On Teaching: Part III

What to teach and how to teach it

Before I begin the substance of part III of the series, I think it is necessary to add a brief coda concerning some elements of the logistics related to part two.  There are two goals in establishing a rightist presence in education- the first is the acculturation and personal growth of the individual students, spiritually, intellectually, morally, etc, and the other is the building of sustaining networks for those students so as to allow them to thrive in a world that is increasingly hostile to the differentiated worldview.  The first is the main subject of part III, the latter is an extension of part II.  Some points should be clarified.

I believe that each iteration of the school should be physically located in a larger-sized small town in a red state in the US, what is commonly called a ‘micropolitan statistical area.’  I think this would provide the ideal population base, cultural context, and conditions for acquiring real estate at a reasonable price.  As an example, consider Ottumwa, Iowa.  Ottumwa is a city of around 25,000 bisected by the Des Moines River.  The demographics and local culture are favorable to the project, and a building suitable for a school of fifty or so students can be had for relatively little expense.   One might find a similar result in Spartanburg, SC, or Melbourne, FL, or any number of towns in the Northeast.  The school should operate, to the greatest degree possible, with the cooperation of local elites, with whom connections would be made in the form of arranging apprenticeships and internships; as regards the latter this is especially true with local government.  An ethic of local civic responsibility should be instilled in the students, to the extent that they should feel as though they have embarrassed themselves and the school by permanently moving further afield.  They should instead be taught to think of themselves as successors, and as the next generation of patrons of the school and of the community.

One thing the last essay taught me, by way of the comments section, is that there seems to be widespread consensus that the heritage population of the US and Canada faces insurmountable odds in the larger neoliberal economic order.  I am not so sure this is generally true to the degree people seem to assume, but no matter; let us turn the strength of this sentiment to our advantage.  If young red state males are convinced they have no future in New York or Chicago, so much the better for Ottumwa.  A school that builds a culture of reactionary localism is the perfect solution to the related problems of brain drain and white defeatism.  If the current elite places don’t want you, you can stay where you are and make new ones.  Ottumwa and its environs are no smaller that Florence, Athens, and Enlightenment-era Edinburgh.  The energy simply needs to be turned inward.  In this way networks independent of large corporations, universities, and such can be created and sustained, and in turn linked with others emerging from sister schools in similar areas.   Ideally, to an ever-increasing degree, alumni of the invisible college come to occupy patronage-dispensing chokepoints in local systems of power- political, educational, and economic. 

So goes the wider world.  But before those broader goals are reached, our students at the invisible college must first be educated.  What will we teach and how will we teach it?  Here begins part three proper.

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First and foremost, a proper reactionary education is Classical.  It is important to understand that in modern education discourse this word has many meanings, and we must disabuse ourselves of most of them if we are to arrive at a right-wing pedagogy.  In particular, there is a species of pedagogy very similar to what I’m advocating that differs in subtle but important ways. This variant of Classical education is popular among normies, has a great deal of money and goodwill behind it, but, I believe, ultimately misses the point and diverts needed energy and resources into less than ideal ends.

Teaching is something that even people who acknowledge they can’t do have strong opinions concerning.  For every person instructing on the front lines there are a thousand armchair principals.  A good number of such people are wealthy and influential, or can tap into the networks of the same, and this is just as true in normiecon spaces as it is in the public system.  For the Hannity-fans of the world, education was largely perfect exactly around the time they passed through public school, generally some time in the 1960s or 70s, and still more perfect by extension during the time their parents attended in the 40s and 50s.  This is what is meant when they use the phrase ‘Classical education,’ and when these people or their agents are given space to reform, this is what they attempt to replicate.  The Barney Charter School Initiative, run out of Hillsdale, is a perfect example of this in practice. The results are not generally unimpressive given that the communities that embrace such methods typically have the mores and social capital to make them work, but in the end, from the reactionary perspective, represent a great deal of effort to roll a boulder halfway back up the hill. 

I’ve already anticipated the criticism.

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Classical in this sense means Dorothy Sayers and Susan Wise Bauer; it means diagramming sentences and writing in cursive; it means ‘classic’ literature like The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird.  Classical means adopting the Hillsdale-Jaffa view that America was a nation cursed by the great twin evils of slavery and sectionalism until the martyr Lincoln purged it with his benevolent armies and created the empire of liberalism that found its apotheosis in Martin Luther King and neocon wars for democracy.  When one drives past a Protestant church one often sees scheduled on the sign outside a traditional service followed by a contemporary service; the former is simply the latter from twenty years prior.  In much the same way, this common understanding of ‘Classical’ is a pastiche of norms and methods from the days of progressivism-past, given a patina of the traditional by boomer nostalgia, but which is ultimately fully compatible with, and indeed ancillary to, managerial neoliberalism and well within the boundaries of the housebroken discourse of modern normie conservatism.  It’s the kind of thing Rod Dreher loves, especially when given a Christian whitewash, as it generally is.  It is vital to understand that the greatest difficulty facing the reactionary teacher among those otherwise inclined to accept what he offers is the fact that Christian normiecons- Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox- cannot accept that Christianity and liberalism are distinct things, and will interpret criticism of the latter as attacks on the former. 

The Association of Classical Christian Schools gets results, society, not so much.

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So what then do I mean by ‘Classical?’  A Classical education in the proper sense is one centered on the Classical languages, Ancient Greek and Latin.  The core of the academic program would consist of instruction in those languages to gain a reading proficiency and secondarily an ability to compose and converse.  All else would follow from that.  This is perhaps the most controversial part of my proposal, and I can already anticipate the objections forming in the minds of some of my critics.  I could almost frame it as a Platonic dialogue:

MOROTATOS:  Why would you learn Greek and Latin?  Nobody speaks that anymore.

EUDIDASKALOS:  One learns any language in order to speak to those who know it in their native tongue.  There are things worth learning in Greek and Latin; those who would learn them should learn those languages.

M:  But they have translations now.  And anyway who reads?  You can just Google stuff.

E:  A translation is necessarily an interpretation; one can learn from them, but so much the better to go to the source.  To read something is to make it a part of you, to join to your being the thought of others, including others long gone.  Quod ceteris negatum est, cum mortuis loquemur.  Reading Classical texts in their original languages is your connection to your ancestors, a spiritual bond stronger even than a biological one.  You become a part of a great chain stretching back to antiquity, a conversation that started before you were born and which will continue long after you are gone. 

M:  Whatever.  Learning those languages is useless.  Who’s going to hire you?  It’s like gender studies.

E:  Dear benighted child, you went to college for six years and got an MS in computer science.  But in order to get and keep your job, in order to work for the people from whom you borrowed $100,000 for the privilege of working for them, you have to pass through diversity training given by someone with that gender studies degree, who is paid for one presentation what you earn in a year.  You have to nod to every humiliation and for all your pains you will be fired the minute your tasks can be automated.  The gender studies graduate will be the one making sure the AI that replaces you respects the pronouns of the foreign coders who facilitated your redundancy.  Gender studies isn’t useless; it’s symbolic of one’s full acceptance of the mores of our current pseudo-elites.  It’s a perverse and hideous parody of Classics, a synecdoche of the wider deformation of modern society.

M:  I think I get it now.  It’s pointless and dehumanizing to shape my life around being economically valuable to market forces, since I ultimately have no control over this in any case.  Even if I succeed in gaining some amount of material success my pursuits will be hollow and my life wasted because nothing I seek has any transcendent value.  I realize now that my heritage was stolen from me.  They promised me that if I left those traditional things behind as old and useless that I would gain the world, but what does it profit a man, or a society, to gain the world at the cost of his soul?  And in any case it was a lie; I traded my birthright for a bowl of soup, but the soup never came.  My parents ate it and left me the bill. 

E:  So what do you think you should do?

M:  I must learn to love the good and the beautiful through a rigorous education that builds not only a strong knowledge base but also good aesthetic sense, habits of character, and above a morality rooted in a constant awareness that the hour of my death approaches and I will be held to account for how I spent my time on Earth.  Memento mori.  Such awareness is the foundation of a true elite, not modern but timeless, perennial, as Demiashkevich would have it.  In all times and in all places in Western history, when things have become tired, decadent, and repetitive, the wisest have returned to the well of the Classics and revived culture through great effort, teaching the princes of those troubled times the wisdom of the ancients leavened with the best of what has been since joined to their legacy.  It is not for nothing that the wisdom of Mimir came from a well, nor that Odin had to hand over an eye to drink from it, nor still that he had to hang nine days and nights to glimpse the runes in its waters.  Nor is it an accident that Christ, the Savior of Mankind, sitting beside a well, compared what He offered to Living Water.  Yes, learning Greek and Latin are difficult, and not for everyone, and involve a great deal of sacrifice, and will render one strange in the eyes of the masses, but so much the better!  I accept your challenge.

E:  May your sudden bout of inspired wisdom move others as well.

“Now stop crying and get to work!”

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In fairness I should point out that many of the normiecon Classical schools offer Latin, and I would be remiss in not crediting them with being at the leading edge of the revival of Latin language instruction in America.  The future of Classics as a discipline at the present moment belongs to them and to the homeschoolers who toil away at the fundamentals while Princeton gets rid of language requirements for Classics majors due to the harm it inflicts on the cause of diversity.  Still though, if you ask why they teach it, they are generally embarrassed at the Western European cultural associations.  They will generally put forth that Latin helps with the SAT, or learning Romance languages, or English grammar, or something along those lines.  Their reflexive imitation of the managerial elites means that they have adopted their pragmatic and quantitative valorizations; I half expect to see an article in The Claremont Review of Books about how Latin helps raise the GDP.  Again, the results are not to be discounted, but the rationale is lacking.  We can build on this and do better.

Ideally, students will begin at the invisible college, envisioned as a secondary school, with some foundation in at least Latin.  If not, this will be shortly remedied.  The invisible college, being a microschool, will largely eschew the standard division into distinct grades.  With only fifty or so children it makes no sense to have 9^th, 10^th etc. in any case, but even were the school larger, I think this is a mistaken way to organize things.  Rather than a stark division between teacher and student for pedagogical purposes, I think it makes far more sense to increasingly integrate the students, as they age, into the workings of the school.  This is in keeping with the older Bell-Lancaster method of instruction, used in Victorian times to organize multi-age classrooms often filled with dozens upon dozens of children.  The older students become the assistants for the teachers, and help the younger students with their lessons.  As such, those students not up to speed on at least their Latin would be placed under the tutelage of older peers who would help them get caught up to a level where they could follow along with the main instruction.

What would a typical day look like?  The oldest students, what would be older juniors and seniors in a public school, would arrive first, at around, say 8:00am.  They teachers will have been there since around 7:00, preparing.  Every one of these older student would be assigned to an instructor based on his or her particular aptitude and personality; if there were four teachers, each would have, say 2-4 older students as teaching assistants.  Each group would share a pleasant breakfast and something caffeinated while they discussed plans for the day and received specialized, individualized instruction from the teachers, to include dual enrollment college classwork.  The younger students will arrive around 9:00, and move into their designated groups, each headed by an older student.  The groups in turn will form cohorts that move from room to room and teacher to teacher through the day, each of the three classes lasting around 65 minutes.  Classical Culture class covers Ancient Greek and Latin, to include ancient languages, history, literature, art, philosophy etc.  It begins with a review of assigned translations and then new instruction.  Humanities class covers modern English, history, literature, art, and modern foreign languages.  These would be combined as fully as possible into a single curriculum. Natural Philosophy class covers math and science, to include the only use of computers in the school.  This would take us to about 1:00.  All students and teachers would dine together, lunch having been prepared by a teacher and students detailed for the purpose.  After lunch would come physical instruction, which would alternate among weight training, team sports, self-defense and combat sports, and leisure.  The school day would end around 3:00, earlier for those older students with athletic commitments outside the school.

This is from 2008. What are we waiting for?

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At all times and in every way possible students would be made to feel a sense of belonging and responsibility to the school and to the community.  Those older students working as teaching assistants would be given real duties with real consequences.  In return, the teachers would honor their service by working to make sure that their charges received opportunities in the world commensurate with their abilities.  While at first the pull of the teachers would be somewhat circumscribed, as the school gained notoriety, a recommendation from the faculty at the invisible college should carry real weight.  This would be the foundation for the network of patronage I mentioned in part II. 

As for the actual methods of instruction, they would vary.  Teaching is an art and the only one in which the medium has a say in the process.  Generally, a mixture of lecture and Socratic Method would be the base form of teaching.  Some teachers would prefer methodically-planned deep dives into books; others may be more spontaneous and allow lessons to follow into interesting rabbit holes.  The sorts of teachers one would bring on for such work would be, to say the least, unique individuals.  Anyone who asked, in a job interview, “what standards are we using,” or “where is the instructional guide” would be patiently directed to apply to the public school down the road.  It would be expected that everyone teaching would hold the equivalent of an MA in at least one academic subject, though obviously exceptions would be made for those with an exceptional degree of knowledge and demonstrable teaching ability.  Teachers would be expected to teach at least two subjects at expert level; note that the school envisions four teachers but offers only three academic classes. More than that, however, everyone brought on board should have a fixed commitment to reactionary principles.  The invisible college exists as an alternative to the liberal hegemon, not as a variant.  At the invisible college, one is taught to value excellence (not equality), hierarchy (not egalitarianism), honor (not self-promotion), physical and moral courage (not conformity), and above all humility and a life of sacrifice (not selfishness and materialism).  We revere out forebears and our culture.  While I know that some corners of the right are Nietzscheans or pagans or other, for my part, I aim to honor God through my teaching, and I believe that that worldview is not only correct, but more appealing to prospective students than anything more esoteric.

Though the school is right wing, it is not a shop for indoctrination.  It is an alternative to the world, not a place to hide from it.   In addition to the Bible, to Plato and Aristotle, to Guenon and Evola and DeMasitre and Gomez-Davila, we will learn about Marx and Freud, Adorno and Marcuse, and Crenshaw and Kendi.  Our students will know all about pronouns and genders and neoliberalism.  They will know their enemy better than ze knows zirself.  The character of that enemy will reveal itself as the shadow cast by the light shed by Truth.  They will learn what to hate only as a consequence of learning what to love.  They will learn that despite the fact that the typical leftist presents as physically weak, mentally ill, and emotionally damaged, as a collective they are both evil and relentless, a fact that will be illustrated through example rather than haranguing.  If the invisible college is discovered, the students may see this firsthand, a test of their courage and ours as mobs of blue-haired tranissaries descend on our peaceful world.  In that case, they will teach the most important lessons for us, and perhaps learn some things themselves- ho pathos ho mathos estin.

The theorists of education I most recommend reading to understand what I am after here include, but are not limited to, Plato and Aristotle, Quintillian, Clement of Alexandria, the great Renaissance humanists Vergerio, Bruni, Piccolomini, and Guarino (whose principle works can be found together in an I Tatti edition to which I have great recourse) Albert J. Nock, the criminally underrated Michael Demiashkevic, Jacques Barzun, John Lukacs, and Justin Popovic.  In the final installment of this series I will lay out current trends in education and what I feel are the likely future outcomes of them, along with what I feel are the prospects for something like the school I envision coming into being.