Not long ago a deer wandered out of the woods near our home at dawn and was struck down by a passing vehicle. A homeschooling mom who later chanced upon the carcass realized it was less than an hour old, as she had not seen it when she had driven out earlier that morning on another errand.
At that point she did the only sensible thing a homeschooling mom would do. She called up all the other moms in the homeschool network, and a hunter dad, and soon a half-dozen families and their children had gathered at a local farm to process the carcass.
Step-by-step the hunter showed the kids how to skin the hide and cut away the meat. The inner organs and other inedible parts were thrown into the field for the coyotes. Everybody got to participate in the experience, the youngest watching, the others cutting and skinning. My sons came back home grinning with blood on their T-shirts.
They might have been grinning, too, because their usual morning schedule had been interrupted. One of the advantages of homeschooling is that you can, more often than not, drop everything you are doing for a few hours, or a day, if something truly more interesting comes along.
This kind of spontaneity is harder to find in the regular school system, where the daily structure tends to be more rigid. If a deer gets struck down in the school parking lot, they don’t call the local hunter. They might pull down the window blinds to protect the children from emotional trauma; they might call the animal shelter to take the dead thing away; but they would never, never, put a halt to social studies and hurry outside to explore the strange wonders of deer anatomy.
Most of us who were schooled in the regular system, including myself, were so accustomed to the daily structure that we never questioned it. And most of us have no idea that we are, to a great degree, the educational descendants of the Prussians.
Prior to around 1850, schools in America were typically one-room arrangements with mixed age levels and no standard curriculum. Those early schools are a bit like the homeschool communities of today, where kids of different ages often learn and play together, and education can be tailored to the cognitive strengths and aptitudes of each child.
How did school become standardized? What was the motivation for this change?
As Susan Wise Baur points out in Rethinking School, schooling in Prussia underwent a transformation after the nation’s humiliating military defeat by Napoleon:
Struggling to rebuild, Prussians statesmen decided to organize schools like military units, in order to instill the will to fight and build pride in Prussia’s historically pugnacious national culture. Students were organized into platoons by age and assigned to a single “squadron leader”, a system that made the transition into military service quite straightforward.
In 1843, Horace Mann, who was Secretary of Education for the state of Massachusetts, did a tour of the Prussian schools. He was so impressed that, with his support, the Prussian system was introduced to the state of Massachusetts in 1847.
By the turn of the century, this military-inspired system had become the norm of the nation, bringing with it a factory-like efficiency, as “one teacher could corral and indoctrinate dozens of students at a time, as long as they were of roughly the same age and ability”.
And, as John Taylor Gatto suggests, the main purpose of the indoctrination was to create a population that would conform to the demands of a rapidly industrializing nation. Such a nation no longer needed the self-reliance, ingenuity, courage, or other “frontier virtues” that had helped it grow.
These virtues were in fact now threatening and seen as liabilities to the emerging economic system. “Highly centralized mass production economies,” Gatto observes, “can’t function well without colonizing individual minds and converting them into a mass mind”. As a result, under the new school system,
the goals of good moral values, good citizenship skills, and good personal development were exchanged for a novel fourth purpose—becoming a human resource to be spent by businessmen and politicians. By the end of the nineteenth century, school was looked at by insiders as a branch of industry.
When math is subjective
The idea of the “factory model of education” has been critiqued as a simplification of how schooling actually evolved in the United States. Still, it is no stretch to suggest that high levels of social efficiency are needed if a society is to grow to a mass scale—beyond the scale of villages and towns—and that organized public schooling is a vehicle to support that growth.
If we fast-forward a century and a half to the present, the structure of the original Prussian model remains unchanged. There are teachers (squadron leaders), there are classrooms of children (platoons), and there is culturally relevant knowledge that is taught (indoctrination).
And yet, while the model remains, what happens within the model is changing. For many, our educational system is viewed as a toxic Western cultural inheritance that needs to be dismantled and radically transformed.
In California, a white English teacher has claimed that teaching standardized grammar, syntax, and essay structures are a form of “white supremacy”:
What do I mean by that? Well public education is an institution that upholds lots of problematic systems in our society like white supremacy, and misogyny and colonization, etc…
Well, let's look at how we write essays [where we] start with an introduction that includes a thesis, always cite your sources, use transition words like ‘however’ and ‘therefore.’ These are all made-up rules. They were created by Westerners in power.
If there is anything surprising here, it’s that the teacher did not go further and suggest that commas are fascists and only Nazis use apostrophes. Meanwhile, a few thousand miles away, in the province of Ontario, a newly conceived mathematics curriculum was initially described like this in 2021:
An equitable mathematics curriculum recognizes that mathematics can be subjective...Mathematics has been used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges.
Following media reports and political embarrassment about these words, the paragraph was swiftly deleted from the government website. But the underlying spirit remains with us: a belief that oppressive Western values remain embedded within our educational system and must be expunged.
Even if we uncritically assume that Western education should be defined mainly by its evils, and that the goal of education should be to redress these evils—rather than to focus on knowledge and skills acquisition—a problem remains: the elevation of subjectivity as a core part of the solution will plunge us deeper into oppression, yet of a new and deadlier variant.
The veneration of the impulse
The claim that math can be subjective means that the individual person, rather than the reality in which that person exists, determines truth. The suggestion that citing sources or using “however” in essays are actually cunning strategies that enslave marginalized people, and that the solution is to free these people by focusing on their individual speech patterns, has the same effect: it situates truth within the subjective.
Individual subjectivity is a part of life and a source of human originality. But subjectivity itself can become oppressive when used as a source of liberation. An excessive focus on ourselves makes us less able to adapt to the demands of reality, and more dependent on continual affirmation that our subjective experience is “valid”.
I can insist that 2+2 equals 5, because it feels right to me, but I will not be able to manage my finances. I will also need other voices around me, real or simulated, to assure me that 5 is, after all, the correct answer.
All this goes beyond education. I previously wrote about the fiat system—the emerging global system involving fourth industrial age technologies. One of the basic ideas of the new system is that the individual self is the center of reality. Our subjective felt needs come before everything else, and technologies and doctrines are supplied to reinforce this view.
Adults can struggle with addiction and dependency to substances, devices, emotions, and sex. But at least they have a fully functioning brain. Children do not. The frontal lobes of the brain—a region involved in planning, foresight, and impulse control—do not fully develop until around the mid-twenties.
And so, a kid jumps up and down on a couch, not thinking he might stumble and slam into the glass coffee table. A fourteen-year-old has sex with her boyfriend of two weeks, because she’s really, really sure he loves her. On TikTok, the world’s most popular app for Gen Z, a girl bobs her head and makes noises to music for 10 seconds and gets 660 million views.
The frontal lobes are the braking system of the brain. They allow us to come to a screeching halt, just before we do that stupid or pointless thing—or why we can foresee the folly long before it happens.
The cultivation of hyper-individualism in youth lures them into their own folly, and hails it as good. Their here-and-now impulses become their moral center; a lust for dopamine becomes their motivation; boredom becomes dread, and objective constraint becomes oppression.
All this plays into the hands of globalist political and corporate forces. Hyper-individualism breeds social isolation, and isolated individuals are easier to control.
The California English teacher who believes she is rescuing her students from white supremacy may be encouraging a new kind of oppression within a new system that does not enslave nation or tribe, but individual minds. White supremacy is evil, but tech supremacy is hell.
The Prussians are long gone, and our assumptions about schooling are changing rapidly, but one thing is still true: we are operating within a political and economic system whose primary goal is managed and owned by a small powerful minority. Gatto observed that “colonizing individual minds and converting them into a mass mind” was central to the second industrial revolution, but it is just as central, if not more, for the fourth.
Surviving the Milk Separator
How do we elude the mind-colonizing influences of the system? Gatto recounts a court battle between an Amish community and the state of Wisconsin, which might give us some clues. The state wanted Amish children attend public school until age 16, and sought to make them comply through police power.
The Amish resisted on these grounds: they said government schooling was built on the principle of the mechanical milk separator. It whirled the young mind about until both the social structure of the Amish community, and the structure of private family life, were fragmented beyond repair.
The Amish understood that separating children from families and local community would turn people into disconnected individuals. The Supreme Court of Wisconsin, which fortunately ruled in the Amish’s favor (Wisconsin v. Yoder, 1972), observed the following:
Aided by a history of three centuries as an identifiable religious sect and a long history as a successful and self-sufficient segment of American society, the Amish have demonstrated the sincerity of their religious beliefs, the interrelationship of belief with their mode of life, the vital role that belief and daily conduct play in the continuing survival of Old Order Amish communities, and the hazards presented by the State's enforcement of a statute generally valid as to others…
The court battle between the Amish and the state took place in the early 1970s, a time of social change, yet decades before the worldwide centrifuge of the internet, where the whirling of young minds, social fragmentation, and intrusive state and global politics, have become normative.
We can’t all be like the Amish, but their resistance to the mechanical milk separator of the state shows us considerations and principles that are still vital today:
- family
- small and local community
- self-sufficiency
- connection to land
- religious or spiritual beliefs that are tangibly woven into life
- ways and traditions with longstanding historical roots
- avoiding anything that promotes the separation or isolation of people from each other or their way of life
None of these is specific to education, but together they form the essential soil in which all learning, and life itself, is grounded.
In our own lives, it may be constructive to see these considerations and principles as goals to aspire toward, or lenses to see through, rather than categories we can immediately achieve.
For instance, all of the families that got together a few months ago to process the deer carcass belong to the same homeschooling network, and most to the same church community, yet few of them live in local proximity, and none are self-sufficient.
All of the families also use electricity in their daily lives, whereas the older order Amish do not use the public power grid, keeping them disconnected from TV and internet, and thus free of the attention-snatching and mind-warping power of these devices—another distinct advantage, surely.
There might even be an argument that, in the long-term, we all have to become something like the Amish to survive the emerging global technological system. Certainly, if the pain of the system becomes too much to bear, desperation will drive many out of it, even if it means giving up their Twitter feeds and never seeing another Netflix show again (actually, that might be a relief).
Until then, we are pilgrims in the machine. Protecting ourselves and our families means seeking out relationships with others on the same path, a path that leads us closer, not further, to being human.
The path will keep us real. And it will give us the eyes to see more clearly—to see a deer in the woods perhaps, just before it dashes into the shadows.
Image Credit: Amish children in carriage