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Speaker 2: Man, All right, George back, Welcome to the J. Burdons Show.
How are you doing?
Speaker 4: I'm doing wonderful. It's great to be with you again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm very glad to have you on the You
and I have been doing sort of an informal longer
series about you know, different populations in America, I mean honestly,
for over a year now somewhat infrequently, but this is
something more topical, something you wanted to bring up directly,
and so I figured I'd just hand the floor to you.
Speaker 12: So I wanted to talk about what's going on in
private schools, which is the only kind of education I
have in a direct connection with. I'm interested in diagnosing
the problems and identifying ways forward, at least for dissident educators,
which is mostly homeschoolers these days, though there are good
private schools out there still.
Speaker 4: So I.
Speaker 12: Penciled down what I call the neo con influence in
private education. And this is an important thing for us
to consider because we have we have the Conservatives, and
I think that this has been a big part of
our discourse these days, where we've seen some unmasking of
the Conservatives. We've seen an apocalyptic moment for the conservative
American and we've all found ourselves asking the question, just
what are they trying to conserve? And the answer inevitably
is something of the establishment. They're trying to shore up
a system that has failed a number of particular beliefs,
mostly from the previous generation, which we should understand it was.
It was the investment in those beliefs that caused the
creation of a great number of Christian schools of all
stripes of church supported schools. The classical school movement is
very much invested here, and that is not to malign
anyone invested there. I have friends there. I have a
shout out to a special someone out there, part of
a charter school, who reached out to me because he
listens to this podcast and wanted to hire me. And
I have nothing but but gratitude for that particular person
and many other people in the classical schools, the charter
schools and such. There are great many charter classical schools
that cannot talk specifically about religious faith, but nevertheless are
trying to do things.
Speaker 4: But the.
Speaker 12: Neo conservative or we might just call them all conservative investment,
the political perspective is something that we must face. So
one of my key influences as an educator is C. S.
Lewis's little book The Abolition of Man, which I think
is essential reading and it has particular importance for an educator.
Lewis's cause for writing this book was a book.
Speaker 4: Of literature education.
Speaker 12: It starts out as a piece of criticism about a
book for education. He gives the writers of the book.
The actual authors of the text he's criticizing. He gives
them some Roman names, and then he picks apart something
that they are making the foundational instruction in their text.
The story he tells is very evocative. He says that
they quote Samuel Coleridge, the poet, and the poet looks
at a waterfall and calls it sublime. He calls it
incredibly beautiful and lovely. And the authors of the school
text say Coleridge is actually talking about his own private
feelings when he says this, that this is beautiful. Lewis says,
this is the process of debunking, and what they are
debunking is any sense of absolute objective value that anything
is worthy of the attribution sublime. In effect, whenever we
apply a value judgment to something, we're only saying something
about our own private feelings. And Lewis says this makes
the value attribution ultimately meaningless. Lewis says that the educators
in this context, they have cut the soul out of
the students long before he is old enough to understand
the possibility of having a certain experience of actually seeing
objective value in anything and correctly describing it. And this
was an inspiration for me. I always took this book
very seriously. I first encountered it as an undergraduate, and
as a teacher, I often read it and reflected on
what I was doing. So I started my career teaching literature,
American history and government. Thankfully, I got ancient literature, which
I couldn't have asked for anything more permanently valuable. I
taught Sophocles and Homer, I taught Dante in my literature survey,
and in the course of my career I suddenly discovered
when that first teaching post wrapped up for me, my
contract was not renewed after seven years of teaching the
same classes. I had discovered in those last years that
it wasn't just the parents who had ingested this debunking
spirit that Lewis had talked about. It was not just
the students who frequently came to me already believing in
an ideological way that the debunking was the essence of
freedom and liberty. It was even the administrators of the
school who had internalized that kind of belief, and that
was the kind of thing they were trying to preserve
in their institutional work. They wanted to preserve a format,
a perspective that essentially allowed for that, and the conflict
I found myself in with initially students, then parents, and
finally the administration was the point of debunking and whether
or not we could make value attributions. So Lewis talks
about this in his book that ultimately these value attributions,
these are the unsentimental sentiment, as Weaver had it, and
ideas have consequences. This is the essential faith, the dogmatic belief,
if you will, in the permanent, enduring human value of families,
of loyalty to friends, of partiality, to one's own homeland,
to one's own kin, folk, of faith in God, of
the devotion of religion, and it ultimately can only replace
them with sophistry, which is this rationalistic argument that undermines
the foundations of all of those values. What is Lewis's
primary purpose in his book The Abolition of Man, where
he's saying the undermining of all those values destroys the
essential elements of a human being. These are the things
that make life worth living. These are actually the foundations
of culture itself, and all of these things, these these
sophistical debunking process, this rationalized criticism of these things destroys
the harmony.
Speaker 4: Of a society.
Speaker 12: So I discovered that this, this kind of sophistical arguments
for argument's sake about values was not something that even
the leaders of the school were prepared to contend about.
In spite of the the slogan of the school where
I first began my teaching career. They had taken me
in as a rookie without any teaching experience. They gave
me my chance, and I talked for them for seven years,
and I and that that was an incredibly happy and
productive time.
Speaker 4: In my life.
Speaker 12: I was able to welcome to children into my family.
I was able to buy my first home because of that,
and I have incredible gratitude for all of it.
Speaker 4: It was what made me professional.
Speaker 12: I am I am now. The slogan of that school
was various absolute aspects, truth, beauty. Those are how they
described them That that was how they described themselves.
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Speaker 12: And it was a stunning moment when I realized that
these things were adjustable. And this is the situation that administrators,
any administrator anywhere, will recognize the wide path the latitude
that must be maintained to keep your institution from being
a esoteric concern. Something that does not have enough appeal
to keep it operating. And this is something I did
not understand as a teacher. You know, I was just
devoted to my subjects and trying to explain them the
best I could. But as an administrator, you're thinking about
the bottom line. Necessarily, you're trying to maintain the budget,
and you must know your audience and so on. You
you are recruiting students, you're admitting students, you're trying to
graduate the students. You don't want people to be alienated,
you don't want them to be falling off. And this
is one of the great challenges of education now because
the great temptation of the teacher, as as it is
for the administrator. The great temptation is the sin of flattery.
It's that of lying to people for your own advancement.
And every teacher will face that when they have to
grade something. And I found myself in my last years
of teaching, if I was giving something lower than a B,
I needed to visit several administrators and make sure that
I had them on my side, because invariably there would
be a parent that would be very upset. They would
want a meeting with the administrator and Their line of
attack was very familiar. They would say, what are we
paying you for? And you're giving my daughter a c
an F. What are we paying you for? You're obviously
doing something wrong. We've invested here, and so on. It's
a minority that does that, but they determine an awful
lot about how things operate, because if a teacher is
going to give the grade on an objective level, you
know the paper was illegible. You know, you couldn't sit
and read it. It was so incomprehensible. It did not
contain valuable information, It did not fulfill the basic requirements
of the of the assignment, and so on. That's that's
one thing. But if it's a philosophical difference, Now I'm
giving assignments concerning objective values, most most often in literature,
which is my subject today, the individualist, the liberal of
the modern day. We'll say, well, the authorities of whatever circumstance,
who were they to tell the hero how he should act?
He is striking out, He is being a fearless individual
with his own line of reasoning, and that is heroic.
I will apologize for the hero, now, said said coherently.
That wouldn't necessarily be a bad paper. But the message
in the class was that of the objective social values
that Lewis describes. So Lewis in his book he says,
until quite modern times, all teachers and even all men
believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions
on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it. Believed,
in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could
merit our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.
The idea is restated in Aristotle that the aim of
education is to make the pupil like and dislike what
he ought, that this is not something that's finally up
to them. And this could not have been better matched
with my own literature material. I was teaching Oedipus, rex,
I was teaching some Hesiod, I was teaching Homer's Iliad,
and finally, the last great poem in the class was
Dante's Inferno. All of them concern these absolute values, the
transgression of which leads to eternal ultimately eternal punishment, something
implied even in the Greek pagan texts. So it was
extremely appropriate for the subject matter, and it was the
overarching theme of the class. That is where I fell
into trouble. I was teaching the Ordo Amorus, which Lewis
also mentions something that needs to be on the forefront
of our our thought on these things, and ultimately of
incredible political importance, the properly ordered social loves and regards.
That we prefer our own family, that we prefer the
people we share with our friends, the people that we
are in community with, we prefer them to the outsider,
to the dissenter, to the foreigner, to those outside of
our own communities, And that this is the fundamental order
of society. To have these properly ordered loves is of
incredible significance, and that in fact the ordo amoris, according
to Saint Augustine, according to Aristotle, according to Plato, according
to Thomas Aquinas, the these are the basic elements of
education itself. This is what education is for, to teach
us what is good, what is bad, to teach us
what our duties are, To teach us where our loyalties
must lie, which ensures the future of any community. Communities
all have limited resources. They must allocate those resources properly
based on the proper sentiments, and if they do not
do so they will be pillaged, they will be destroyed,
they will not form families, they will not provide for
their children, they will not stand by for their friends,
and so on. So this is such a fundamental thing,
and it struck me long before I was a teacher.
It struck me as so profound and so needful.
Speaker 4: It was a root of my classes.
Speaker 12: I was very I was very devoted to this. I
took Homer's Iliad as an example. In book nine of
Homer's Iliad, Achilles is confronted with a procession of emissaries.
Achilles has separated himself from the fighting. He claims he
does not care if his companions live or die in
the siege in front of Troy. He is offended by Agamemnon.
Agamemnon has publicly embarrassed him and humiliated him, and he
is he's staying in his tent and sulking, cultivating his
anger against the slight, against this public dishonor. And his
friends come to him. They're sent by Agamemnon. Agamemnon admits
that he was wrong. He pledges to restore everything to Achilles,
and more. He wants to make amends. Promises Achilles the
authority over cities. He promises Achilles gold bars, racing horses.
He promises Achilles cauldrons and tripods, an unusual gift in
our conception, why would you want giant barbecue sets? But
the reason being that the ability to entertain large groups
is something that consolidates political and social status. It gives
you authority. If you can feed large numbers of people,
then you have increased clout. He promises Achilles, even his
own daughter, making him an air. There really isn't anything
else conceivable that Agamemnon could promise to Achilles to make amends,
and yet Achilles refuses to be reconciled. Now, the responses
to the are very interesting. We see a long series
of speeches in book nine of the Iliad, and this
was an occasion for me for a major essay assignment.
I had my students for many years they would write
an essay in response to this, And the whole point
of the essay was the ordo amoris, the properly ordered
loyalties sentiments. The response from Odysseus is the most important
of all of them. Odysseus is the first one to
speechify to Achilles. Achilles. He says Achilles. Agamemnon wants to
make amends. Human beings offend one another, but we have
to keep living. We must make amends with one another.
We make amends for any wrong that could possibly be,
for greater wrongs than we're done to you, he says.
Agamemnon has offered you all of these things, but consider
the other motives. You have to comply your father himself.
He told you to guard your anger, to not let
anger consume you. You were told you were given this,
this role. You are a soldier. You must care what
happens to your friends, what happens to your comrades, what
happens to your whole community. You must care about whether
they live or die.
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Speaker 12: That is that is part of your essentral duty as
a soldier. You cannot be in it only for yourself.
And he tells Achilles that he has got a responsibility
for his community, for his friends, and then he has
a responsibility to his father, who ordered him and who
has proper authority over him. So he makes this a
very very good appeal. Then we have at the at
the tail end, we have Ajax, the warrior who makes
the final speech, and it's the shortest of the speeches
to Achilles. Ajax says, Achilles has a heart of stone.
It is not like a human heart. He does not
care for his friends. He is like is like vegetable matter.
He does not have warmth in his heart, a very
important theme in Homer to have warmth in your heart
towards the right ends. This is a powerful symbol in
Homer for that correct sentiment, that proper orientation of loves.
And Ajax says to Achilles, he says, a man will
reconcile even for his murdered brother. And yet Achilles says,
he cares about nothing but for his own regard. And
I would give that to them and send them out
to write a paper. And the goal is to recognize
this order of values. Achilles eventually rejoins the battle, but
not for the reasons you might think. He does not
reconcile with Agamemnon.
Speaker 4: Initially.
Speaker 12: It's only when his friend Patrickleus, a soldier who cares
for his friends, who cares whether they live or die,
he goes and fights an achilles armor, and he is killed.
What is more natural than a soldier going into battle
than dying. But Achilles will not be reconciled to that.
He goes and has his vengeance on Hector, who had
killed Patricklus, and only reconciles with his community after that point.
Speaker 4: Are several things there. Yes, indeed, I.
Speaker 2: Think it's interesting. You may remember, I guess this would
have been almost a year ago now, when suddenly you
know everyone on the political left was very concerned about
this idea of Ordo a Morris because J. D. Dance
mentioned it in the speech. And what's interesting to me
is that there are certain things that we as as moderns,
and I certainly include the sort of conservatives we're talking about,
are very comfortable with. And so, for instance, in the
example of Achilles, what it's like, Oh, well, there's a
very comfortable narrative, which is partially true. It is an
aspect of what's going on, which talks about the rage,
the arrogance of Achilles. But the element that you were
talking about, the incorrect privileging, putting your own above or
putting your own honor from a certain perspective above your
your fulial piety, your duty to those around you. It's
a much more uncomfortable. That's a more uncomfortable thing for that,
for that sort of system of values to poke it.
And I think it's interesting. This is maybe slightly less
relevant to Homer directly, but it's something that you mentioned
it before, which is to what extent is Western civilization valuable? Well,
is it valuable as sort of addressing right as part
of the process of finishing you know, your son or
daughter into you know, a member of the upper middle
class or is it does it have intrinsic worth? Do
you owe something to your civilization? And I think that
that dissonance, that gap between stated and revealed preference is
very important, right, Like, why are we going through you know, this,
this sort of ritual of learning, Homer? Are we doing
it because it's something that you can bring up in
a college application essay and and you know, wow, the recruiter.
I mean, obviously it probably wouldn't work now, but hypothetically,
you know, or is it learning about something that is important?
Right that the building blocks of the civilization which birthed
you something that is inherently better than other things is
preferable to them.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I kind of threw a bunch at you there back
The idea interrupted the stream of thought, But I realized
there are multiple things that I wanted to say earlier
and I hadn't gotten to Yes.
Speaker 12: Absolutely, and this was the This the impetus for one
of the very first questions on my midterm review, when
I was going over big questions that I want them
to consider because I'm trying to set them up for
essay questions on the midterm, I asked them at the
first part of the review. It was a reference to
my initial introductory lecture in the class. I said, when
someone describes something beautiful, are they talking about something real
that you can see, that you can appreciate, or are
they only talking about their own private feelings? That was
my question, and this is ultimately the reason why we
would teach Homer, because Homer is talking about things of
eternal quality, and most certainly things directly concerning Westerners. What
is a Westerner? What sets them apart? What things do
they believe? What have they cultivated for thousands of years?
And Homer is a wonderful introduction to these things, discussing,
you know, Bronze Age warriors in the rest, it nevertheless
isolates those things, and we see that with the Odyssey.
One of my favorite examples from Homer. Odysseus is tempted
by Circe, the goddess who loves him. She is eternally young,
and she offers him the greatest, the greatest bribe ever
encountered in literature. She offers him immortality and eternal youth
if he is to stay with her. And what does
he do? He embraces his own mortality, which is also
what Achilles does by the way, he knows he will die.
He knows that the best part of his life is
already passed. His own foot vitality is fading. He is
now older, he is now, you know, around fifty or something.
He wants to go home. He wants to see his
own aged father, he wants to raise his son, he
wants to see his wife. He wants to restore his
authority in his estate. And he turns down Circe, the
goddess who offers him limitless pleasure, because he wants his home,
because that offers him the greatest satisfaction, to deliver his
home from those that would despoil it, to save his
son from those that want to kill him. And he
has no assurance of success in that quest. He does succeed,
and that's why the Odyssey is so inspiring, and the
gods are intervening on his side because his cause is just.
But this is the ultimate question, these great values. I
love that particular example of Odysseus in the Odyssey, but
the ultimate question is those enduring qualities. And this was
what first got me into serious trouble. That essay, or
that exam review question to set them up for that
essay question. My students are mostly like anyone in any time.
They're a product of their time. They are liberals, as
are the administrators. They believe that there's a bunch of
different ideas out there and it is the province of
the individual to choose among them, to hear them in discussion,
and also not to be told which one is right,
which one is just so theoretically, they'll entertain the debate
between the atheist and the theist. They'll entertain the debate
between the materialist and the the orthodox believer who says
there is a spiritual realm, there are eternal values. They'll
entertain the debate between the communists and the liberal and
they think, oh, well, this is all free and we're
going to let the best one win. But they do
this for children, and there's a certain level where we
must encounter unfamiliar ideas and entertain thoughts and the rest
we see even at the college level, this is something
that is still very powerful because the the established course
is so very powerful. We conform to the authority, and
it's it's very rare to encounter someone that doesn't.
Speaker 4: This is why it.
Speaker 12: Matters where we invest with education. But even in the
Christian high school, there is this strong conviction that no
one should tell them what to believe, even when it
comes to things like the authority of the parents, the
adherence to the faith of their Christian Church, loyalty to
their homeland, and so on. The idea is more like
John Stuart Mills, very subversive, the idea that everyone should
be a totally free actor with nothing to compel his allegiance.
And when I gave that question one year, one particular year,
I remember so well because it led to a kind
of scandal. I still had years of teaching ahead of me,
but I gave that question to the class, and in
the examiner of you, things went out of control. I
had a student question me initially saying, well, you say,
a statement of value is a recognition of some objective fact,
at least potentially, and not a reference to one's own
preferences or feelings.
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Speaker 12: What if I prefer something else? And I asked for
the context. Now, this is the same class where I
was teaching Dante, and of course in Dante we're talking
about sexual morality, and that was something that comes up
in the class. She said, well, I have friends that
like to sleep around and they use contraception.
Speaker 4: In high school. What do you think of that?
Speaker 12: And I said, well, that seems to be a bad
course of life. Because we we have sexual relations with people,
were connected with that individual for the rest of our lives,
whether or not we want it, which is one of
the reasons why we don't even have to have sex.
We will feel connection to those we've united with emotionally,
those we've imagined ourselves with. In some respect. So I
was talking in those terms, and I got a very
spirited response from several It was a minority. Most of
the students did not relate to what was being said,
but it was a minority of students that were so
inspirited by this something that we had talked about. By
the way, we were talking about the circle of lust
in Dante, for instance, where we see these these tormented
lovers united together in a kind of punishment. They're weeping,
though they're embracing, they're weeping, and they are adulterers. They
are you know, famous, famous people from history that Dante describes.
And I would point to them and say, this is
this is the kind of torment of a failed relationship,
a breakup where you're united to someone but it only
causes you grief to remember. And it wasn't something that
exploded at the time. It seemed more more acceptable in
the context, but in this other context where it was
brought up, it was a point of controversy I had.
I had another student who was much less uh, much less.
Speaker 4: Thoughtful on the question. She spoke up.
Speaker 12: She said, what about what about our food preferences? What
if I prefer to eat candy instead of the meal
for dinner, and I said, well, that's actually a very
good example. This is this is a very objective example.
You eat junk, you're made unhealthy, and that causes suffering.
We know what you ought to eat. This is not
a question at all I had. I had a long
drawn out meeting that it went to the administray because
I was telling the students that they couldn't eat refined
sugar because it was their preference, because of objective value,
and it was the role of the teacher to tell
them how they ought to live. But it came down
to the absurd example of lollipops as a substitute for
a square meal. That was the example that was brought
up in class. The most controversial question aside from the
sexual one, which had its own angry meetings with parents
concerning they thought I was being inappropriate, and I believe
I acquitted myself on the point. But the most controversial
question aside from that was I said, I believe it
had to have been in discussion in class. I don't
think I ever wrote this down, but I was looking
for an example of bad art, and I was thinking
of something egregious. Specifically, I was thinking of something that
I did not believe any parent in my school would
go to bat for would immediately see my point and
find it find it obvious, because I did not want
controversy on the question, and I realized things were things
were touchy and worrisome. I was concerned about the response
I was getting from this minority of my students. So
I said, it's like saying that Lady Gaga is not
worth your time or study, that it's wasteful and ugly objectively,
and that in music, you could devote your life to
the study of Mozart and that would be a worthy
use of your time, whereas Lady Gaga is disgusting and
is not worth even even your five minutes to listen
to a song. Well, that got an uproarious response I had.
I had several passionate students I had touched on something
they liked, which I did not anticipate. This was before
Lady Gaga sang the national anthem for Biden's inauguration, which
I found I found especially appropriate. After my Lady Gaga thing,
something I talked about for years, that I that I
went that I staked my reputation on the ugliness of
Lady Gaga and lost credibility with my employers. I contended
and said that this is analogous to the full meal,
the square meal with vegetables and protein, and the lollipops.
But it's even worse. It's really like shit. It's like
eating shit. And this this got me into serious hot water.
It wasn't the word I used to describe with my
my students, but is nevertheless what I believe. That very day,
I walked down the hallway and I encountered another teacher,
the mother of one of the students who had contended
with me that day, and I said, oh, I had
an interaction. I suspected this was going to come back
at me. I said, I was talking with your daughter today.
In the midst of this, her daughter walks up. I
hadn't seen her there. She walks up. She had already
told her mother about her interaction with me, and her
mother says, yes, you were telling her what she ought
to eat. This is a high school student with her mother,
and her mother says, yes, you were telling her that
she had bad taste in food. And her daughter is
standing right there to accuse me in front of her mother.
Speaker 4: She says yes.
Speaker 12: He says, I don't know what I should what I
ought to eat. And I said to the mother, in
all seriousness, we were talking about lollipops versus a meal.
I thinking this is going to get respect, and she says, no,
if my daughter wants to eat something, it's her business,
you have no say. And what's all this nonsense about
objectivity about this that there are things that are worth
eating and things that are not worth eating. And I said, well,
the question is a little more complex than that. I
even brought this into our discussion in the class. I
said dark chocolate would be better than lollipops because there's
more to taste, because it's a more sophisticated enjoyment. And
her mother said, well, that's just bigotry. And then I
had some meetings. I had several meetings after that with
aggrieved parents whose students went home to tell them about
out my Lady Gaga opinion. I had one parent that
came in to say, oh, well, all that, all that
Beethoven stuff, that's all fine, but you can't tell anybody
what they should like. I had a parent that said,
I have never heard of Lady Gaga, and I quote,
never heard of Lady Gaga, but I'm going to tell
my children to listen to them, to her so that
they won't be a bigot like you, which just made
my eyes pop out. I did not and that and
that was my my ultimate mistake. I did not know
my audience. I didn't know ultimately who I was teaching for.
And this is this is the bigger problem, because this,
this is the mainstream, and it does not it doesn't
need to be the preponderance. It does not need to
be fifty percent. It need only be a few and that,
you know, with a with a school that's reliant on tuition,
which is really the only thing we would have to
work with with any sort of dissidence where it's enough
to end the career.
Speaker 2: Here are several things there, And it's funny to me
because you know, when you when you say the term
like neo conservative, it's tough because there's both a specific
and a generalized meaning to that. For instance, like in
this context, we're basically just talking about like normal conservatives, right,
like conninc types, versus like the actual literal neoconservatives. Because
one of the things that I find so funny is
that if you actually go into you know, like real
neoconservatives velocity. One of the things that they are quite
concerned about is the decay of objective morals right they
view that they view relativism. That's what's being wrong with
our country. And it's interesting to me that you know
many of the people who.
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Speaker 7: What's brought me into therapy? Bone watch alarms. They're ruining
my life. I can't enjoy listening to music or podcasts
anymore like normal people because that dreadful sound is ringing
in my head day and night.
Speaker 12: Woo woo woo.
Speaker 13: With their damn fifteen seconds response time.
Speaker 7: I'd never get away with us. Plus they're twenty four
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Speaker 2: Would either champion their beliefs explicitly or just by osmosis
have discarded that core central tenet and have basically, you know,
kind of kept this this kind of very you know,
watered down form of cultural conservatism where it's basically just
you know, it's it's progressivism, but without the gay stuff.
And even then there's kind of a ratchet and prawl
that you know, many on the right have gust that
the you know, the values of yesterday's conservatives are completely
and totally unacceptable. And I mean, I think that the
bigger problem, the bigger problem in all of this right
is again right, like, why do people send their children
to private education? Do they do that to raise their
children outside of the influence of modern culture, the regime
as we would say it, or to accredit them? And
that's a problem that needs to be addressed because if
the answer is simply to accredit them, well they've got
you by the nose, because you can't ever do anything
too outside of you know, higher education. You can't do
anything that goes against them too much, because then you'll
never be allowed to index with that system. Similarly, I
think that this has sort of been improved, but talking
to you know, other people at similar institutions, it seemed
like COVID was sort of the worst time for this,
because effectively, what you had is any of these private
schools were effectively one of the only educational institutions that
was open. And so what happened, at least as far
as I've had it explained to me, is that a
whole bunch of kids got set there because their parents
wanted them to go to any school, and so you
had a lot of that side stepping of the traditional gatekeeping. Right,
Someone's like, well, I don't care if it's a crazy
religious school, I just want my kid there, and then
that begins to metastasize. I think it's a difficult thing
because there does need to be some sort of of gatekeeper,
and this becomes incredibly difficult. Less so now, but when
you have a hostile administration and effectively a whole office
of the DOJ that exists to ruin the life of
anyone who says you can't send your kid here. If
you're a lesbian like, that's not what we want. You
can't send your trans kid here. And so it's a
really precarious position to be it because, as I'm sure
you know, Bagbie scandal can kill a school like that,
you know, one that is entirely elective. You know, they
don't get federal funds. It's not like they can just
fire someone and completely dodge responsibility. And so I don't
say this to let these people off the hook, but
they are in a tough situation. And I think that
especially if you've imbibed the and this is something that
I've spoken to the groupcost about before, but if you've
been bied the value system of managerialism, right, the idea
that the purpose of any institution is to grow incrementally bigger,
you know, to find metrics and improve them. You know,
however arbitrarily those are defined. Well, are you going to
say no? Are you going to say we don't care,
We're sorry, you know, your child is no longer welcome here.
I've seen schools do it, but it's rare, especially rare
when money is tight. To be brutally honest, but I'll
kick get back to you.
Speaker 12: Indeed, and those practical considerations ensure the survival of those institutions.
And I've been close enough to the administration. I was
finally an administrator myself, though I didn't have much to do.
I sat in the meetings. But it ensures the survival.
And so there are compromises made on that level, which
I understand, because you want to make payroll. You believe
that you are doing a measure of good and given
the norms, the norms are always important to note. The
norms determine what will fly and for the in the
administrator's perspective. And I heard this from an administrator on
an occasion. I still remember it. He said, look here,
you're teaching Dante. Dante is full of things they are
not going to buy. Consider the greater good. And what
he was was communicating to me is don't harp on
the controversial parts now. And then this is also where
I look back on my own career, and I was thinking,
I'm thinking, now, you know, I if I was not
submission driven because I thought that the administration would back
me up and was not aware of their practical concerns,
I could have had a longer career. It's only it's
only in in my mistakes that I was able to
see this.
Speaker 4: Truly.
Speaker 12: But it was through these hostile meetings that I really
first realized the seriousness that to have a preference will
be called bigotry, That the the individual moral preference. The
idea that a child can have.
Speaker 4: Moral agency and.
Speaker 12: Choose some some philosophy of ethics, That that a an
immature youth can be a philosopher of ethics for their
own lives, can decide what's ultimately good, has created such
an untenable position in education.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 12: The best, the best proposal I've ever heard, and I'm
still very taken with it, came from another administrator, a
friend who I'm still in touch with. This person said
we need to have an elite tier, and I still
think that that is a wonderful way to go forward.
So the elite tier would be to teach the literature
as I did, but not ask for any recognition of
an order of goods. That would be the mainstream tier.
That would be the general admission class. The elite tier,
which this person proposed, would be the upper grades. Maybe
maybe if it was large enough school, it could be
a more exclusive set alongside.
Speaker 4: The upper grades.
Speaker 12: But the person said, the elite tier should be invitation only,
it must be exclusive, and there we can actually require
essays and we can teach them what they should believe
about a particular point. Now, and this is this is
such a larger problem. And this is why traditionally schools
were organized on sectarian lines, and schools were explicitly religious,
because on a point of controversy, especially in theology, we
can all understand this easily, the supreme truth about God
and your role in the universe, that different Christians will
have different answers based on their explicit loyalties. Therefore, they
organized on sectarian lines so that they could all be
on board with the highest thing and all say the
same thing. In our condition, we are trying to organize
people of common cultural loyalty, are trying to organize something together.
And this puts Catholics and Protestants and Orthodox like me
all thrown together. And so we overlook those sectarian differences.
And there is a kind of liberality. But what I
saw in my own experience, the cultural liberality will always
have the greater importance the freedom of the youngster to
be their own philosopher of ethics. That is the grounds,
it's not going to be the Catholic insisting on a
Catholic point of theology in our condition that is quaint.
As one of my students said, when I was talking
about the music, one of my students said, well, mister Bagbie,
you're talking about something that well in music. I was saying,
I was saying Beethoven's better than Lady Gaga. I made
another analogy. I said, well, Shakespeare is better than USA
today because we throw away USA today every day. No
one will pick it up again. And look at what
they said, because it's not of enduring quality. And every
once in a while a journalist writes something that we
will reference again, but it's quite rare. It's disposable, right,
And that had adherents. I want a point in the argument.
They responded well to that. But one of the students
raised hand and said, well, mister Bagbee, you're talking about
stuff that's written down, and we actually care about music.
So you can have your distinguishing taste when it comes
to Shakespeare versus USA today, but don't touch our taste
in music, which is a way of saying, don't talk
about things we think are important. You have your own
weird ideas about what is important and finally valuable. You
can talk about that all you want. We don't care
about that.
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Speaker 7: Mum, why did they call it Scottish cheese?
Speaker 1: This cottage cheese?
Speaker 12: Honey?
Speaker 14: And I'm not sure.
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Speaker 3: I think so.
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Speaker 12: But don't talk about what we think is important and
that question of taste. Why why put Homer in front
of a student? Because Homer is the best, we will
put in front of them. What is the very best.
That's what we aim to do. That's why we talk
about the leaders in history, the people that made the decisions,
why they are the most important because they they resolve
a conflict, They determine what comes next. To some some degree,
it's not it's not to them to decide which which
of the historical characters or events are the most important.
We're there to tell them what is and what what
ultimately results and we know we know how this breaks down.
With the decline of the liberal order, there is no
one in a position to tell the hungry what they
should be fed. No one has has that general recognized authority.
That is necessary to be authoritative as a teacher, and
that's why more exclusive sets are necessary for education. You
must have a you must have a loyalty and adherence
a solidarity in a group. And that's something that many
of us are talking about over in the Old Glory
Club and later recently with our friend Dave the Distributists.
They've been talking very constructively on that. Dave even said
just recently in his most recent show with the Cascade
Society that we have to be or we should be
more intentional about who we can do things with so
that we can build these kinds of communities. These things
are necessary to preserve the things we most value. We
must coordinate because, as Aristotle says, in the politics, the
isolated individual is as inconsequential as the in chess. We
have to be able to coordinate in groups so that
we can have things like education that will elucidate the values.
Speaker 2: Well, Bagbee, I think that we are fast approaching time.
I will have to have you on again to discuss
this at length when I'm feeling a little bit better.
But I'm really glad to have had you on. Where
can people find more of you and more of your work.
Speaker 12: Yes, indeed, I have a telegram channel called Bagbee's Corner
where I'll publish my thoughts. I'm really more active there
than I am on X. You can find me on
X at tall Men Books, and I am a publisher.
I've got a number of new books coming out. I
just I just uh submitted a book for a new
series today. I've got a new series on lawmen and
outlaws in the Old West, and I hope to announce
the publication of that first title later this week. You
can find my my works on www dot tallmen Books
dot com me n Tallmen Books dot Com, where you
can find all the books I've republished. That's my business.
It's always a pleasure to come on. Thanks a lot
for having me.
Speaker 2: Of course, very much glad to have you and everyone
at home. Keep your head up, but I can't last forever.
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