Some Inside Notes on Education
Several Observations
It’s 4:44 in the afternoon as I begin this. My day as a teacher officially ended just over an hour ago, but I’m still here and will be here until well after 5:00. I should be doing all the grading and secondary school side-quests that I stayed late for in the first place, but instead I took a few minutes to read
’s latest piece (thank you kindly for the mention). I generally agree with his basic thesis that the universities as we know them are on their way out for many (though not all) of the reasons he specifies. But I would add a few notes on the world of education and academia from my own experience that might shed some further light on the phenomenon.In the first place, historically speaking, a university education was the major rite of passage of upwardly mobile middle-class young men and assorted oddballs who just wanted a grounding in the liberal arts. Yes, there were aristocrats like Byron and peasant strivers like James Garfield, but for the most part it reflected and perpetuated a bourgeois culture of service to society by way of elevated mind and manners, perfect for the brighter sons of lawyers, farmers, and businessmen. That middle class has been wholly hollowed out by neoliberalism and its rapacious value-stripping, driving up profits in the short term while leaving behind the hollow husks of its victims. By all sorts of means (student loans, overpriced textbooks, research and patent deals, etc.) globohomo did to colleges what it did to radio stations. Women arrived en masse on college campuses for the same reason (and at the same time) they did in corporate offices, to create a large- and cheaper- pool of labor for big capital to draw upon.
Feminism: As Empowering as Cancer!
In many ways the university is at the center of the great web of corporatized rent-seeking that is our modern economy, the result of an implicit conspiracy to concentrate credentialing within an untaxed oligarchy with close relationships with both government and the business world, ensuring (at least in theory) a steady stream of ‘customers’ needing to go into increasingly higher debt to purchase the right to work. It is considered perfectly sane in our world to borrow $200,000 for the privilege of employment at the bank that lent it to you. Of course, the very act of demanding credentials for everything increases the demand for them, but the greater volume thus generated fuels inflation that necessitates in turn a demand for further and more expensive certifications. Degrees and dollars are churned out by the same system for the same reason, even in the manner in which they increasingly both require buy-in from foreigners.
The increased presence of women on campus is further the artifact of that curious statistic related to IQ that John Carter mentioned. Men and women have the same average intelligence but the distribution is different; men tend to be both smarter and dumber than the ladies, which is the most anecdotally obvious social science finding I can think of. When economic demand made necessary an increase in the number of students in college there would inevitably be a huge uptick in women once the admissions office began creeping left along the bell curve. The only way to get more men would be to keep going until you hit that class generally considered destined for prison or journalism or group homes- the dregs of intellectual life- or else to become so selective once more that only the far right of the spectrum, where men predominate, is the norm once more, as Carter suggests.
College is no longer the preserve of men seeking the polish of liberal arts or the rigors of the hard sciences; so what has it become? In many ways, coinciding with the increased presence of women, it now fills the role once played by the defunct institution known as the finishing school. These female-oriented academies existed to provide middle-class women with the attitudes and social graces that would make them attractive partners for their presumably college-educated husbands. The difference now is that for the majority, the state is their husband, and they are less the wives of individual men than the fungible harem of absolutist managerialism. Once you understand that, the behavior of college-educated women voting hard blue on the grounds that not being able to murder their children in utero would interrupt their service at the office makes a great deal of sense. Till death do they part.
Regarding education as a whole being female coded, I would say that that’s true- now- but with some major caveats. Obviously academia was mostly heavily male for most of its existence, but even at the primary and secondary levels, until relatively recently, one could find a more even presence of men and women. Especially after WWII, when the GI Bill expanded access to college at the same time the Boomers were creating a massive expansion in the public system, lots of vets made their way into the classroom and put their stamp on the period. I’ve written before about the marvels wrought by (WWII Army vet) Stan LeProtti on the physical culture at La Sierra High School in California, and it’s safe to say that there were many others like him putting a decidedly masculine stamp on things before the great cultural deluge of the 1960s kicked in.
Seriously, watch this.
Even today, the ‘female’ nature of schools needs some unpacking. Some 75% of teachers in public schools are women, concentrated most heavily at the elementary level, then progressively less as the kids get older. But this masks the fact that it’s not the same cohort of women the whole time. Men at all levels tend to have longer education careers than women, a fact evident in men’s disproportionate representation at all levels as principals. In short, the women who teach, while collectively dominating the profession, tend to be individually more short-term in their employment than the men, and thus their impact is more general and diffuse rather than particular and related to their specific personalities.
Why is that? The non-politically correct answer is that the young women who go -disproportionately- into early childhood education do so because they love children, and thus want them for themselves, and thus want to get married and resign. The relatively high turnover rate among teachers (almost half quit within five years) does reflect some of the very conspicuous negatives of the job, but of at least equal weight is the fact that most of the 22-year olds embarking on teaching second grade don’t really intend to make a life of it. There’s nothing historically unusual about that, and one might imagine a model wherein it’s considered normative for adults of all backgrounds to spend a few years teaching before moving on to something else, or after having had a career. It is, in any case though, very much a factor in the overall culture of education as it is now.
But even for the ladies who stay on, and for the men who tend to last longer in any case, teaching is a job that is very amenable to family life. The public system is horrible and I’ve written before advising against working in it, but if you somehow find a way to make it work for you you’ll have lifetime employment at a decent salary- an attractive enough proposition in today’s world. Private school work, which I would advise, is far better despite being less remunerative on average. Whatever the status of teachers in society as a whole, the male teachers I know- save for those who’ve chosen otherwise- are all married with children, and generally have houses and are solidly integrated into their communities. I have summers off to spend with my girls and many breaks in between as well; once you get a handle on the paperwork and other manifold drudgery the job runs pretty smoothly, though it does get very mentally taxing at times. Were it not for my particular need to work harder than average to send my daughters to a specific private school I would have far more free time than I do. I would be miserable at a “high-status” pursuit like stock-jobbing or running a corporation, and I can’t imagine a tradeoff worth yoking myself to a career like that that would make it palatable.
As an aside, if you find yourself in college looking for a wife, you could do a lot worse than an early childhood ed major. They tend to be outgoing, lively, agreeable, organized, and (at least in the South) quite attractive as a whole. They like kids and often possess a kind of manic energy that they direct into activities like decorating, dressing up, and assorted crafts that they will easily repurpose for family life. The downside is that they tend to be, well, a bit on the basic side- not especially intellectual, prone to groupthink (if they’re doing it on Instagram, she’ll be doing it shortly), and typically very common in their overall tastes and interests. But if you want a generally kindhearted mid who can pass a background check, the early childhood ed major is a fine option. As a bonus, once the kids are older she’ll get bored and want to go back to work, which generally means cheaper health plans and access to all kinds of mortgage benefits- so there’s that too, a small price to pay for having to make conversation about pumpkin spice and Taylor Swift for a few decades.
Basically this.
As I’ve mentioned before, in addition to teaching at a high school I also work as an adjunct instructor for several colleges. Adjunct work represents the penultimate stage of the proletarianization of academic life before the widescale advent of AI instruction, which if it comes to pass will represent the heat death of Western academia. On a personal level, it also represents the end stage of my own academic journey. When I was a young man I very much wanted to be a professor, but my grades and connections were not such that I was able to parlay them into any meaningful path forward. I stress my personal negatives first before pointing out that I also came of age in a world that had no interest in another white male wanting to explore the history of the West. I was in my 20s before I even realized there was such a thing as Classics, but I made rapid progress, studying Greek at 30 and wrangling my way into a solid program at my state’s flagship university. But the money ran out before my hopes did, and my most recent attempt to enter a PhD program (not the one I would have preferred anyway) crashed into the demands of family life. There won’t be another.
Like this, but with less sunshine and more paperwork. I exaggerate but a little.
Along those lines, I’ve commented before on something John Carter also mentioned, the complaints of professors in highly selective universities that their students don’t read. This picture is from his essay:
In my economics class I have my students read Andrew Carnegie’s “The Gospel of Wealth.” I ask them to write about what they would do if they had money like that old robber baron. Most- bizarrely to me- offer that they would start a business, as if the only thing they could think to do with infinite money was make more money. The ones with more charity and less stunted imaginations generally offer schemes to help people. When they ask me what I would do I tell them- after outlining my plans to start an Ultimate Panda Fighting League with Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, and give gorillas PCP and turn them loose in shopping malls in neighborhoods I don’t like- I note that yes, I would help people, but also, that I would buy a house on the campus of my old university and take classes there for the rest of my life. That generally baffles them, as they take an instrumental view of college as a place to get the certifications needed for entry into middle-class life, those who’ve even thought that deeply about it. But not for me.
Complaints like the above from professors at those elite colleges infuriate me on a visceral level. I love universities. I love the idea of them. Carter calls them a luxury good, but I don’t think that’s quite fair. Western society needs its culture perpetuated at all levels, not merely the popular, by high culture as well. That requires resources and a concentration of intellect. The old Latin collegia refers to any kind of voluntary association, but in the academic sense it represents a brotherhood (though always leavened with a few sisters) dedicated to the life of the mind, a secular (or not-so-secular) priesthood, the Brahmanical equivalent of the mannerbund. It’s elite but it’s no luxury; without it, we wither, becoming the grey goo mass that liberalism would make of us. I won’t gainsay the importance of going to space, but far more valuable is the drive to look within, and the means to do so must be preserved and carried forth.
All that is to say that I have no pity for the tenured academics who gripe that their charges don’t like books. I read more in a week than the lazy striver grade-grubbers they admit skim in a semester and I always have. I would have slept on a park bench to attend a college offering high-level scholarship when I was young; I still would, were I more free. If the people who attend your college don’t read and the people who do read have to be anons on the internet, it says a lot about the culture you’ve created. You could have all the readers you seek, all the academic prowess you desire if you really wanted it. Call it the Open Exam. Anyone who wishes to can go to their local testing center and, in the presence of witnesses, hand-write an essay on a given topic, take a math test, perform an experiment, etc. and the results will be evaluated, blind, by professors in the relevant fields and outsiders who may be interested. Those who pass muster are then given random opportunities to attend a number of schools in different regions of the country. In addition, professors can personally select promising entrants who show prowess in their particular areas. No admissions boards, no DEI, no ideological litmus tests- let the anons test their mettle against the best Advanced Placement can produce.
We can dare to dream it . . .
That won’t happen because everyone knows what the result would be. Those atop the system know they’ve displaced thousands of bright young men and that for all the hardship society has inflicted upon them they’ve still done well for themselves and still managed to get (in an unfortunately often haphazardly autodidact way) the education they wanted through their own efforts. They’ve shown the system to be fake and gay. Not just the universities, but the whole predatory-parasitic organism that is neoliberalism. One of the unspoken (other than mockery) themes of this election is that undercurrent of support for Trump and Vance among just that subset of frustrated men. It’s a testament to the pull of the liberal arts that so many have done so much despite the current pushing so strongly the other way. I spent thirteen years waiting tables and hauling furniture and now I’m on the cusp of being a Substack bestseller despite not even charging for my work, work that (I’m grateful and humble to say) attracts praise from professors and assorted PhDs, more successful authors, and people who have dominated in other areas of life. Thank you all for that.
But we can all do more. We can work together to create new institutions for education and preservation of culture. We can build intentional communities around them, centered on healthy family life and productive economic activity wherein the benefits flow to those who produce, not those with a license to loot. We can revitalize the university into something that serves the ends of God and civilization. It’s been done before. It can be done again.
I'd say, with a few exceptions (including the fact that you could carve out a few classes on each toxic campus), we no longer really have universities. We have criminally expensive daycare centers for the weirdos, the ignorant, and the mental defectives. That's the faculty and staff. I'll allow others to talk about the students.
It seems so odd, to blame *schools* for the lack of reading.
When I was in school, I read 3, maybe 4 whole books, as assignments. That's it. And yet. I read hundreds of books. Trashy SF and fantasy, mystery novels, true-life adventure stories, books on archaeology and horticulture, drawing and how-to books, encyclopedias of insects, plants, and birds, the entire Bible (because I was bored in Spanish class), Norman Cohn's *The Pursuit of the Millenium* (fascinating!), Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls (on which I wrote a paper, for 10th grade social studies, because why not?)... if the schools had never assigned me a single book, nobody could have *prevented* me reading them.
There are many more plausible things to blame for the decline in reading. Schools ain't it.
I blame the cost of bookshelves and the relentless electronic conquest of boredom.
I grew up in a house crammed to the rafters with books, and no TV. But now that I have a family of my own, I find shelf space the primary limiting factor. Five bookcases in our living room alone, and still we cannot approach my parents' levels of book-hoarding, and barely manage to keep our children supplied with reading material. We supplement with e-readers, but it's not the same.