Strange as it sounds, I've recently quit teaching as I couldn't get the school I was working in, in Japan to prioritize the learning of the students. I had made it my goal to push forward actual education (they're a conversation school) and I wanted to ensure students could learn English, rather than learning stupid hello and goodbye and days songs. I also focused on pushing history and poetry into some of the classes, and some creative exercises. Already I could see the students enjoying themselves, learning, improving and looking forward to the next class.
But my bosses preferred to publicly humiliate me, insult me and tried to stalk and break me psychologically so I quit as I realized that they were in it for money, and to push forward DIE not actually teach.
As it is though, I've gotten enough knowledge of how to teach and what style works best, for me and my students to when the time comes give homework, reading material and what not to teach my own kids when the time comes. So what I learnt in just a few weeks was invaluable, as to what I shall do I'm not sure.
For the moment I've little in the way of money, but as I'm going back in for a trade and will be working with my gf and brother (and my mother to an extent) to save up money to buy a commercial building to build a hobby-shop/bakery/book-store, I'm hoping to also look into homeschool options. Thankfully plumbing (the trade I'm looking into) should allow the resources necessary to look into some private schools and home-school options, along with building up the dream-shop I've in mind so that I can work to help others find the books and bds they love most, teach my kids and work as a place to sell my own books even as I forge a relationship with publishers and distributors.
You may consider coming to America and working the homeschool circuit. As a native speaker of both French and English you could fill a real gap in foreign language instruction (language and science are two areas where homeschooling families often need the most outside assistance).
Honestly hadn't considered it, if I were to step into teaching there, it'd be in the south. The North is so peculiar to me culturally that I always feel terribly homesick and spiritually ill for some reason (I don't know why, not discriminating, I just found on my last few visits to Ohio & Michigan ill and utterly bereft).
But I've many friends in the two Carolinas and Arizona, and Texas. So it'd probably be those areas.
If I may ask, how much do homeschool teachers make? I figure I should ask, as it could play a role in my decision of how to proceed from hereon out. Hope you don't think less of me for asking this Librarian, I do appreciate and feel honoured that you might recommend such a path.
There's not fixed job called "homeschool teacher." You'd be an entrepreneur making your own way. You'd have to advertise and find clients and decide for yourself what to offer and what to charge. There is also the prospect of private school employment with homeschool work on the side. Lots of opportunities for foreign language teachers in that area. Here in the South you can do well for yourself and the homes are inexpensive outside of metro areas. I am a lifelong Southerner and would never leave.
I teach philosophy at a “classical” charter school near Sacramento. It’s as you say, but a little better, but it seems to be fighting an impossible battle.
It's to the point where "Classical" is simply meaningless as a descriptor. For a lot of people it amounts to "how I kind of imagine public schools were like in the 1950s-" lots of performative cursive writing and pleated skirts, but the same progressive education mindset. Hillsdale is bad about that. If the curriculum doesn't center on Greek and Latin, or at the very least Latin, it's not Classical.
Out of curiosity, were these Japanese bosses, or Westerners? I can't imagine the average Japanese boss caring about DEI (though humiliation is something the Japanese have many flavors of) but liberalism has gotten it's fingers in every pie lately, so I was wondering.
One of them was an Australian, and the other an older Japanese lady. She was very in love with DEI and its culture, and both of them loved all things liberal and dreamt of turning Japan into America.
Trust me they HATE traditional Japan. Some of the students were traditional, others were not or had moms that were not. It varied from student to student, all I know is that with my predecessor’s departure the students were uneasy, they bonded swiftly with me, but then when I left from what I heard it’s started a chain reaction as the school’s local rep got dragged through the mire.
Apparently there’s some practices they do the Japanese don’t approve of. Some of the flavourful humiliating tactics were not approved of by all the local Japanese people others were, but they could not appear to like it when others disapproved.
When I'm feeling particularly provocative I've taken to asking my friends and family "what's the point of education?" (I have young children, so it's on my mind a lot.)
A lot of the answers invoke some sort of utopia where completion of the prescribed educational pathway results in "a better civilization." This despite the fact that civilization is crumbling around us.
The more honest answers essentially boil down to what you describe here: education -> money. I think this is at least partially true, if unsatisfying.
I haven't found an answer I completely agree with yet, nor am I sure I can articulate my own. But I think it's somewhere in the realm of "the point of an education is to better understand the Creator." I'm not sure how to operationalize this mindset, but I suppose doing the opposite of whatever the public schools are doing is a reasonable place to start.
Education is the right ordering of the person. It is disciplining the physical self so as to cultivate the soul so as to be able to exercise reason, all with the aim of aligning the will with the good and the beautiful. That's how I think of it anyway.
At the risk of venturing into nihilism, I'll press a little bit: what's the point of aligning the will with the good and the beautiful? Your response isn't substantislly different in type from someone who says "the point of education is to generate an informed, civic society". It sounds like a laudable goal, but is a collection of humans with properly aligned wills an end in itself, or the means for something more?
At the risk of getting theological, we were created for a purpose. But even in pagan or philosophical terms, one can see that in nature no appetite is without recourse. Animals have a drive to eat, reproduce, and preserve its life, and within nature are food, mates, and teeth and claws each proper to a particular creature. On top of these things humans have the capacity to reason, and so there must be a fit object upon which to exercise that reason. This cannot be simply problem solving, since reason has no satisfaction in material terms (one can get to full from too much eating; one cannot have too many thoughts- they do not occupy space). A rational mind that can contemplate the eternal necessarily has its end there. That's my chain of reasoning anyway.
Thanks for this - it's certainly an answer I haven't heard before! (I love Substack for interactions like these.) if I may summarize, it sounds like you're saying "education exists to meet one of humanity's primal needs". I'll get a bit more theological and claim that your answer isn't that different from mine (though yours is obviously worded better.) Much to ponder.
I've pondered the same question. I remember a well educated uncle of mine defending the liberal arts (as opposed to, say, a STEM education) on the grounds that "they make you a better person." Simplistic, perhaps, but not untrue. Because of my education (such as it is) I live in a wider, subtler, more beautiful world. I can explain much of what I see around me (and am apt to notice it in the first place) in terms of physics, mathematics, and biology. I can read about and imagine ancient peoples, and draw parallels between their times and ours. I can read the thoughts of long dead authors and appreciate the beauty and wisdom they recorded. This deeper, fuller existence I enjoy is surely an adequate reason for education
In and of themselves, I would say the liberal arts don't make you a better person so much as more of a person- more whole, more substantial, less of a weightless shade. Betterment comes from orientation towards a noble end.
When one says "a better person," one of course thinks of virtue and morality, a thing I heartily endorse. And, importantly, that's an avenue open to nearly all of humanity, even the dull witted who could never be taught Latin or Calculus. And there are, of course, highly educated people who are wicked and evil (I think of Marx.) But in a sense, being more whole and substantial, in itself, makes them "better people." Better villains, in some cases, but still better.
I was trying to answer Bunyan's question of the point of education, from the standpoint of Aristotle's concept of things that are good for their own sake, and that's the answer I came up with. Virtue is good for it's own sake, for different reasons, and education (not indoctrination or credentialization) is also good for it's own sake. And both together are best of all.
Really love the stack, BTW, thanks for your writing
I think the point of education is to open your mind to the great thinkers of the past. It is to integrate the ideas of your own culture with the cultures of the past and to try to understand who we are and why we are here. It is to live a thousand lives and learn how to live the good life. In other words, You Absolutely Must Not Leave It To Professionals.
This is work only a parent can do for their children. Early schooling is unnecessary. Kids need to learn to read but that is easily done. There is a book that teaches this in 100 lessons and is basically foolproof (meaning that I was able to use it successfully on disparate children). After that they need to learn their place and value in the family.
The education du jour in every town in this sad country is nothing more than hideously expensive daycare, provided by the intellectual bottom feeders of our society. Please, no one give me the 'there are good teachers' thing. You might as well say there are good politicians, good Satanists, good mob bosses. We all know that might be true theoretically, but if it were true in actuality, then how the ever living hades did we get to the point we are re public schools?
Just for the record, my bona fides are that I have reviewed a thousand-plus educationist's resumes, hired dozens of teachers for a few charter schools, and looked with dismay at the lack of integrity of even some of the most qualified teachers we have hired. This system does not work. It must be abolished. Three to five years of absolutely no publicly funded formal education would be chaos, but that would be an improvement over the current system of formalized evil intent.
I’ve had good teachers; I work with many good teachers, and I have kids I teach who will make good teachers in the future. If your school isn’t attracting good teachers it’s perhaps because they’re not offering what good teachers want.
We do attract good teachers. My point is that we draw from a pool of hundreds of thousands of ignorant ideologues, and, at this point thousands of malcontents as well. I'm not arguing that there are not good teachers. My point is that they aren't even the minority. They are the absolute exception and it is tricky to find them and even trickier to keep them because we can only afford to pay so much.
Every time you talk about bad teachers people want to say, "oh, but there are good teachers, I had one." Yeahyeahyeah.....I had a couple, too. I am friends with some. I value what they do. But those absolute exceptions to the rule are the point of all this....and it is the point John Taylor Gatto made. The system is bad. And often good teachers become bad ones by selling out to it. The "there are good teachers" argument only muddies the waters. This system must be abolished. It cannot be fixed by the "there are good teachers" point.
There are way more bad teachers than good ones, and way more ineffective ignorant teachers than bad ones. Good teachers = about 2%. Bad teachers = about 20%. Ignorant idiots = about 38%. Well-meaning people who like having three+ months a year off = 40%
Public schools taught my brilliant daughter; Summa Cum Laude in Chemical Engineering and a masters in machine learning, (AI), (while she worked full time and had a baby) to hate God, to reject the faith she was raised in, Christianity, to disrespect and hate her parents; and to embrace Marxism and "alternative lifestyles". The other four fared better but only in that they don't outright declare their hatred and rejection of Jesus and us. Even the one who is a practicing "Christian" has major issues in conflating culture and his faith.
If I had to do it over, not one of my five children would attend a public school.
I'm sorry that happened to you. Sadly, there are many such stories out there along those lines. "It's the schools," one says; "it's the culture," says another. But they're one in the same. It's hard to escape it even intentionally, even in our own lives. Liberalism is like seed oils or microplastic- it's in the air we breathe. So don't beat yourself up about it. Do what you can to mitigate its effects and win wherever you see the opportunity.
If we could teach school kids not to believe in Imaginary Cloud Wizard we would eliminate a huge amount of violence and death from this world. Something like 75% of violent deaths through history have been because of people fighting over Imaginary cloud wizard.
I believe your 75% figure is pure fiction. Stalin the official atheist killed more people in a few months than the Inquisition killed in several centuries. Not to mention the atheists Pol Pot, Mao, Castro, and Lenin, some of the worst criminal mass-murdering monsters in history.
And, you teach kids not to believe in God, that they are only animals, that there are no higher moral or spiritual law, and you think that will make the USA a paradise? Look around you. Can you not see what a century and more of secular humanist and atheist indoctrination has accomplished?
Huh, I was the kid in the back with the novel. I married the girl with the spiral notebook. We both dropped out of high school and got on with life as soon as we were able.
The line about gritting your teeth until you finally reach the room full of great kids rung true to my experience as a student. I've never been in a per capita smarter room than in my high school AP classes, none of the "exclusive" institutions came anywhere near because, as you note, education is typically not the point of the education industry.
I spent my happiest years at the flagship state university. It was the only time when I raised my hand to answer a question and, looking around, saw that other people were doing so as well. I knew I wanted to teach in an environment like that one day.
I was so excited when I left one job to teach AP course at a charter school. A whole class of smart motivated kids!
Turns out this was an “everyone is capable of achieving given the opportunity” school full of the usual mix, just every class was AP/IB. So about 15% top of the bell curve should have even been in the class at all.
The ancient Romans understood beekeeping, and that at the center of the hive was a queen, but they also knew that somewhere in there was a king bee that was actually running things. No one ever saw Apis Rex, but he had to be there, because how could he not be? In like fashion, everyone knows that every child is a genius who loves learning, and that the problem is with the system, but no one is ever able to design a system that will reflect the preferred reality, no matter what money or power they have. This does nothing to challenge the idea though, so everyone either pretends its happening or moves on to a new plan.
Great essay, as always. And I'm not just saying that because you shared my note ;)
The issue of public education and the nature of teachers is always a complicated one for me. Not because I don't think public education should be abolished - it should, at least in its current form, which is, in my opinion, state mandated daycare at best and child prison at worst - but also because my mom was a teacher, and many of my friends were/are teachers, as are a not insignificant number of their spouses. They're all good people, and I've seen how the system wears them down over time and hamstrings any attempt they might make to go above and beyond. My mom in particular was disgusted with the way that the most brilliant kids she ever had come through her class was routinely neglected and written off by the greater system as failures because they didn't test well and didn't have the temperament to sit in one spot for eight or nine hours and do things that they didn't want to do and, in most cases, probably didn't matter. Not calling myself brilliant, but I certainly fell into both of those camps, myself. Anyone who really does care about helping the students almost seem to be punished for reaching out and trying to help them excel, because, as you said, it isn't about excelling - it's about bringing everything down to the mean (and increasingly, below it, it would seem). I remember she had one student - a Slovenian immigrant, no less - that, these days, is probably a member of MENSA. The kid was good at sports, good at academics, and won a number of national competitions. When he qualified for one in one of the programs she was overseeing at the school, they tried to talk her out of letting him go to Washington D.C. to compete because, apparently, it was "more important" he stay in school and not "get behind" rather than go to this competition, where he stood to win a full-ride scholarship and an internship with Google's Map division. Fortunately, he did go, and he did win, but the administration of the district tried to do everything they could to keep him from going and my mom from taking him. At the time, she was convinced it was because they didn't want to cough up the funds to send them all to D.C. for a week, but, years later, she knows it was really because they just didn't care what happened to this kid and probably saw his excellence as something of a bane rather than a boon. I've experienced the same thing in corporate America. No one's allowed to get ahead and the smartest, hardest workers at the lower levels are often seen as a threat to the job security of those above them.
But, I also can't run defense for teachers as a whole because the field is also the refuge for mediocrity. I always took offense to the saying "Those who can't do, teach", because it seemed so derogatory to the teachers I personally know, but at the same time... well, I can certainly remember many, many teachers I had the misfortune of suffering with throughout my time in school. I even had a good friend of mine consider going into teaching just because he had "nothing else to do", but I talked him out of it. I told him don't do that to yourself, and don't do that to the kids, because you all deserve better than that.
People have been talking about school reform for the last century, and they always say they want the same thing, and the efforts all end the same way- where they started, because the way things are is what everyone really wanted to begin with. No Child Left Behind was literally a mandate to make every student above average. The result of hundreds of billions of dollars spent was no different than what had been there before. The mediocrity is only punctuated by organized looting by interest groups. You'll notice the wars and financial reforms proceed the same way.
Fifty some years ago from kindergarten on I/we explained to our kids that school , then, was set up for socialization but, if they put a fair amount of effort into it they could pick up quite a bit of education there as well. I suspect the same's true today though even more effort's required. My savage teenage granddaughter, a recent high school grad., is articulate, can do her sums, read Heinlein and Dostoevsky as well as R. Crumb, etc. Her practical ballistics isn't bad either but that was home schooled.
Adding another reason to L of C's why get edUcated ; I've also told my kids all through their formative years (2 through 62) to assure a comfortable living learn a trade but by hook , crook , college, used book stores and/or well chosen friends, https://librarianofcelaeno.substack.com, -whatever, get a classical education! The trade will satisfy your monetary needs but the classical ed. broadens one's horizons, gives you after work choices besides beer and TV!
As per usual, good Librarian, you prove yourself a font of knowledge and wisdom well worth tapping into.
In the middle of your article, you describe those particular kids scattered around the classrooms, reading their books or scrawling down their ideas into the margins of spiral bound notebooks or on sheets of scrap paper later stuffed into a binder or backpack, though with less embellishment than I give them here. Being the intelligent man I know you to be, I'm sure you've already read into that embellishment and guessed that I'm about to say I was one of those very kids throughout most of my grade school career. (For want of a better phrase.)
I'm twenty years removed from those days, but I'm not so old that I don't remember how things felt back then. The latter half of my elementary and the whole of my middle school experiences were a bit different since I was living in a relatively small mountain tourist town at that time, small by California standards, anyway. (About 2200 people, with nearly half that community being retired seniors.) The teachers in that school were often community staples, and many of them were the passionate types who tried to instill that desire to learn in the students with mixed success. Come my Sophomore year we'd moved back down into San Diego county, living out in suburbia again. The differences between my middle school and high school experiences were already pretty clear from my Freshman year alone, but the remaining three down here shone a stark light on it.
You say mediocrity is the goal of our public school system. To steal a quote from Breaking Bad, "You're goddamned right." High school was a thoroughly demoralizing experience. I had a couple teachers that I considered quite good, and one that I'm immensely grateful for to this very day - my criminal forensics teacher, Mr. K. His class broke me out of my lowest lows, out of a crash course towards failure, because he showed himself to be an affable, relatable, and genuinely passionate and talented teacher. He was a man of many experiences - he served in Vietnam, worked at one point for the CIA and also the FBI if I remember correctly, did criminal investigative field work, and eventually got into teaching alongside his wife. He worked as a U.S. history, government, and economics teacher and managed to get his criminal forensics and criminalistics courses into the school by working with one of our local colleges to turn it into an introductory prep course for their greater criminalistics program. One of the very best teachers I ever met, so as you can imagine, of course he ended up fired about six years after I graduated because some pearl clutcher didn't like the particular brand of gallows humor he used to make classes that were all about the ins and outs of investigating crimes like murders more palatable for the students.
In the time I've been reading your work since finding it, taking in your thoughts and ideas for my own consideration, I've developed a similar respect for you that I have for Mr. K. Your students are very lucky to have you as their teacher, sir. I think I'd have greatly enjoyed studying under you if I were one of them.
Thank you very much for the kind praise. I suspect that Substack is a community comprised in large part of 'those kids' and that your experience would resonate with many. For my part, I had some good teachers like your Mr. K, but I also spent much of my time alone in the school library absorbing as much as I could. Would that there was some way to bring those scattered teachers together with those scattered students, but eagles don't flock.
I went to a charter school in the mid-90’s when it was a new experiment in my state. It attracted a lot of great teachers who were fed up with the bureaucracy and BS in the public schools, and most of the smart, weird kids in my district. It had about 10% the enrollment of local middle school, but its alums made up 50% of the AP & Honors courses when we got to our regional high school.
That was 30 years ago and I know the educational and social landscape has changed, but I know there are still teachers, students, and parents who will flock to schools that offer a real alternative when given the opportunity.
This will never happen at scale, but if enough motivated people push for real education in their communities, maybe we can keep civilization alive through the impending Idiocracy.
“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.”
I met a woman recently who supervises the supervisors who manage housing for kids who have been rejected by society, "troubled". She works with some regional company, but she has been thinking about starting her own, so she does not have to deal with the administrators above her. She seems rather passionate about giving these kids a sense of order and the kind of incentives that build dignity and self-respect. I hope to talk more with her. I have imagined building facilities for such, with an attached greenhouse, surrounded by gardens and fruit trees. Sunlight and plants are the best medicine, I think.
My own paganism I am realizing is not particularly liberal, becoming less so the more I read your work and the writers on substack I subscribe to. I have otherwise been reading old books, most of which are a good antidote to my own liberal materialist training.
I was private Christian schooled K-12, and my university was actually Christian (social/theological conservative)
I taught history (Geo, World, US, Gov/Eco) for 2 years at my old high school, and it was great. 90% of the students were from good Christian families, and 10% public school rejects who thought we were a reform school (they never lasted more than 1 year before expelled). Literally every subject was soaked in Bible references, and discipline was swift and fairly severe. Not as based as corporal punishment, but we had a hard ass vice principal; just push the black button and send the trouble maker to the hall. And since the parents actually gave a damn, our write ups and detentions would be reinforced at home.
Alas, the pay was garbage. Every other teacher was either retired from public school with a pension, or had a working spouse. I was the only young breadwinner there. So I got my state cert and went to a public charter school to teach AP World History. Hooray! A whole class of smart kids!
Nope. “Every student is capable of achieving, if given the chance!” So the typical run of the bell curve all thrown into AP/IB courses, with a much bragged about “all our students are accepted to college!” (Susan, community college barely counts, and can we have a look at the completion rates? No?). So maybe 15% should have even been there at all. Plus, as you say, a huge focus on “restorative punishment”. No write ups, no detention, no expulsion for anything less than assault, drugs, or sex on the grounds (which is I guess better than most public schools these days). So everyone in their phones all day. All year I was encouraged to curve up the 40-ish average on tests to get a better distribution, and even then dozens were still failing. “Drag them across the line! Just spot them 5 points on their year average to get them to 70!”
It's pretty typical for private schools to underpay their faculty. Too many Church schools treat teaching jobs as sinecures for women with the understanding that their economic role is to supplement some man's income rather pay at a level that would attract talented educators. They'll cry poor, but the football team will have a bigger staff than the science department.
A lot of people make the jump to the public system because it pays more; it's a recurring theme at my private (non-religious) school. But like you said (and I said) you're fighting against an entire culture of mediocrity and indifference, seasoned by lying, hypocrisy, and rationalization. For some it's worth it, for others not.
»Schools represent the most efficient means of both controlling society’s children and indoctrinating them into the proper worldview to sustain the system.«
This was very evident in Germany during the Covid era - school closures, compulsory masks and tests, vaccination advertising at and vaccination buses outside schools, bullying of the unvaccinated, etc. And a large majority of parents who supported this, even calling for unvaccinated children to be excluded from school.
It became unmistakably clear to me when my 15-year-old stepdaughter recently explained that a teacher was "educating" her class that the AfD ("Alternative for Germany"; German right-wing conservative opposition party) was an anti-democratic, far-right party that should not be voted for.
Previously, German schools had a political neutrality requirement as well as a ban on all (pharmaceutical) advertising. This now seems to be history for good and very few parents and teachers are criticizing this development. It seems that schools, teachers, parents and ultimately also pupils are being brought more and more into line.
As critical parents, we are gradually running out of legal means to counteract this development. The last resort would be to take the children out of school and emigrate to a country where there is no compulsory education - as in Germany - and teach the children ourselves. But you have to be able to afford that in the first place.
There is no politically neutral state education. Government schools serve the end of validating the regime. The silver lining in this is that the fear and brittleness behind it all gets communicated to the brighter students. At my last school, for example, my students told me that the day after Trump was elected the science teacher spent two days randomly crying and ranting in class. One sort of kid takes this as a sign of the seriousness of the threat posed by Orange Hitler. Another sort learns to associate liberal democracy with sobbing, hysterical women. They saw the mask of normalcy come off and what was behind it.
I would advise doing the same. If you're unable to get your stepdaughter into the sort of educational program you would prefer, have her go to school every day and matter of factly announce that she and her family are AfD supporters. No anger, no insults, just say it like she's telling them you're all blonde. The teachers will lose it- not all of them, but enough to set the tone. The mask will come off and the other students will see them for the fragile, spiritually hollow, dimwitted functionaries that they truly are. At the very least, the other kids will get a valuable lesson.
I see two fundamental problems here, firstly the class, in which the overwhelming majority of pupils have already been indoctrinated to such an extent that such a statement from our daughter would fall on deaf ears and lead to further bullying (i.e. not a valuable lesson for the other children either) and secondly that she would have little chance of standing her ground in a "debate" with the teacher, who already has the majority of the class on her side (who have also only had the prevailing narrative drummed into them by their parents at home).
I know of a similar case where the teacher simply stifled the discussion in order to avoid having to enter the debate with an argument. It was then simply said that there were more important things to do than discuss a party that everyone should already know was right-wing extremist and anti-democratic. I think our daughter is simply not up to this task yet. Unfortunately.
I don't mean engage in debate. She might simply make clear that she don't take the programming seriously to whatever degree she feels comfortable doing so. I wouldn't expect a child to be able to debate a teacher, even a dull one. Rather, building the habit of standing her ground, even at the risk or unpopularity, is the useful outcome.
»She might simply make clear that she don't take the programming seriously to whatever degree she feels comfortable doing so.«
That's exactly what we advised her to do: Not to enter into a debate, but to try to make it clear that she doesn't believe the "chatter" of either side. Thanks for the confirmation!
Given how the AfD is polling among the young, it doesn't seem the teachers are making a difference. Even more catastrophic is German youth's total indifference to democratic politics.
The strivers and midwits will outnumber the dissidents in Germany for some time, but, like the United States, no one is voting their way out of this.
Before things went south education offered a way out of poverty through excellence. Challenging subjects, hard work, etc made it so that if a kid put in the effort, they would be recognized for it. Nowadays this has turned into a meaningless credential farm where a title by itself means very little, removing that avenue of growth for the poorer kids.
I have encountered entire books about this working-class phenomenon in nineteenth-century England, though they mainly focused on an initiative from above. This article seems to dwell more on initiative from below and auto-didacticism. Have we lost that fire entirely?
My question is whether you believe this is truly an endemic problem across the entire country or, rather, whether it's another example of inequality with private schools and public schools in wealthy suburbs having a different system.
Inequality doesn't enter into it; it's wholly meaningless as a factor in education. That Lizzo weighs 300 pounds isn't proof that Taylor Swift is starving to death. Likewise, that Westchester public schools spend X doesn't mean the students of New York public schools are deprived at X-2. The baseline resources in both places are more than sufficient for students to not only learn but thrive. If the astrophysics lab at St. George Floyd Memorial High School isn't as good as the one at the Jeff Epstein Academy the next county over one could argue there's an issue, but the problem is more one of basic, grade-level numeracy and, more profoundly, willingness to learn for learning's sake.
I currently work in a private boarding school where tuition for international students tops out at over $60,000 a year, and I previously worked in a small suburban charter school where the parents were working class and profoundly local. I have the exact same issues in both places. The students I have who come from other private schools and the scholarship kids from area public schools all tell the same stories, and bring with them the same habits, tastes, interests, and ethics. One thing that might amaze someone who grew up in the era of cliques of jocks and nerds and goths etc. is just how homogenous the kids have now become. You would never be able to tell from either looking at them or engaging in casual conversation which ones were the sons of billionaires and which were teachers' kids. Our society has achieved a level of flattening is truly astonishing.
As in any body some kids stand out for good or bad more than others. In general, I get the same sort of work ethic from the rich kids as those less so. There are but a few days left in the school year and I have seniors who are set to fail. Few of those graduating are prepared for college, as they've been grabbed by the belt and collar and dragged through high school. Once no one is waking them up in the morning they'll cease doing so. Their lives are easy, filled with toys and games and drugs, and their idea of adulthood is one in which the toys, games, and drugs are simply more elaborate. Our collective idea of success or failure is whether they end up having the resources to enjoy them.
The "Bomber Mafia" that emerged from WWII to dominate SAC believed that the B-52 was the solution to every problem, because they had a lot of them, knew how to use them, and every time one was deployed it served to validate the air generals' power. Likewise, wealthy liberals tend to believe that the problems in education stem from a lack of wealth properly administered by liberals. There's an entire class of billionaires that have thrown entire GDPs of African countries at a few school districts with nothing to show for it. Bill Gates hasn't changed anything, Mark Zuckerberg hasn't changed anything. Public funding, private riches- nothing.
Ask yourself this. You're my age, perhaps a bit older. No matter how rich you were you didn't go to school with a smartphone or an iPad or a laptop. You didn't have the internet; you didn't have AI. You didn't have any of the things that students today are considered wholly deprived for lacking. And yet you managed to get an education. Your father went to school before digital computers were in wide use. His father didn't have a television. Theodore Roosevelt sent his kids to Groton under conditions that today would be considered Third World. How did they manage to learn, and not just learn, but accomplish so much? Inequality is not just spatial but temporal; if it holds people back today it should have really hindered our forebears. But it didn't.
The problem isn't inequality, it's quality. It's our culture and our ideology. It's our lack of faith, in every sense. And no amount of money or leveling will fix that.
Thanks for that answer. I haven't had a child in high school since 2012 so I'm very much out of date. My kids missed the smartphone/social media grinder for which I consider our family very lucky.
Do you think there has been a sea change in the past dozen years our am I just kidding myself through the data points involving my own family?
I think there's a lot to Jonathan Haidt's theories about smartphones making kids, especially girls, especially liberal girls, miserable, and they first became a major phenomenon around 2012. But the iPhone is just the playing out of the logic of neoliberalism. There always need to be new markets and people have to be made insecure to motivate them to pursue ameliorative consumption. Everything has to be homogenized and uprooted to facilitate more efficient marketing. People have to be disconnected from everything real to create those empty spaces one is expected to work to fill with contrivances. I want to stress that it's not a flaw in the system or a perversion of it. It's the way it has to work. It's pervasive in blue states and red, from rich to poor.
Strange as it sounds, I've recently quit teaching as I couldn't get the school I was working in, in Japan to prioritize the learning of the students. I had made it my goal to push forward actual education (they're a conversation school) and I wanted to ensure students could learn English, rather than learning stupid hello and goodbye and days songs. I also focused on pushing history and poetry into some of the classes, and some creative exercises. Already I could see the students enjoying themselves, learning, improving and looking forward to the next class.
But my bosses preferred to publicly humiliate me, insult me and tried to stalk and break me psychologically so I quit as I realized that they were in it for money, and to push forward DIE not actually teach.
As it is though, I've gotten enough knowledge of how to teach and what style works best, for me and my students to when the time comes give homework, reading material and what not to teach my own kids when the time comes. So what I learnt in just a few weeks was invaluable, as to what I shall do I'm not sure.
For the moment I've little in the way of money, but as I'm going back in for a trade and will be working with my gf and brother (and my mother to an extent) to save up money to buy a commercial building to build a hobby-shop/bakery/book-store, I'm hoping to also look into homeschool options. Thankfully plumbing (the trade I'm looking into) should allow the resources necessary to look into some private schools and home-school options, along with building up the dream-shop I've in mind so that I can work to help others find the books and bds they love most, teach my kids and work as a place to sell my own books even as I forge a relationship with publishers and distributors.
You may consider coming to America and working the homeschool circuit. As a native speaker of both French and English you could fill a real gap in foreign language instruction (language and science are two areas where homeschooling families often need the most outside assistance).
Honestly hadn't considered it, if I were to step into teaching there, it'd be in the south. The North is so peculiar to me culturally that I always feel terribly homesick and spiritually ill for some reason (I don't know why, not discriminating, I just found on my last few visits to Ohio & Michigan ill and utterly bereft).
But I've many friends in the two Carolinas and Arizona, and Texas. So it'd probably be those areas.
If I may ask, how much do homeschool teachers make? I figure I should ask, as it could play a role in my decision of how to proceed from hereon out. Hope you don't think less of me for asking this Librarian, I do appreciate and feel honoured that you might recommend such a path.
There's not fixed job called "homeschool teacher." You'd be an entrepreneur making your own way. You'd have to advertise and find clients and decide for yourself what to offer and what to charge. There is also the prospect of private school employment with homeschool work on the side. Lots of opportunities for foreign language teachers in that area. Here in the South you can do well for yourself and the homes are inexpensive outside of metro areas. I am a lifelong Southerner and would never leave.
Ohhh I see, I was thinking of home-schooling my own kids, and if I were to teach that way I'd still want plumbing as a fall-back option.
I figured you were a life-long southerner Librarian, love the American deep-south you lot are all collectively awesome.
I teach philosophy at a “classical” charter school near Sacramento. It’s as you say, but a little better, but it seems to be fighting an impossible battle.
It's to the point where "Classical" is simply meaningless as a descriptor. For a lot of people it amounts to "how I kind of imagine public schools were like in the 1950s-" lots of performative cursive writing and pleated skirts, but the same progressive education mindset. Hillsdale is bad about that. If the curriculum doesn't center on Greek and Latin, or at the very least Latin, it's not Classical.
Damn, sounds rough hopefully you won't give up like I did. I found the humiliation rituals and the harassment impossible to live with.
Out of curiosity, were these Japanese bosses, or Westerners? I can't imagine the average Japanese boss caring about DEI (though humiliation is something the Japanese have many flavors of) but liberalism has gotten it's fingers in every pie lately, so I was wondering.
One of them was an Australian, and the other an older Japanese lady. She was very in love with DEI and its culture, and both of them loved all things liberal and dreamt of turning Japan into America.
Trust me they HATE traditional Japan. Some of the students were traditional, others were not or had moms that were not. It varied from student to student, all I know is that with my predecessor’s departure the students were uneasy, they bonded swiftly with me, but then when I left from what I heard it’s started a chain reaction as the school’s local rep got dragged through the mire.
Apparently there’s some practices they do the Japanese don’t approve of. Some of the flavourful humiliating tactics were not approved of by all the local Japanese people others were, but they could not appear to like it when others disapproved.
I hope this answers the question.
When I'm feeling particularly provocative I've taken to asking my friends and family "what's the point of education?" (I have young children, so it's on my mind a lot.)
A lot of the answers invoke some sort of utopia where completion of the prescribed educational pathway results in "a better civilization." This despite the fact that civilization is crumbling around us.
The more honest answers essentially boil down to what you describe here: education -> money. I think this is at least partially true, if unsatisfying.
I haven't found an answer I completely agree with yet, nor am I sure I can articulate my own. But I think it's somewhere in the realm of "the point of an education is to better understand the Creator." I'm not sure how to operationalize this mindset, but I suppose doing the opposite of whatever the public schools are doing is a reasonable place to start.
Education is the right ordering of the person. It is disciplining the physical self so as to cultivate the soul so as to be able to exercise reason, all with the aim of aligning the will with the good and the beautiful. That's how I think of it anyway.
At the risk of venturing into nihilism, I'll press a little bit: what's the point of aligning the will with the good and the beautiful? Your response isn't substantislly different in type from someone who says "the point of education is to generate an informed, civic society". It sounds like a laudable goal, but is a collection of humans with properly aligned wills an end in itself, or the means for something more?
At the risk of getting theological, we were created for a purpose. But even in pagan or philosophical terms, one can see that in nature no appetite is without recourse. Animals have a drive to eat, reproduce, and preserve its life, and within nature are food, mates, and teeth and claws each proper to a particular creature. On top of these things humans have the capacity to reason, and so there must be a fit object upon which to exercise that reason. This cannot be simply problem solving, since reason has no satisfaction in material terms (one can get to full from too much eating; one cannot have too many thoughts- they do not occupy space). A rational mind that can contemplate the eternal necessarily has its end there. That's my chain of reasoning anyway.
Thanks for this - it's certainly an answer I haven't heard before! (I love Substack for interactions like these.) if I may summarize, it sounds like you're saying "education exists to meet one of humanity's primal needs". I'll get a bit more theological and claim that your answer isn't that different from mine (though yours is obviously worded better.) Much to ponder.
It’s care of the soul. It’s for salvation ultimately.
I've pondered the same question. I remember a well educated uncle of mine defending the liberal arts (as opposed to, say, a STEM education) on the grounds that "they make you a better person." Simplistic, perhaps, but not untrue. Because of my education (such as it is) I live in a wider, subtler, more beautiful world. I can explain much of what I see around me (and am apt to notice it in the first place) in terms of physics, mathematics, and biology. I can read about and imagine ancient peoples, and draw parallels between their times and ours. I can read the thoughts of long dead authors and appreciate the beauty and wisdom they recorded. This deeper, fuller existence I enjoy is surely an adequate reason for education
In and of themselves, I would say the liberal arts don't make you a better person so much as more of a person- more whole, more substantial, less of a weightless shade. Betterment comes from orientation towards a noble end.
When one says "a better person," one of course thinks of virtue and morality, a thing I heartily endorse. And, importantly, that's an avenue open to nearly all of humanity, even the dull witted who could never be taught Latin or Calculus. And there are, of course, highly educated people who are wicked and evil (I think of Marx.) But in a sense, being more whole and substantial, in itself, makes them "better people." Better villains, in some cases, but still better.
I was trying to answer Bunyan's question of the point of education, from the standpoint of Aristotle's concept of things that are good for their own sake, and that's the answer I came up with. Virtue is good for it's own sake, for different reasons, and education (not indoctrination or credentialization) is also good for it's own sake. And both together are best of all.
Really love the stack, BTW, thanks for your writing
Thank you for reading.
I think the point of education is to open your mind to the great thinkers of the past. It is to integrate the ideas of your own culture with the cultures of the past and to try to understand who we are and why we are here. It is to live a thousand lives and learn how to live the good life. In other words, You Absolutely Must Not Leave It To Professionals.
This is work only a parent can do for their children. Early schooling is unnecessary. Kids need to learn to read but that is easily done. There is a book that teaches this in 100 lessons and is basically foolproof (meaning that I was able to use it successfully on disparate children). After that they need to learn their place and value in the family.
The education du jour in every town in this sad country is nothing more than hideously expensive daycare, provided by the intellectual bottom feeders of our society. Please, no one give me the 'there are good teachers' thing. You might as well say there are good politicians, good Satanists, good mob bosses. We all know that might be true theoretically, but if it were true in actuality, then how the ever living hades did we get to the point we are re public schools?
Just for the record, my bona fides are that I have reviewed a thousand-plus educationist's resumes, hired dozens of teachers for a few charter schools, and looked with dismay at the lack of integrity of even some of the most qualified teachers we have hired. This system does not work. It must be abolished. Three to five years of absolutely no publicly funded formal education would be chaos, but that would be an improvement over the current system of formalized evil intent.
I’ve had good teachers; I work with many good teachers, and I have kids I teach who will make good teachers in the future. If your school isn’t attracting good teachers it’s perhaps because they’re not offering what good teachers want.
We do attract good teachers. My point is that we draw from a pool of hundreds of thousands of ignorant ideologues, and, at this point thousands of malcontents as well. I'm not arguing that there are not good teachers. My point is that they aren't even the minority. They are the absolute exception and it is tricky to find them and even trickier to keep them because we can only afford to pay so much.
Every time you talk about bad teachers people want to say, "oh, but there are good teachers, I had one." Yeahyeahyeah.....I had a couple, too. I am friends with some. I value what they do. But those absolute exceptions to the rule are the point of all this....and it is the point John Taylor Gatto made. The system is bad. And often good teachers become bad ones by selling out to it. The "there are good teachers" argument only muddies the waters. This system must be abolished. It cannot be fixed by the "there are good teachers" point.
There are way more bad teachers than good ones, and way more ineffective ignorant teachers than bad ones. Good teachers = about 2%. Bad teachers = about 20%. Ignorant idiots = about 38%. Well-meaning people who like having three+ months a year off = 40%
Your milage may vary.
Seeking truth and knowledge. Struggling with the classic works of the past. Being facile in verbal and written communication.
Public schools taught my brilliant daughter; Summa Cum Laude in Chemical Engineering and a masters in machine learning, (AI), (while she worked full time and had a baby) to hate God, to reject the faith she was raised in, Christianity, to disrespect and hate her parents; and to embrace Marxism and "alternative lifestyles". The other four fared better but only in that they don't outright declare their hatred and rejection of Jesus and us. Even the one who is a practicing "Christian" has major issues in conflating culture and his faith.
If I had to do it over, not one of my five children would attend a public school.
I'm sorry that happened to you. Sadly, there are many such stories out there along those lines. "It's the schools," one says; "it's the culture," says another. But they're one in the same. It's hard to escape it even intentionally, even in our own lives. Liberalism is like seed oils or microplastic- it's in the air we breathe. So don't beat yourself up about it. Do what you can to mitigate its effects and win wherever you see the opportunity.
If we could teach school kids not to believe in Imaginary Cloud Wizard we would eliminate a huge amount of violence and death from this world. Something like 75% of violent deaths through history have been because of people fighting over Imaginary cloud wizard.
Good grief, you have no actual grasp on history, do you? I am speechless. You poor man. ❤️
You’ve devoted your life to the Imaginary Cloud Wizard. You poor pathetic simpleton. Go pray or whatever you Jezus freaks do.
POV: you’re the smartest guy on Reddit, but no one appreciates you so you go to Substack to spread the Gospel of cringe skeptic Aspergianity.
There is nothing sadder than a profoundly sad man who fancies himself superior to the joyous people around him.
Thank you for the reminder.
I believe your 75% figure is pure fiction. Stalin the official atheist killed more people in a few months than the Inquisition killed in several centuries. Not to mention the atheists Pol Pot, Mao, Castro, and Lenin, some of the worst criminal mass-murdering monsters in history.
And, you teach kids not to believe in God, that they are only animals, that there are no higher moral or spiritual law, and you think that will make the USA a paradise? Look around you. Can you not see what a century and more of secular humanist and atheist indoctrination has accomplished?
By ‘Imaginary Cloud Wizard’ do you mean ‘Mr. Wizard’ or ‘Bill Nye the Science Guy’?
And how is the 8th grade going?
Not at all true:https://matsumoto.substack.com/p/universal-basic-hitler
Huh, I was the kid in the back with the novel. I married the girl with the spiral notebook. We both dropped out of high school and got on with life as soon as we were able.
This article hit a little close to home.
It sounds like you made a lot of wise decisions.
Plenty of dumb ones too, but it worked out well enough.
The line about gritting your teeth until you finally reach the room full of great kids rung true to my experience as a student. I've never been in a per capita smarter room than in my high school AP classes, none of the "exclusive" institutions came anywhere near because, as you note, education is typically not the point of the education industry.
I spent my happiest years at the flagship state university. It was the only time when I raised my hand to answer a question and, looking around, saw that other people were doing so as well. I knew I wanted to teach in an environment like that one day.
I was so excited when I left one job to teach AP course at a charter school. A whole class of smart motivated kids!
Turns out this was an “everyone is capable of achieving given the opportunity” school full of the usual mix, just every class was AP/IB. So about 15% top of the bell curve should have even been in the class at all.
What a miserable year. I quit teaching after that
“Everyone is capable of achieving.”
The ancient Romans understood beekeeping, and that at the center of the hive was a queen, but they also knew that somewhere in there was a king bee that was actually running things. No one ever saw Apis Rex, but he had to be there, because how could he not be? In like fashion, everyone knows that every child is a genius who loves learning, and that the problem is with the system, but no one is ever able to design a system that will reflect the preferred reality, no matter what money or power they have. This does nothing to challenge the idea though, so everyone either pretends its happening or moves on to a new plan.
Great essay, as always. And I'm not just saying that because you shared my note ;)
The issue of public education and the nature of teachers is always a complicated one for me. Not because I don't think public education should be abolished - it should, at least in its current form, which is, in my opinion, state mandated daycare at best and child prison at worst - but also because my mom was a teacher, and many of my friends were/are teachers, as are a not insignificant number of their spouses. They're all good people, and I've seen how the system wears them down over time and hamstrings any attempt they might make to go above and beyond. My mom in particular was disgusted with the way that the most brilliant kids she ever had come through her class was routinely neglected and written off by the greater system as failures because they didn't test well and didn't have the temperament to sit in one spot for eight or nine hours and do things that they didn't want to do and, in most cases, probably didn't matter. Not calling myself brilliant, but I certainly fell into both of those camps, myself. Anyone who really does care about helping the students almost seem to be punished for reaching out and trying to help them excel, because, as you said, it isn't about excelling - it's about bringing everything down to the mean (and increasingly, below it, it would seem). I remember she had one student - a Slovenian immigrant, no less - that, these days, is probably a member of MENSA. The kid was good at sports, good at academics, and won a number of national competitions. When he qualified for one in one of the programs she was overseeing at the school, they tried to talk her out of letting him go to Washington D.C. to compete because, apparently, it was "more important" he stay in school and not "get behind" rather than go to this competition, where he stood to win a full-ride scholarship and an internship with Google's Map division. Fortunately, he did go, and he did win, but the administration of the district tried to do everything they could to keep him from going and my mom from taking him. At the time, she was convinced it was because they didn't want to cough up the funds to send them all to D.C. for a week, but, years later, she knows it was really because they just didn't care what happened to this kid and probably saw his excellence as something of a bane rather than a boon. I've experienced the same thing in corporate America. No one's allowed to get ahead and the smartest, hardest workers at the lower levels are often seen as a threat to the job security of those above them.
But, I also can't run defense for teachers as a whole because the field is also the refuge for mediocrity. I always took offense to the saying "Those who can't do, teach", because it seemed so derogatory to the teachers I personally know, but at the same time... well, I can certainly remember many, many teachers I had the misfortune of suffering with throughout my time in school. I even had a good friend of mine consider going into teaching just because he had "nothing else to do", but I talked him out of it. I told him don't do that to yourself, and don't do that to the kids, because you all deserve better than that.
People have been talking about school reform for the last century, and they always say they want the same thing, and the efforts all end the same way- where they started, because the way things are is what everyone really wanted to begin with. No Child Left Behind was literally a mandate to make every student above average. The result of hundreds of billions of dollars spent was no different than what had been there before. The mediocrity is only punctuated by organized looting by interest groups. You'll notice the wars and financial reforms proceed the same way.
Fifty some years ago from kindergarten on I/we explained to our kids that school , then, was set up for socialization but, if they put a fair amount of effort into it they could pick up quite a bit of education there as well. I suspect the same's true today though even more effort's required. My savage teenage granddaughter, a recent high school grad., is articulate, can do her sums, read Heinlein and Dostoevsky as well as R. Crumb, etc. Her practical ballistics isn't bad either but that was home schooled.
Adding another reason to L of C's why get edUcated ; I've also told my kids all through their formative years (2 through 62) to assure a comfortable living learn a trade but by hook , crook , college, used book stores and/or well chosen friends, https://librarianofcelaeno.substack.com, -whatever, get a classical education! The trade will satisfy your monetary needs but the classical ed. broadens one's horizons, gives you after work choices besides beer and TV!
Just to be clear, I'm not faulting beer.
As per usual, good Librarian, you prove yourself a font of knowledge and wisdom well worth tapping into.
In the middle of your article, you describe those particular kids scattered around the classrooms, reading their books or scrawling down their ideas into the margins of spiral bound notebooks or on sheets of scrap paper later stuffed into a binder or backpack, though with less embellishment than I give them here. Being the intelligent man I know you to be, I'm sure you've already read into that embellishment and guessed that I'm about to say I was one of those very kids throughout most of my grade school career. (For want of a better phrase.)
I'm twenty years removed from those days, but I'm not so old that I don't remember how things felt back then. The latter half of my elementary and the whole of my middle school experiences were a bit different since I was living in a relatively small mountain tourist town at that time, small by California standards, anyway. (About 2200 people, with nearly half that community being retired seniors.) The teachers in that school were often community staples, and many of them were the passionate types who tried to instill that desire to learn in the students with mixed success. Come my Sophomore year we'd moved back down into San Diego county, living out in suburbia again. The differences between my middle school and high school experiences were already pretty clear from my Freshman year alone, but the remaining three down here shone a stark light on it.
You say mediocrity is the goal of our public school system. To steal a quote from Breaking Bad, "You're goddamned right." High school was a thoroughly demoralizing experience. I had a couple teachers that I considered quite good, and one that I'm immensely grateful for to this very day - my criminal forensics teacher, Mr. K. His class broke me out of my lowest lows, out of a crash course towards failure, because he showed himself to be an affable, relatable, and genuinely passionate and talented teacher. He was a man of many experiences - he served in Vietnam, worked at one point for the CIA and also the FBI if I remember correctly, did criminal investigative field work, and eventually got into teaching alongside his wife. He worked as a U.S. history, government, and economics teacher and managed to get his criminal forensics and criminalistics courses into the school by working with one of our local colleges to turn it into an introductory prep course for their greater criminalistics program. One of the very best teachers I ever met, so as you can imagine, of course he ended up fired about six years after I graduated because some pearl clutcher didn't like the particular brand of gallows humor he used to make classes that were all about the ins and outs of investigating crimes like murders more palatable for the students.
In the time I've been reading your work since finding it, taking in your thoughts and ideas for my own consideration, I've developed a similar respect for you that I have for Mr. K. Your students are very lucky to have you as their teacher, sir. I think I'd have greatly enjoyed studying under you if I were one of them.
Thank you very much for the kind praise. I suspect that Substack is a community comprised in large part of 'those kids' and that your experience would resonate with many. For my part, I had some good teachers like your Mr. K, but I also spent much of my time alone in the school library absorbing as much as I could. Would that there was some way to bring those scattered teachers together with those scattered students, but eagles don't flock.
I went to a charter school in the mid-90’s when it was a new experiment in my state. It attracted a lot of great teachers who were fed up with the bureaucracy and BS in the public schools, and most of the smart, weird kids in my district. It had about 10% the enrollment of local middle school, but its alums made up 50% of the AP & Honors courses when we got to our regional high school.
That was 30 years ago and I know the educational and social landscape has changed, but I know there are still teachers, students, and parents who will flock to schools that offer a real alternative when given the opportunity.
This will never happen at scale, but if enough motivated people push for real education in their communities, maybe we can keep civilization alive through the impending Idiocracy.
“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.”
oh! this had me falling out of my seat 😂
One teacher at my school would wear his mask all the way to his car parked down the street.
well, people still listen to NPR so I can’t say I’m surprised
I met a woman recently who supervises the supervisors who manage housing for kids who have been rejected by society, "troubled". She works with some regional company, but she has been thinking about starting her own, so she does not have to deal with the administrators above her. She seems rather passionate about giving these kids a sense of order and the kind of incentives that build dignity and self-respect. I hope to talk more with her. I have imagined building facilities for such, with an attached greenhouse, surrounded by gardens and fruit trees. Sunlight and plants are the best medicine, I think.
My own paganism I am realizing is not particularly liberal, becoming less so the more I read your work and the writers on substack I subscribe to. I have otherwise been reading old books, most of which are a good antidote to my own liberal materialist training.
I was private Christian schooled K-12, and my university was actually Christian (social/theological conservative)
I taught history (Geo, World, US, Gov/Eco) for 2 years at my old high school, and it was great. 90% of the students were from good Christian families, and 10% public school rejects who thought we were a reform school (they never lasted more than 1 year before expelled). Literally every subject was soaked in Bible references, and discipline was swift and fairly severe. Not as based as corporal punishment, but we had a hard ass vice principal; just push the black button and send the trouble maker to the hall. And since the parents actually gave a damn, our write ups and detentions would be reinforced at home.
Alas, the pay was garbage. Every other teacher was either retired from public school with a pension, or had a working spouse. I was the only young breadwinner there. So I got my state cert and went to a public charter school to teach AP World History. Hooray! A whole class of smart kids!
Nope. “Every student is capable of achieving, if given the chance!” So the typical run of the bell curve all thrown into AP/IB courses, with a much bragged about “all our students are accepted to college!” (Susan, community college barely counts, and can we have a look at the completion rates? No?). So maybe 15% should have even been there at all. Plus, as you say, a huge focus on “restorative punishment”. No write ups, no detention, no expulsion for anything less than assault, drugs, or sex on the grounds (which is I guess better than most public schools these days). So everyone in their phones all day. All year I was encouraged to curve up the 40-ish average on tests to get a better distribution, and even then dozens were still failing. “Drag them across the line! Just spot them 5 points on their year average to get them to 70!”
I quit and became a fed.
It's pretty typical for private schools to underpay their faculty. Too many Church schools treat teaching jobs as sinecures for women with the understanding that their economic role is to supplement some man's income rather pay at a level that would attract talented educators. They'll cry poor, but the football team will have a bigger staff than the science department.
A lot of people make the jump to the public system because it pays more; it's a recurring theme at my private (non-religious) school. But like you said (and I said) you're fighting against an entire culture of mediocrity and indifference, seasoned by lying, hypocrisy, and rationalization. For some it's worth it, for others not.
🔥edu
A bit of a dirge, this.
»Schools represent the most efficient means of both controlling society’s children and indoctrinating them into the proper worldview to sustain the system.«
This was very evident in Germany during the Covid era - school closures, compulsory masks and tests, vaccination advertising at and vaccination buses outside schools, bullying of the unvaccinated, etc. And a large majority of parents who supported this, even calling for unvaccinated children to be excluded from school.
It became unmistakably clear to me when my 15-year-old stepdaughter recently explained that a teacher was "educating" her class that the AfD ("Alternative for Germany"; German right-wing conservative opposition party) was an anti-democratic, far-right party that should not be voted for.
Previously, German schools had a political neutrality requirement as well as a ban on all (pharmaceutical) advertising. This now seems to be history for good and very few parents and teachers are criticizing this development. It seems that schools, teachers, parents and ultimately also pupils are being brought more and more into line.
As critical parents, we are gradually running out of legal means to counteract this development. The last resort would be to take the children out of school and emigrate to a country where there is no compulsory education - as in Germany - and teach the children ourselves. But you have to be able to afford that in the first place.
There is no politically neutral state education. Government schools serve the end of validating the regime. The silver lining in this is that the fear and brittleness behind it all gets communicated to the brighter students. At my last school, for example, my students told me that the day after Trump was elected the science teacher spent two days randomly crying and ranting in class. One sort of kid takes this as a sign of the seriousness of the threat posed by Orange Hitler. Another sort learns to associate liberal democracy with sobbing, hysterical women. They saw the mask of normalcy come off and what was behind it.
I would advise doing the same. If you're unable to get your stepdaughter into the sort of educational program you would prefer, have her go to school every day and matter of factly announce that she and her family are AfD supporters. No anger, no insults, just say it like she's telling them you're all blonde. The teachers will lose it- not all of them, but enough to set the tone. The mask will come off and the other students will see them for the fragile, spiritually hollow, dimwitted functionaries that they truly are. At the very least, the other kids will get a valuable lesson.
I see two fundamental problems here, firstly the class, in which the overwhelming majority of pupils have already been indoctrinated to such an extent that such a statement from our daughter would fall on deaf ears and lead to further bullying (i.e. not a valuable lesson for the other children either) and secondly that she would have little chance of standing her ground in a "debate" with the teacher, who already has the majority of the class on her side (who have also only had the prevailing narrative drummed into them by their parents at home).
I know of a similar case where the teacher simply stifled the discussion in order to avoid having to enter the debate with an argument. It was then simply said that there were more important things to do than discuss a party that everyone should already know was right-wing extremist and anti-democratic. I think our daughter is simply not up to this task yet. Unfortunately.
I don't mean engage in debate. She might simply make clear that she don't take the programming seriously to whatever degree she feels comfortable doing so. I wouldn't expect a child to be able to debate a teacher, even a dull one. Rather, building the habit of standing her ground, even at the risk or unpopularity, is the useful outcome.
»She might simply make clear that she don't take the programming seriously to whatever degree she feels comfortable doing so.«
That's exactly what we advised her to do: Not to enter into a debate, but to try to make it clear that she doesn't believe the "chatter" of either side. Thanks for the confirmation!
Given how the AfD is polling among the young, it doesn't seem the teachers are making a difference. Even more catastrophic is German youth's total indifference to democratic politics.
The strivers and midwits will outnumber the dissidents in Germany for some time, but, like the United States, no one is voting their way out of this.
Before things went south education offered a way out of poverty through excellence. Challenging subjects, hard work, etc made it so that if a kid put in the effort, they would be recognized for it. Nowadays this has turned into a meaningless credential farm where a title by itself means very little, removing that avenue of growth for the poorer kids.
Thank you, and I always encourage people to read this.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-classics-in-the-slums#:~:text=In%201988%2C%20Barbara%20Herrnstein,who%20were%20not%20classically%20educated.
What a beautiful read, thank you.
I have encountered entire books about this working-class phenomenon in nineteenth-century England, though they mainly focused on an initiative from above. This article seems to dwell more on initiative from below and auto-didacticism. Have we lost that fire entirely?
I don’t think so. Sometimes embers just need life breathed back into them. The fire rises.
Challenging read!
My question is whether you believe this is truly an endemic problem across the entire country or, rather, whether it's another example of inequality with private schools and public schools in wealthy suburbs having a different system.
Inequality doesn't enter into it; it's wholly meaningless as a factor in education. That Lizzo weighs 300 pounds isn't proof that Taylor Swift is starving to death. Likewise, that Westchester public schools spend X doesn't mean the students of New York public schools are deprived at X-2. The baseline resources in both places are more than sufficient for students to not only learn but thrive. If the astrophysics lab at St. George Floyd Memorial High School isn't as good as the one at the Jeff Epstein Academy the next county over one could argue there's an issue, but the problem is more one of basic, grade-level numeracy and, more profoundly, willingness to learn for learning's sake.
I currently work in a private boarding school where tuition for international students tops out at over $60,000 a year, and I previously worked in a small suburban charter school where the parents were working class and profoundly local. I have the exact same issues in both places. The students I have who come from other private schools and the scholarship kids from area public schools all tell the same stories, and bring with them the same habits, tastes, interests, and ethics. One thing that might amaze someone who grew up in the era of cliques of jocks and nerds and goths etc. is just how homogenous the kids have now become. You would never be able to tell from either looking at them or engaging in casual conversation which ones were the sons of billionaires and which were teachers' kids. Our society has achieved a level of flattening is truly astonishing.
As in any body some kids stand out for good or bad more than others. In general, I get the same sort of work ethic from the rich kids as those less so. There are but a few days left in the school year and I have seniors who are set to fail. Few of those graduating are prepared for college, as they've been grabbed by the belt and collar and dragged through high school. Once no one is waking them up in the morning they'll cease doing so. Their lives are easy, filled with toys and games and drugs, and their idea of adulthood is one in which the toys, games, and drugs are simply more elaborate. Our collective idea of success or failure is whether they end up having the resources to enjoy them.
The "Bomber Mafia" that emerged from WWII to dominate SAC believed that the B-52 was the solution to every problem, because they had a lot of them, knew how to use them, and every time one was deployed it served to validate the air generals' power. Likewise, wealthy liberals tend to believe that the problems in education stem from a lack of wealth properly administered by liberals. There's an entire class of billionaires that have thrown entire GDPs of African countries at a few school districts with nothing to show for it. Bill Gates hasn't changed anything, Mark Zuckerberg hasn't changed anything. Public funding, private riches- nothing.
Ask yourself this. You're my age, perhaps a bit older. No matter how rich you were you didn't go to school with a smartphone or an iPad or a laptop. You didn't have the internet; you didn't have AI. You didn't have any of the things that students today are considered wholly deprived for lacking. And yet you managed to get an education. Your father went to school before digital computers were in wide use. His father didn't have a television. Theodore Roosevelt sent his kids to Groton under conditions that today would be considered Third World. How did they manage to learn, and not just learn, but accomplish so much? Inequality is not just spatial but temporal; if it holds people back today it should have really hindered our forebears. But it didn't.
The problem isn't inequality, it's quality. It's our culture and our ideology. It's our lack of faith, in every sense. And no amount of money or leveling will fix that.
On Point.
Thanks for that answer. I haven't had a child in high school since 2012 so I'm very much out of date. My kids missed the smartphone/social media grinder for which I consider our family very lucky.
Do you think there has been a sea change in the past dozen years our am I just kidding myself through the data points involving my own family?
I think there's a lot to Jonathan Haidt's theories about smartphones making kids, especially girls, especially liberal girls, miserable, and they first became a major phenomenon around 2012. But the iPhone is just the playing out of the logic of neoliberalism. There always need to be new markets and people have to be made insecure to motivate them to pursue ameliorative consumption. Everything has to be homogenized and uprooted to facilitate more efficient marketing. People have to be disconnected from everything real to create those empty spaces one is expected to work to fill with contrivances. I want to stress that it's not a flaw in the system or a perversion of it. It's the way it has to work. It's pervasive in blue states and red, from rich to poor.