-American schools are models of efficiency, rigor, and perfect consistency in the goal they are seeking to achieve. No one can fail to be impressed by the utter unanimity of mind among everyone involved with them.
-Within the educational system, the nature of little boys is met with an urgency, severity and unrelenting violence that rivals any hagiographical story of a desert monk chastising his nature with penance and prayer. If the educational system attacked concupiscence and the sense appetites with the same intensity that they presently attack masculine irascibility, aggression, and lack of ability to sit still and pay attention, then within five years we would have ten million six year old boys living in the wilderness on the top of fifty foot poles.
-When people think of the bad, ghetto school they conjure up images of violence and brutality. Nonsense. That school and all others are characterized by somnolence. We think of wolves when the better image – and in some sense the more tragic one – is of zombies.
-There are plenty of students that pay close attention in class and learn all sort of valuable things. Our schools have no problem churning out persons with very advanced skills. But there is almost never dialogue, debate, or boisterous inquiry. You could make Socrates himself into a room full of typical American students, even ones with genius IQ’s, and they still would be unlikely to disagree with him. They would dutifully record what he said, silently pass a test on its content, and then move to the next place when the bell rings.
-The American student occasionally talks to or challenges a teacher intellectually, but they never do so to each other.
– We can complain of the Leftism of the educational system, but this misses what is most formal to it. The Leftism of educrats is not revolutionary Leftism – no “Workers of the world unite!” or “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité!”. Even if they spoke about these things they give absolutely no quarter to the sort of psychodynamic power that would act on them.
Don’t think for a minute that I think this is all downsides. I am horrified by the idea of revolution, which tends to lead only to systematic murder and tyranny. Revolutions always start with high ideas that are quickly lost in the immediate fog of the revolution itself. But our education system is practically defined by a system that stomps out the possibility of revolution, and in this sense, it is profoundly anti-Leftist.
-Our educational system is about crowd control, but there is no small cabal of Lex Luthor-style evil geniuses that cackle with glee at their plan. The somnolence and mediocrity go all the way up and all the way down. The Secretary of Education herself would be horrified if she made a gun out of a Pop-Tart.
-We can stand the thought of effeminate defiance: cattiness, passive-aggressive sniping, irony, cynicism, etc.. But we are terrified by the idea of a truly empowered defiance. Every American student has heard of Rosa Parks and sees her as heroic, but he has also had that quality of soul that made her do what she did systematically rooted out from his character since pre-school. Again, it is not all downsides to have a docile and well-drilled citizenry, but there is also a manifest contradiction in lionizing Rosa Parks and being horrified by the soul of lions.
-The cult of self-esteem is really just an aspect of stomping out the lion (or the beast).
-Perhaps we once tamed the lion by making the gentleman. But gentlemen cannot be mass-produced. It’s hard to see what else the education system can do, if we take it as a given that they must make a peaceful citizenry.
-If some war is just, there is a point at which the absence of conflict becomes unjust.
Just Thomism 
thenyssan said,
March 9, 2013 at 12:41 pm
Rough year in school for your son? 🙂
My 7 year-old son is pure, elemental boy and struggling mightily in 2nd grade public school. Here come the tests, the remediation activities, the hours of extra math on the weekends. He must catch up! He must conform! Don’t you realize what will happen if he doesn’t?!
The private school where I teach makes a big sales pitch based on the idea that we know what boys are like, what they really need, and how to help them grow, be happy, and learn. The longer I work there and the more relieved parents I meet along the way, the more horrified I am at how masculinity is treated, in the medical sense of the term, in public (heck, much private as well) education.
E.R. Bourne said,
March 9, 2013 at 11:28 pm
James,
Don’t you think, though, that the reason that the education system appears to be “anti-leftist” is because we are living in a post-revolutionary state? Christianity is dead, any semblance of western identity is dead, so why should we expect our rulers and educators to have the urgency of a Jacobin? They have been on the throne for decades.
Educational leftism only seems anti-revolutionary because it is the nature of human beings to have their practices crystallize into a form of tradition. After the first generation sheds the blood, the next just has to promulgate the corruption, which it can now do while appearing conservative.
Moreover, since leftism is profoundly anti-humane, something both you and thenyssan point to when describing its reaction to masculinity, it is incumbent upon the modern education system that it achieves a ubiquity and uniformity that can never be questioned. In other words, leftism must be incredibly authoritarian because it is a perpetual war against humanity’s natural inclinations.
The world Orwell describes in 1984 is anti-leftist in your sense, but it cannot ultimately be anti-revolutionary, it was the product of one.
James Chastek said,
March 10, 2013 at 12:40 pm
Part of stomping out masculine irascibility might be keeping a grip on power, but that seems secondary to me, and it would not justify the focus, intensity, and universality of the project. All the schools – public and private – a working from a very clear picture of what the educated man is, and what the well-mannered human male is. The sheer severity of the manners demanded – from the conformity of physical comportment to the absolute bans on aggression to the strictness of the taboos on various words (the restrictions on free speech are oppressive) – all point to a clear view of what the educated person is. Literacy and basic skills are not universally necessary (everyone is OK with widespread lapses in attainment in this sort of stuff) but the moral vision is uncompromising and absolute.
The goal of this moral education is the peace of a well-drilled populus with humble ambitions and dutiful lives, and which keeps quiet in exchange for being allowed private carnal enjoyments. The education system will create no men of ambitious and irascible genius, and as an upside we get no Caesars or Napoleons or Lenins or Hitlers. As another upside, the only riots that will happen will be among the, um, urban population (wink), and these will be minor skirmishes which we watch on the news and then take moral responsibility for from the comfort of the suburbs. War will become unthinkable or even impossible. And isn’t this a very attractive good? Didn’t St. Thomas himself say the first good of civil society is peace, an imperative that is even more pressing given the experience of the 20th century? The whole revolution of the 60’s was an attempt to make sure the wars never returned. After all, 1960 was about as close to world war as we are to 9-11, and the experience of 1914-1945 involved the psychological trauma (and moral corruption) of a thousand 9-11’s. If crushing the nature of little boys is what it takes to make sure that never happens again, so be it. If ya wanna make an omelet, etc.
I’m not saying I agree with all this, but I think the case is compelling, problematic, and difficult. That said, it’s too early to know whether this war on boys will blow up in our faces, that is, whether it will work to cage and sedate the beast rather than tame him. We cage them in with taboos on speech and action and sedate them with “forbidden” pleasures they are allowed to consume quietly and privately (and with lots of real sedatives too!) but these all leave the beast intact. We want the mediocrity and quiet that comes from denying moral absolutes (no John Browns!) but sooner or later the beast will realize that the lack of absolutes means that his cage is also not absolute.