Intrepid Education

They go after the boys, because strong men are their worst enemies.

“Every student misbehavior reflects an unmet need,” is one of the most progressive educational opinions with which I concur. However, that unmet need, contrary to what the progressive educational establishment holds, is almost always character formation, in one form or another, and to one degree or another.

The point that this person is trying to make is the epitome of our distorted understanding of excellence. Both the institution and many, not all, of the people who matriculate from the institution have proven time and again that the number of letters that trail behind one's email signature are not a direct correlation to the degree of one's wisdom. Certification in anything, in and of itself, warrants no respect. Rather, proof of the value of that certification, in the form of both good and purposeful deeds, as well as a love for doing such deeds, reflects the value of any signifier of completion. Fostering these qualities is education. Giving someone a physical or digital piece of paper that promises that that person did their homework and got good grades is just an abstract claim that someone was educated, regardless of whether or not they were.

Any educator worth putting in front of a class should not only think that this is unproductive and unhealthy, but also know that this is evil. Continuing to put children en masse in front of screens on days that are supposed to be without school, and continuing the “temporary” measures assembled for a bogus emergency cannot be dismissed as pure incompetence. Masked ghouls such as the people decreeing and supporting these directives have no business forming souls.

I routinely make a Freudian slip when addressing Aquinas and Augustine. I have done it for years, just did it here, and cannot seem to curb the habit. I know who both are, have read both of their works, but for whatever reason catch myself using their names interchangeably far too late after doing so. Perhaps it is simply a testament to their being two theological giants whose name begins with the same letter, and that the syllables of their names have a similar distribution of inflection. Mea culpa.

An eighth grader in 1912 was far wiser than the average adult of our time.

Another “Catholic” college has decided to stop being Catholic, and deserves to receive zero applications for the coming academic year. Add it to your already extensive list of institutions to avoid like the plague.

Sign of a decadent society: it separates man from his forefathers.

Doing hard things creates the strong men who create good times. Good times make things easy. Easy things then create the weak men who cause bad times. Never do easy things.

One of the wisest male-specific maxims I have ever heard comes from a wise priest of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter (@fsspna): a man is constantly discerning. His whole life occurs in a perpetual state of evaluation, of both himself, and those under his charge. @AnthonyEsolen writes of this beautifully in No Apologies. The man externalizes. He looks outward, for good and bad alike on the horizon. Is he building, growing, and otherwise expanding the scope and scale of his humanity? Men owe it to themselves to be both asking this question and acting upon the just answers that follow it in perpetuity. Flourishing for the man is not so much measured by any single measurement at a particular point in time as it is by the cumulative growth over time. To grow is to live. To be constant is to fail. Comfort and stability are feminine teloi.

This issue reminds me of the X discourse some months back about insecure, narcissistic teachers unjustly exercising their power over students to satisfy some sort of passion for control. Hundreds, if not thousands of anecdotes circulated. I both correctly predicted it, and was not the least bit surprised when it almost immediately proved to be true: the overwhelming majority of these anecdotes were shared by men, former boys. That too, says a great deal about modern education.

The fact that boys have disliked school for generations, with little to no variation amongst various socioeconomic, sociopolitical, demographic, or cultural categories should have raised the alarm on the state of the modern school long ago. It is not rich or poor boys, black or white, or those of stable or unstable homes who do not like school. Statistically, it is the entire male sex: half of the population. That is an egregious indictment of the system writ large.

Democracy, not to be confused with a federal republic like America, inevitably leads to tyranny. Democracy with a morally weak majority already is tyranny.

Their greatest fear is children who are actually learning.

Now, an image of me in the national dress of the country best represented by my material...

What the world would look like if I was king, according to @Grok.