The Dictatorship of the Masses

The Institutionalization of the Revolt

[This essay was inspired by the work of

Phoebe Jacobson

. Do check out this and this. As a personal disclaimer, I do not believe in public schools, would not teach in one nor advise others to do so. However, as I note in the essay to follow, we all make compromises, and I don’t judge or gainsay those who do choose that path. Perhaps under your particular conditions you see something I cannot. This piece is less about the public school system than the public and the sort of society we have all created and the ways in which it perpetuates itself.]

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world.

1 Corinthians 5: 9-10

Every job necessarily involves compromises. It’s why Aristotle thought paid employment and slavery amounted to the same thing. But then, there’s not really any such thing as ‘independent’ wealth either- Elon Musk has shareholders and regulators he must appease with DEI apparatchiks. Politicians are in hock to donors but donors must depend on those same politicians to facilitate their looting of the public. Those who really screw up, get too careless or greedy or conspicuously perverse, will in the end be made an example of; no one is really safe in their status in this life. Thus, no matter our station, we all must ask every day how far we are willing to go to do what is necessary.

The thing about lizards is, they’re cannibals.

We’ve seen this as institution after institution in our society has been turned from its original and still ostensive purpose into an engine of wealth extraction. Clear Channel did it to radio. Purdue Pharma helped do to medicine what private equity did to hospitals more generally. Calling it vulture capitalism is unfair; vultures eat dead things. These corporations are more like spiders, trapping their victims, liquifying them, and leaving behind their hollowed out shells.

But these powerful economic and political actors are already criticized from across the political spectrum. It’s easy to convince ourselves that those of us on the receiving end of these changes are objects rather than subjects. But of course, that’s not really true. It’s a system we all, to one degree or another, choose to participate it, because we’ve deemed it on some level worthwhile to engage rather than make the hard break that real independence would entail. And nowhere is this more evident than in our public schools.

This, after all, is where the system of managerial neoliberalism most fundamentally perpetuates itself. One might think that this seems on its face to be a bit of an exaggeration. After all, it’s doubtful the Sacklers send their progeny to the local town high school. And perhaps your own children are similarly privately educated, or homeschooled, or something along those lines. You’ve severed yourself from the public school system as thoroughly as our managerial elites have, so how then are you a part of it?

You pay for it. We pay for it. We’ve hired an army of functionaries to administer it at state expense. To facilitate this we’ve yoked some 6% of our GDP to this system, which gives but a scarce hint of the secondary and tertiary connections the system has to the wider economy. Even if one does not know the precise numbers everyone understands on some level that decoupling public schools from that wider economy would be devastating. There are no serious public school abolitionists.

Yes, I know, libertarians

There are deeper reasons for this as well. Our economy is maximised for consumer output. Not only must those consumers be conditioned for their role, but those who manage the consumer economy must also be fully engaged. Indeed, just as people are taught that their value stems from the things they buy, so too is it bound up with their ability to produce. One is a real person- valuable, indeed lovable- to the degree one is economically viable. In short, mom and dad both need to work, and something must be done with the kids while they do so. Note that while not having children is the preferred option in a consumer society, there are no serious overt efforts to discourage reproduction, as only so many customers can be imported without destabilizing aftereffects and eventually you run out of old people. No schools would mean that the kids would need to be supervised all day by an actual parent, or else turned loose in the streets to cause problems. Schools represent the most efficient means of both controlling society’s children and indoctrinating them into the proper worldview to sustain the system.

There’s enough credit to go around for all of us.

But while we all agree to participate in this system to one degree or another, the most immediate accommodations to be made with it are on the part of its most basic agents, the teachers. They are the points at which the thing to be moulded, the students, meets the program of moulding. And here is where the confusion sets in, as those specifications- the end results intended- have both explicit and implicit aspects that conflict with each other in profound ways.

Doctors are taught in training that their purpose is to save lives and learn upon getting their first jobs at the local hospital that their purpose is also to enrich various hedge funds. Likewise teacher education works on two levels. The first is pleasant enough, perhaps even noble. It needs to attract the noble-minded, after all, as it certainly does not involve any prospect of material success. You learn that while you won’t be getting much money, you’ll be making a difference. Children are natural learners- everyone knows that, trust us. The problem is that our society distributes resources unequally, and some children simply don’t have what they need to learn. That’s where you come in. Through hard work and dedication, with your creativity and ability to design interesting and challenging lessons, you’ll help close those social gaps and give kids the ability to lead richer, more fulfilling lives, not merely materially, but intellectually, even spiritually. You will equip them for happy and productive lives in a multicultural liberal democracy.

A careful student-teacher might notice some very important and unsupported assumptions in all this, and might compare it to his (or more likely) her own experience and wonder about how true it is. But the people training you are experts, so perhaps your own memories of high school- of chaos, indifference, and anomie- are not the norm. You also learn at this point to not read too much subtext into your learning materials. The books and journal articles you’re assigned never seem to point to any substantive successes despite covering a span of time longer than you’ve been alive. Your training faculty speak as if they’re disruptive outsiders but, when you think about it, they’re saying the same things you keep hearing in your student teaching from the school administration there. Everyone keeps insisting that if only the system would adopt their ideas things would be better while maintaining all the while that those ideas already guide the system. You might remember learning from your history coach in high school how every communist revolution proclaimed itself the real thing- unlike its corrupt and deformed predecessors- despite advancing the same theories. Comrades, this time we need real differentiation, real inclusion, real best practices. You might also remember them all ending the same way.

They all teach for about 2-3 years, are unsuccessful by their own admission, and promptly go on to write books about how to teach.

I remember my own student teaching in the local high school. My mentor was the school pitching coach; he’d played baseball for the same school himself as a teen and gone to the minor leagues before an injury sidelined him. His former coach, retiring, asked him to return as his successor, and asked if he had a degree in anything that would justify a teaching job. He maintained to me that he didn’t read much, as he had horrible ADHD, though this didn’t stop him from working on rotational charts and such for hours on end. At the time, I thought this was terrible, that someone who really cared about history was necessarily being sidelined so that the school could hire someone to teach fastballs. But when I got to know the students I realized how mistaken I was.

If America had a subtitle

For when you get your first teaching jobs you rapidly come to discover a new reality. The job description spoke of things like “critical thinking” and “democratic citizenship.” The goal, as you understood it, was to teach children to be responsible and informed members of society. Good liberal that you are, classical or progressive, you no doubt believe some variant of that yourself, largely due to the cramped horizons of your own view of human nature, though you don’t yet recognize them as such yet. It hasn’t yet been forced upon you, that dark night of the soul where you start to doubt your certainties. You have always believed yourself a critical thinker, an educated person, someone who arrived at positions on the basis of reason and logic. But you’ve also been carefully groomed to understand that history is one long list of good guys and bad guys, people who advocated freedom and equality and their enemies who didn’t, and that there’s such a thing as an arc of history that bends toward justice, that history remembers, that it has a right side. That, you’ve never questioned. There’s the bad old days with slaves and kings and women in kitchens and gays in closets, and then there’s now, a present that is somehow both inevitable and precarious. Knowing these things, you, as a teacher, have forgone wealth and status to inspire the youth to learn and care about their world.

The reality is that you have spent about 5-6 years getting fairly competently trained to sell something no one really wants. In fairness it’s easy to be fooled. Everyone tells you how important your work is, how valuable it is to guide young people. But the truth is that neither your superiors, your students, nor their parents actually believe this, nor should they.

Your bosses, whose ranks are always inexplicably growing, exist mainly to ensure that you follow an undeviating path of mandated content and drill for the sole end of generating numbers on state tests that serve as a measure of how ‘good’ a school is. You will discover that how good you are as a teacher, how you are evaluated, is determined by this and from how few problems you bring to their attention. The greatest breach of etiquette in the world of education is to formally document some serious issue that requires a hard decision on the part of an administrator. ‘Restorative justice’ isn’t popular because everyone is woke and certainly not because it works, but because it serves as a pretext for lowering unpleasant suspension and expulsion numbers. Following the rules too attentively will lead to your being cited for bad classroom management. This is known as accountability.

It’s just as gay as it sounds.

By itself this wouldn’t be a problem, except you are also now discovering that the vast majority of your students are at best indifferent and at worst actively hostile to learning, and tend to express those feelings through conspicuous addiction to technology and various substances, mockery, and violence. This is truer at poorer and more diverse schools, but is pretty universal, a consequence of the nature of a consumer society. Most children have been told their whole lives- implicitly if not explicitly- that the purpose of doing anything is the gratification of some appetite, either immediately for the dumber sort or deferred for those with a higher IQ. This is purely antithetical to education, which demands sacrifice and above all humility. The spirit of liberalism is ‘believe in yourself and you can do anything,’ one desire being as good as another, but certainly achievable if your imagination is stilted enough. The Classical and Christian ideal, memento mori, is unknown, even at institutions ostensibly dedicated to those very principles (ask yourself, Classical Christian readers, how many times you’ve heard the ‘studying Latin helps with your SAT score’ line). Your students will regard your attempts to teach them things as assaults on their egos, your compelling them to work as an imposition on their time- which they prefer to use gratifying their more immediate impulses- and your attempts to hold them to account as hilarious.

This is because their parents, and the public more generally, feel the same way about what you’re doing as the children, and for the same reason. Since everyone and everyone’s every desire are all equal and equally valid, what they want most of all from you, the system’s first gatekeeper, is validation, the reassurance that their children, and by extension themselves, are doing fine. If there’s one thing the public school system is good at, something every aspect of managerial neoliberalism is very good at, it’s rationalizing mediocrity, hypocrisy, and failure. Our schools are no different than our churches, our military, our business community, or any other institution. The only problem with heresy is that it didn’t go through the proper democratic processes; the services would be doing great if it wasn’t for MAGA hate-mongering and this awesome economy; asset bubble- not with modern monetary theory! The purpose of school is to get a certificate that will act as the stamp of quality for young adults to participate in the economy and your job as a teacher is to contrive some justification for giving them one. It’s why no one is really allowed to fail save under the most extreme circumstances- the only kids who actually do are those so marginalized as to have literally no one willing to make excuses for them.

Even with a completely debased system and these completely cooked numbers some kids just can’t pass the fog test to get that diploma.

So why stay and do it, apart from the need to make a living, more or less? Every good teacher knows why. You know that kid, he’s the one in the back with the novel; she’s the girl who writes poetry in her spiral notebook. There the ones who are pleasant and interested regardless of the chaos and indifference around them. They’re set apart somehow, differentiated, but not in the sense the system means. You don’t know that other meaning yet. Those kids are both the reason for putting up with the evils of the system and the main pretext for all compromises with it. This is the real test. The cruelest thing about a public school is the way it takes motivated, loving people and induces them, bit by bit, to compromise their integrity and sense of purpose by dangling before them the possibility of making a difference. ‘Ignore this, put up with that, and one day you’ll get to do the job you actually want to do. Keep plugging away and you’ll get somewhere where you can have whole classes full of great kids who make it all worthwhile.’

Almost no one realizes- or at least accepts- that the mediocrity is the point. It’s what the system wants because it’s what the public wants. There is no mass constituency for education, and public education, that creature of the masses, will always and ever only be a tool of stupefaction, conformity, and commonality. It is the site of reproduction of the mass, in Ortega’s sense.

“The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear, of course, that this "everybody" is not "everybody." "Everybody" was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialized minorities. Nowadays, "everybody" is the mass alone. Here we have the formidable fact of our times, described without any concealment of the brutality of its features.”

Maybe you stumbled across this or something like it in your teacher training or earlier studies. Maybe you filed this away for later use, as some kind of warning, the way English teachers think themselves clever for assigning 1984 or To Kill a Mockingbird- totalitarianism! racism! symbolism!!! But you didn’t really take it to heart before. It was something theoretical, something to maybe admonish the kids about- don’t be a conformist, ok! The implications of taking it seriously were too much to handle before, but now, after days, months, years of seeing it it finally forces itself into your conscious life.

Maybe you start to ask unpleasant questions. Maybe you begin to wonder why everything you were taught about kids and schools and society seems at inverse variance to what you see everyday. Maybe your professors were wrong. Maybe Paulo Friere was wrong, maybe even Dewey. Maybe Locke and Jefferson were wrong . . .

You know better than to share these doubts with your peers. It’s not that they’re true believers, of course. Yes, there’s those few women who repeat the jargon about learning styles and equity in meetings and conversations, but for the most part everyone just carries around either a weighty cynicism or a bland indifference to it all. For some, teaching becomes a show- this one dresses up like Atticus Finch; this one describes her days through lip-synched Taylor Swift songs on Tik Tok. Though they might mean well and hate the hypocrisy of it all, ultimately they’re mostly dull creatures and make their peace with the system by becoming one with it. Those among them who can’t hack it in the classroom and who are sufficiently venal will become administrators.

This really is about as clever and edgy as subversive teacher humor gets. FACE!!!

But even those few who really sense something wrong will lack the framework to express what exactly it is they hate about it all. The NormieCon coach-types will express exasperation that the kids won’t read- can’t read, and how they and society thereby have no future. They never really reflect on the fact that neither they themselves nor anyone they know reads anything as adults and that their free time is spent largely as their students would spend it. The main problem with being ignorant in this understanding is that one will lack the marketable skills to reach a level of economic success sufficient to consume as one would prefer. The aspirational NPR-listening set, the only ones who still watch late night comedy shows, will tell you that democracy is at stake, but themselves defer all political and social questions to credentialed experts and consider themselves well-informed to the degree they are aware of their latest dictates. Many of them still wear cloth masks around the school. The hard leftists, not as common as one might think from watching Fox News, believe wholeheartedly in the dogmas of equity and know that the real problems are poverty and racism, but are not the least bit curious why their charges are able to come to school wearing thousands of dollars worth of clothes and technology and spend their non-existent funds on vapes, fake hair, and video games.

No one takes the big step back from it all because no one reads old books. The biggest problem with progressive education, the hegemonic ideology of public (and nearly all private) schools under neoliberal managerialism, is its categorical presentism. The main results of this are a smug whiggism and an inability to find perspective on problems. No one can really see how weird it all is. Why do we think everyone is willing and able to learn despite all evidence to the contrary? Why do we think the youth are too poor to learn despite even the most deprived having more resources than the richest prep-school dilettante from a century ago? If one lifestyle or pursuit or activity is as good as any other why even ask people to learn in the first place? What if that’s in fact what we tacitly have stopped doing? What if it’s not even that tacit? What if people are so different in their capacities that education in a meaningful sense is impossible for most and not something they desire in any case? What if there are things worth pursuing for their own sake rather than for the promise of material gain? What if those books from the bad old days before Linda Darling-Hammond were right? Plato? The Bible? What if the myths are real..?

Ask yourselves these questions as a teacher and you begin a process that ends with the same question it began with: how much am I willing to compromise to do what is necessary? The main difference is that this time around you’re far more fully aware of both the situation and your own role in it. There’s no one answer to that question; everyone must decide for himself and herself, given his or her own circumstances, how much to sacrifice. For my part, I look to a lot of influences, but Junger’s anarch, the self-aware servant in but not of the system, I think is a useful model. So too, the Christians of the Patristic period lived in a hostile world but not only thrived but changed the culture from within, so much so that the pagan emperor Julian had to try to ban them from teaching the very classics that he thought were the best weapon against them.

Make no mistake, liberalism, like paganism, will have its reckoning. There are those within the system, young minds, peers, parents, perhaps even administrators, who have the capacity to see, who can be reached. And someone or something is always doing the teaching, whether you will or not. What comes next will be born of the sacrifices made today.

I also truly believe the time will come again when reading isn’t just for fags.