice essay, thanks.
This is very enlightening! Jesus was a teacher. Not perhaps in the traditional academic sense but in the truest sense of the word - someone who elevates others by becoming a light in their lives.
Thanks for this. I could say a lot in your support (!), but will make two points.
First, education and culture are intimately related and one of the worst aspects of late modernity is the abysmal standard of culture. But the education giving rise to that culture must draw on deep and true spiritual sources.
Secondly, one way the Jesuits successfully recovered large parts of Europe for the Catholic Church in the 16th and 17th centuries was by setting up schools which were so good that elites of the time, regardless of their own religious beliefs, wanted their sons to attend them.
There is surely something to be learned from this, and I have to admit that the elite aspect of it is very important.
Anyway, thanks for another well-written and impressive article. I can tell you’re a good teacher.