On Teaching: Part I

Why teach and who should teach

It is a common enough sentiment in rightist spaces that our society suffers from a lack of children.  Even among normie conservatives one will see lamented the low native birth rates in Western nations.  Much has been said concerning creating policies that will encourage adults to reproduce, and these discussions are useful and helpful.  But I believe there is a dimension of the problem that is not discussed enough, something that is all too often ignored or dismissed from consideration: the role that education plays in the perpetuation of a society and the related necessity of teaching children.

This may seem odd; much rightist discourse centers on history, philosophy, and religion.  In that sense education is vital to the rightist political and social project.  But this conversation takes place among adults with adults in mind.  It is so normal for us that we seldom pause and ask: where are the kids in this?

Well, is they?

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Take Substack, for example.  I have a hair under 400 subscribers at this point (and thank you kindly for that).  Of those who engage my postings, I would guess that they range in age from possibly late 20s to 60s.  I suspect that most of you reading this have similar audiences.  We are having a debate, well and necessary, about how to produce more children, while the children society already has are pursuing TikTok.

We lament this; TikTok is awful.  And yet none of us think it is strange.  Of course the kids are there and not here.  Who wants to hear the Librarian go on about esoteric coyote anarchs when one can watch girls lipsynching Taylor Swift songs in their underwear?  Well, why are we here?  If you are like me, it is because you believe that what we are doing here is a qualitatively better use of time and spiritual energy than having pronoun wars sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party.  So what can we do but interpret the failure of the youth to share our values as an indictment of our failure to communicate them and demonstrate their vital importance?

Ain’t that the truth

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Please do not interpret this as an attack.  I am formost in my guilt in this; I am only conscious of the problem, I believe, because my perspective is somewhat unusual.  As a teacher (private high school and public college adjunct) I see something most people do not, young people in large numbers organized into their own demographic slice of society.  I see the forces acting upon them and the force in turn they will exert on the future.  And I say to those who will hear:  we must teach.

I understand that most of you with your own kids have taken their education in hand. Homeschooling is a vital part of what I envision, and a child’s first teacher is always his parents. But those children must live in a world in which they are three to six in one-hundred, and their peers will be their enemies unless we collectively push back. There is no Benedict Option; Dreher is currently in Hungary where they chose the Constantine Option; more power to all of them.

Understand, this is a zero-sum game.  The young will be taught by someone.  If it is not you, it will be your enemy; if it is not done for the right reasons it will be done for the wrong ones.  I can assure you, having seen the process at every level, that your enemies have a target-rich environment and air superiority.  This cannot stand.  Education is ground that under no circumstances can be conceded to that enemy.  To the extent that they have conquered territory it it must be won back, trench by trench, foxhole by foxhole- shell, gun, knife, and fist.  It does us no good to plan for a pro-natal future and leave the realm of education contested.  The left doesn’t need its own children, being content to reproduce by way of brain fungus.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Cordyceps

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At this point I should be clear about exactly what I mean by education.  I mean first of all paideia, the cultivation of the faculties of body, mind, and spirit by means of the Classical liberal arts.  I mean something that has use beyond the practical, something that has no market value because it is priceless.  I mean the sort of learning that forms a man as a man, not a man as an instrument of some other man.  I mean also religious formation.  I have my own strong beliefs on that score, but a theological debate is outside the scope of this series.  A teacher is one who by profession (getting paid) or avocation (independent means as a calling) fosters the education of another.

And what is teaching?  It is that process of formation whereby the potential of a person is actualized.  A teacher is a shaper, a pruner of dead branches, a feeder and waterer, a guard against pests and parasites.  The noun ‘culture’ and the verb ‘cultivate’ both derive from the Latin colere, meaning to raise crops.  One brings a student into maturity just as one does a stalk of wheat, and with just as much care and sense of importance.  The difference, of course, is that unlike a plant, a human must cooperate with his growth.  His will and the will of that who shapes him must harmonize, sunergon, working together.  That which is more fully realized must help that which is less become greater.  It is by this, and only this, that society continues.

A child or a man can learn without a teacher, true.  A tree can bear fruit in the wilderness.  Some of you no doubt read this and scoff; you are autodidacts, smarter that those drones the system sent to teach you.  To that I say, if you are better learners than they are teachers, then you should be teaching.  The supreme and decisive test of knowledge of something is whether one can teach it.  And if you can do it, it is my contention that you should do it.

It is easy to make rationalizations to the contrary.  But I think deep down there is a kind of ambivalence at the root of rightists being hesitant to enter the field of education.  To be perfectly frank, most of us, including myself at times, have taken in more of the left’s anti-natalism than we care to admit.  We don’t like how kids cramp our lifestyles.  We want to have time to read and write and do important things like talk about having more kids in the abstract, while the reality of concrete children is a lot less fun.  Kids are little savages, egocentric, irrational, indolent, ignorant, and vicious.  God made them cute so we don’t punt them out of windows.  In the aggregate, as in a classroom, the problem is only compounded.  This is the reality, and I would be remiss if I didn’t address that.

Damn wiener kids are the bane of teachers everywhere.

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That said, most of the debates we are having about how to address social problems are far downstream of where those problems could actually meaningfully be addressed.  People don’t want to have children because they are children.  It is for that same reason that every leftist fairy tale endures, it is why so many of our peers’ lives center on toys and games and playtime.  No one who spent any time in a school would be surprised by any of that.  Keeping people as stunted human bonsai trees is the point.  Our job must be to guide them to maturity.  If those of us who are able don’t take up the challenge, who will?   Concentrate on the image that popped into your head after you read those last words.  That is who is developing the future instead of you.

So to whom is this addressed?  Who are you? Are you a student, by which I mean do you regularly humble yourself before books and podcasts and men and women you recognize as wiser than yourself?  You may be humble enough.  Do you have the faculties of discernment, imagination, sympathy, intelligence, and industry?  You may have the temperament.  Are you willing to forgo money, power, and social esteem?  You may have the motivation.

I didn’t ask if you liked children.  If that’s why you do it, you will fail, because there will be times you don’t like them, and if you can’t do your job anyway you will be about as useful as a surgeon who only operates on pleasant people.  Nor does it matter if you are an extrovert or funny or cool.  I have seen teachers be successful who were none of those things and some of the most ‘with it’ people fail.  It also doesn’t matter how old you are, or for how long you intend to do it.  I believe that few people are cut out to be lifers, but that society could benefit from experienced people with the right mindset willing to commit 5-10 years at various stages of life. Men and women both have the capacity to be good teachers, one of the few jobs both do as well as the other, though there are general differences in approaches. That said, there are far more women than men in education, and more men would go a long way to addressing some serious imbalances.

Macho Men, the cream of the crop, academically speaking.

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In my experience, kids don’t care about whether you are upbeat or cynical, or a man or a woman, or what your politics are, your age or your looks or anything like that.  What they value, what they are starving for in the plastic world they live in, is authenticity.  They want you to be real.  They want you to know and care about what you are teaching, they want you to be honest, and they want you to be kind.  If you know your stuff, don’t lie, and care, you will be doing more than most of the adults they know.  If that sounds like you, you know who you are, and what you could do.  If it’s more than you are currently doing, do yourself and the world a favor and consider education. Be a teacher.

I plan for this to be a four-part series.  In my next essay, I will address the ‘where’ of teaching.  As a spoiler, since I’m sure it will occur to you as you read this, I DO NOT advocate teaching in a public school.  This is not a viable option at present, at all.  You may be able to fly under the radar for a while, but the investment in education can be undone in a moment of viral video.  Not having any filter for who comes into your class or what families you deal with makes the work of teaching impossible in the long run.  While there are some public schools and systems that function, they can be hard to discern from the dysfunctional and are best left alone.