Reflections at the Beginning of a New School Year

 

When I was young, I trusted and respected teachers. I always went along with the rules. An old diary reminds me I was diligent about never being late; one year I won a prize for best behaved.I was a good kid and a good student.

I now realize this was a mistake.

Not just that the troublemakers and the slackers and the guys ho just hung out did at least as well in the rough and tumble of real life as I. The problem was more that most of what the teachers taught us were lies.

We were taught science as a series of established truths about the physical universe. In later years, many, perhaps most, of these unquestionable truths have turned out not to be true, and I too often look like a fool when I propound them. Science, as they say, marches on. It is not a set of known truths, but an attitude of universal scepticism, that tests everything rather than accept anything on authority. It never makes any claim to truth, only to working hypotheses, and only disproves falsehoods. The false cosmology we were taught as science, in other words, was the opposite of science. It was worse than a waste of our time; it was misinformation.

In English, the later and usually best works of most great poets were not on the curriculum. This was so even through college. We were left with the false and depressing impression that poets always burned out in romantic youth. Yeats was the notable exception—even his latest poems appeared on the curriculum. Because, I suspect, he stayed pagan to the end.  The problem with all the others is that, as they matured, they all became devoutly Christian. And this was suppressed.

Worse, it is impossible to understand even their early works, English literature generally, except in the context of Judeo-Christian cosmology. Most art is religious art; it almost has to be, to be true art, for true art requires profundity. Yet this Judeo-Christian background was never taught, or even referred to. Instead, everything was read through the lens of Freudianism, or feminism, or Marxism, or structuralism, or Jungianism, or queer theory, or postcolonialism, or whatever intellectual fad was on offer. None of them coming near the point; all of them treating the writer himself as some kind of idiot who had no idea what he was actually saying.

English composition was also mistaught: I had to unlearn many of the supposed rules of grammar and composition learned in high school to become a professional editor and writer. Because they produce bad writing. Indeed, the fact that most people are taught how to write badly gave me my careers as an editor and writing coach. Some of the most egregious examples of classroom malpractice in writing have been collected in a book famous among editors, titled “Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins.” Most teachers have no idea how to write; and can only be trusted to apply rigid rules, which are invented purely for this purpose.

Fraudulent history was probably less common in my day than now. But the worst was the lie about Social Darwinism. We were taught, without explanation, that Social Darwinism was a misapplication of Darwin’s theory to human society. And I am embarrassed to remember that I bought this.

Darwin himself was a raging social Darwinist. And it is hard to see how his theory does apply to human society.

Darwin is the father of Nazi race theory. They were, they said, aiding the evolutionary struggle. War was the evolutionary struggle; the superior races would win, and evolve into a new, more powerful species.

The real atrocities of European colonialism in the latter half of the 19th century, the days of Heart of Darkness, were also due to Darwinian science. Nobody told us. Instead, longstanding and intrinsic Western cultural chauvinism, or even Christianity, were blamed.

And we were taught that the Christian opponents of Darwin were upset because his theory contravened a simple-minded literal reading of the Book of Genesis, the “seven days of creation.” His Christian opponents, such as William Jennings Bryan, were opposed to his theory primarily because they saw it militating against ethics, altruism, and human equality, and logically leading to racism and a war of all against all.

All this was swept under the carpet. 

As was the fact that the progressive movement, the political left during the first half of the Twentieth Century, embraced eugenics, racial segregation, government control of the economy, social regimentation, and to varying degrees, Mussolini and Hitler. We were taught instead that the Fascists and Nazis were “far right.” 

We were of course indoctrinated into the anti-Catholic “Black Legend.” We were taught of the Inquisition and the Crusades as though the former was a witchhunt, the latter a pogrom or a holocaust. Everyone was somehow given the impression that Galileo was burned at the stake, for asserting heliocentrism.

Most grievously, once I left Catholic grade school, once in high school and above, they gave us all to understand that belief in God was marginal, optional, a matter of faith and of personal opinion. This is grossly wrong: most great philosophers since Aristotle and Plato have asserted and offered proofs of His existence. His existence is the one bit of knowledge about which we can be most certain; more certain than of the existence of the material world, or of our own memories. This is also the most important thing to know, without which nothing else matters. This alone makes the malpractice of the public schools criminal and civilization-destroying. 

Solution: school vouchers, bust the ed schools, and let parents set up religious schools.