Something Altogether Different
Alt Ed's Failure... And What Comes Next
[n.b., The is part two of an essay originally published by The Postil in June 2025. JC]
Something Altogether Different
John Coleman
The Failure Of Alt Ed
My knowledge of pedagogical history, and indeed my own life as a teacher, provide ample proof why the educational critique has fizzled and flopped after a century of erudite and passionate discourse. I have books on my shelf over a century old with people making the same complaints, and offering the same solutions, as your latest unschooling podcast and alt ed conference.
This situation has obtained because we schoolmen have not taken ourselves and our vocation seriously. We have allowed a supine and servile mien to characterize our behavior towards administration, students, and – astaghfirullah! – parents; we have allowed every financial huckster and civil busybody to slide into our profession and turn it towards their ends; we have tolerated the soulless and craven spirit of the middle class to be the standard by which all educational work is orientated. Educators at present are not taken seriously, and educators at present should not be taken seriously; no, not until we cop on and restore the raw principles of our calling. This begins with knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
Social trends, demographics, and technology will shortly eliminate the educational field as we know it. In this, schools stand in relationship to society in much the same way churches did two and three centuries ago. Formal education will soon find it no longer enjoys the favor it heretofore had from the ruling class.
Just as national churches were cast aside by the archons of days gone by once their utility had been exhausted, so now schools will soon be left to shift by their lonesome. It will be a fight to the knife whether what replaces the field as we know it will be a vast apparatus of naked job certification and credentialism, or a radically overhauled, decentralized, soul- and knowledge-based learning environment.
Every indicator points to the former as being the certain outcome. Men are content to not only have jobs, but to want them, to seek for them, to lust for them. To be a slave is one thing, but to want to be a slave is something altogether different. We have not only been bid to be consumers, we embrace our roles as lifelong babies who exist to have others serve us. It is one thing to be under the thumb of some rotten landlord, but to prefer “concierge apartments” to ownership betokens a different creature altogether. And on this last point, we stand not on a spiritual and theoretical observation but on data. Everywhere one turns apartments and condos are going up. When one sees such construction en masse it is not merely a sign of the free market, for the free market is dead and gone, it is with O’Leary in the grave. This construction is an indication of where the masters of the market mean to steer society, and – arrah – you come to find that society is content to be steered.
Modern Education’s DNA
It’s easy enough to spot the flaws in contemporary education, if education it be. Dare we count the ways? Yes, but only for a moment lest we lose ourselves in that dark wood.
Secularism is the gravest flaw of modern learning, of course, for it stunts the heart and mind of a child worse than organized religion does. Mind you, this secularism is just as present in 501(c)(3) private religious schools, and your bless’d homeschool co-ops and pods, as soon as your public outfits. It is at base the economic assumption which undergirds each approach, and there is nothing a’tall which will so hollow out the soul of man than commerce.
You may tack up as many crucifixes as you please, you may teach the youngest of young earth creationism, you may drill him for a decade in the ways of the Lord and your favorite political faction, but soon or late that child comes to believe that what really matters is the job which supposedly awaits his diligent completion of his academic cursus. It is the DNA of modern education which does the damage, not the external trappings. That DNA is commercial, and commerce is secular, and to be at base commercial and secular is to be at base unhuman.
Let us listen to Athans’ Solan who long ago told us in those famous Parallel Lives:
The man that boasts of golden stores,
Of grain, that loads his groaning floors,
Of fields with freshening herbage green,
Where bounding steeds and herds are seen,
I call not happier than the swain,
Whose limbs are sound, whose food is plain,
Whose joys a blooming wife endears,
Whose hours a smiling offspring cheers.
The chaos which is American spirituality may be heretical; it may sour delicate souls and alienate intellectual ones; it may waste tremendous cultural and material capital on crimes (or paying lawsuits related thereto); it may lazy out its good will and social heft on graft and mismanagement; it may do some things poorly, most things mediocre, and nothing well; Christianity may be in this generation and this nation – as I hold it – a parody and farce of the faith once given to the saints, but for all these delicts it does not leave atrophied an entire dimension of a man’s life, the spiritual. Yes, without a doubt secularism is the greatest crime of Rockefeller education.
On the heels of this, modern instruction cheats its inmates of ethnos, of tribal and national belonging, of that communal soul and mythos wherewith members of a community could draw deep draughts amidst life’s slings and arrows. If you don’t have roots, you have nothing, and foundations once destroyed, what can the just do?
On these points, lack of faith and lack of ethnos, we see hideous Liberalism come to full stature: the naked, atomized, lonely municep left to shift for himself in a world completely turned over to lawyers, moneymen, landlords, and like pimps.
With the immunity of the soul – what is called “holiness” in men and “religion” in society – left go to seed, the stage is set to turn the child into the bauble of strangers, for in his pretended education a host of anti-human vices and attitudes swept in.
We needn’t dwell on the dysfunctional disciples of the contemporary classroom. Look how they hold themselves; how they eat; how they speak; how their beady eyes avert your manful gaze; how they “ghost” and gripe and gossip. A nation of adult babies!
The publicly – i.e., commercially – educated of our day were formed to be public – commercial – citizens. This they were set to be; this they have become. With publicity comes its attendant mindlessness and cruelty, for the public individual is part of the herd by definition. He lusts for what it lusts for, and he fears what it fears, and he works for what it works for, and none of this is generous, none of it heroic.
The elderly are cashiered by the millions in rest homes, wasting their last gracely years out on television and inanity, and the public man walks by; in every funeral home in the nation there is a closet of unclaimed cremated remains, the public man does not care because the herd does not care. How many thousands, how many tens of thousands, have been done dirty by drugs legal and illegal? The public man cannot tell you because the public man does not care. He cares only when some friend or relation is carried off, and when he rallies for awareness and redress he learns quickly the loneliness of the saint, and this all too late.
This interpersonal and social impiety must at least partially trace its way back to the classroom, for youth are naturally generous. That this spirit does not grow to full charity in adulthood must be explained by the unspoken lessons he was given while a child, that child-turned-man come to believe such anti-social behavior is acceptable like as not came from a purported education which was stripped of humanity and stuffed with commerce.
The publicly educated rely on legality where once there was culture. He trusts to strangers in New York or Chicago his Ring’d safety and his guaranteed loan bequeathed by strangers for strange ends. The child-turned-man spit out from the Rockefeller classroom does not bother to know his neighbor but he is happy to pay private investigators and anonymous agencies to snoop on his fellows, and the parishioner he has known for thirty years he will “vet” with a third-party clique before accepting his aid in Sunday school or on the sports pitch.
We do not have a culture, though it was once the aim of our schools to transmit such. At least as guilty as Madison Avenue, modern pedagogy is responsible for our state of atomization. We no longer have a nation. Our suppos’d country is no such thing; we are all roommates who merely live around each other by the thousands and by the millions. Forsooth, the schooled of our day have lost not only their ethnos, but even their familial knowledge. Few modern people can relate anything of substance concerning their families beyond their grandsirs. The contemporarily educated do not see a poverty in this because no value was placed on verbing, actual community in their instruction.
Having had his concentration deliberately broken every forty-five minutes for twelve years, the modernly learn’d aimlessly go through life. They are so easy to con into a job because they cannot think long enough to realize the theft of their labor. The deliberate shattering of a modernly-educated mind every forty-five minutes for twelve or sixteen or eighteen years; the careful pairing of totally unrelated subjects without any effort to link the one with the other, totally incapacitates an intellect and makes it ripe for every New York huckster, and every Hollywood liar.
And what does all this disorientation produce? A cynical soul, soured to good and soured to God and soured to man, all just as John Rockefeller’s agents intended. One cannot love good and God and man, after all, and love commerce, itself the empire of the dead.
Now that we have seen the fruits of modern education, let us leave this dark wood. It stinks of sulfur and rings of cant, and its resemblance to the bourgeois is giving me the willies.
Cross Ends
The educational critique has been around as long as there have been schools. We see it in Rome as Cato The Elder gripes about the use of Greek pedagogues in the Late Republic, and we see it in the rich Arabs of Mohammed’s time who sent their youth to the countryside to be reared away from the corruption of the cities, and we see it at the Reformation with the rise of Bible-based readers and teaching orders and seminaries. And if we can scarcely believe that Horace Mann and John Dewey were indeed as raw-throated educational insurgents as your “Ed Punks” and Occupy University alum were of a decade past, we need only remember that the revolution not only eats its own, it also canonizes its foes.
Hope and reform spring from the human breast as soon as do cant and wrong. And so a long spit from our day, in the hurdy-gurdy of the 1970s, there rose up anew the perennial critique. This thing hailed from two separate streams of American culture, and these are more or less the communities in other lands who have gone in for alt ed; I speak, of course, of the conventionally religious and the counterculture. Only superficially are these pools at odds; they have much more in common that common perception lets on.
Still and all, alternative modalities of education began to gain traction in the 1970s and ‘80s. In the early years “homeschooling” and “unschooling” were used interchangeably (“deschooling” was also birthed at this time through the capable pen of Ivan Illich); by the 1990s your church sorts more or less became the homeschoolers, whilst the counter cultured parents became the unschoolers. Those communities stalemated for 20 years until the Covid days shook up everything; with the exception that with both communities growing, a necessarily larger and larger number of people of the one pool were dipping their toes in the other community. There was a certain tension building before Covid in homeschool circles about more and more explicitly secular families entering the mix, and vice-versa with your more unchurched unschooling sorts scratching their heads with religious skins hopping on board.
When the days of Covid came, those three sadsome years of masks, sanitizer wipes, and vaccines, the educational world as we knew it was blown sky-high.
You know, I said at the time – and this is in print and on cellophane and in servers – that history had thrown a Russian Revolution in the lap of educationalists with the shutdowns. It was an high-water mark for alt pedagogues, after all, or at least it should have been. That model we so detested, that thing which took the raw material of life – little boys and girls – and turned them with industrial precision into useless tax cows and consumers, was on the ropes. It was shuttered and moldering.
If schools, so called, had come by the 21st Century to justify their value to society merely on the basis of data-input, certification-output, then for once it began to dawn upon the general public if Zoom classes might not be the way to go after all. The Covid disruptions forced the field of formal instruction to admit what it had become: a card-punching, data-spewing social stamp. The mask was off the emperor. The vast apparatus of education, or what was purported as such, was seen to have value solely because the rest of the herd believed it had value. No one who taught grade-school classes at that time, or took as much, believed any serious learning was taking place. Like much from that hour, it was a farce which we were content to pantomime.
Those already inclined to be suspicious of modern education, particularly public schools, were soon joined during the Covid days by a bevy of raw recruits. A brand-new cohort was being exposed to the nature of public curriculum.
Whether or not they could articulate their dis-ease, Americans were suddenly confronted with the degraded nature of formal learning. For three years we witnessed the base utility – nay, we make bold to say the frothy fashion – of the topics broadcast into homes, the informality attendant with the online instruction of youth (which, in fairness, fell within the responsibility of slovenly Millennial parents, not teachers), all the grim meaninglessness of as education given over to being, as President Obama had said a decade before, “Job-ready on day one.” Yes, these were the days, after all, of Black Lives Matter and a certain spotlight which the transgender topic was enjoying, and – hold what one will about such things – these apparently had found their way into enough Zoom classes that more and more unimpressed parents were beginning to display themselves in unseemly ways at school board meetings.
Our foe was down for the count, the critiques we had been making for half a century were taking hold, and one more thing was in our corner: leisure time. The public had the time and ability to learn about Rockefeller learning, and its fundamental anthropological and philosophical errors, by way of easy access to related books, websites, and telephonic recordings.
Assisting this golden season was a wide array of adjacent sympathetic communities of diverse political, cultural, and spiritual approaches, groups who are innately suspicious of mainstream things in general, and especially anything having to do with the state. Podcasts a’plenty, likes and subscribes like you’ve never seen, Amazon men dropping off crates of John Gatto and Grace Lwyellen books hither and thither.
And people for once were not content to sit around and gripe; there was a boom in niche educational approaches. Even formal tertiary learning, the most neglected and retarded area of alternative education, saw great growth. Apocatastasis Institute, heretofore nearly alone in this sector, suddenly found many new siblings as dozens of creative schools, albeit online given the circumstances, were birthed into this world.
What became of this hour of vindication and apotheosis? Nothing, fughall, dust and wind. It withered within six months of the repeal of mask mandates and shutdowns. By the time Russia invaded Ukraine and the page definitively turned from the Covid chapter this circumstantial sun which shown down on alt ed had set. John Holt’s books began to gather dust as soon as the exercise bikes we all bought; podcasts like School Sucks and Tragedy & Hope, resurrected from a decade before, sank back into Interneted oblivion.
History had dropped an educational “Russian Revolution” into our lap. We had the initiative, we had the favor of the population, we had the means to get our message out to more people, and more receptive people, than ever before. Every metric was completely in hand, and yet all this momentum ran out when things went back to normal. Every metric was completely in hand, you see, every metric but one: bourgeois values.
There is a fundamental contradiction in alternative education. You see, this community is fundamentally a middle-class phenomena. It is the same contradiction one sees with everything the bourgeois involves himself in, be it politics, religion, philosophy, family rearing, social reform, or self respect. I speak, of course, of the collision between the deep-seated human desire to soar, to be excellent, to be free, and the stooping, cringing, lowering spirit which means to fit in. There is something of the former in alt ed, there is everything of the latter in the people who are drawn to alt ed.
Two opposite thoughts cannot occupy the mind at the same time, and two opposite spirits cannot claim the soul at the same time; when this situation apparently (though not actually) obtains in a host, be the subject a single organ, or lone man, a family, or an entire community, there will be an upset. When this occurs in a stomach, when one drinks a lemonade on top of a milkshake (as I once did as a boy, no less asway a MetroNorth train), the contradiction erupts as vomit; when this contraction happens in an individual, this results in a neurosis, a breakdown, or worse; when this happens in a family, we call this divorce; when this happens in a community, in alternative education, for example, we call this mediocrity.
Vision & Execution
And where does Educational Leadership fit into this lost opportunity? Leadership is needed primarily in the realms of vision and execution. Alt ed has heretofore been incisive in diagnosing the problem with Rockefeller education. It sees with laudable clarity its vapidity, its snuffing out of curiosity, its atrophying of the soul; such partisans see the bureaucrats and administrators of mainstream schools as the layabouts they are, and its teachers – in the kindest of moods – as apparatchiks as uninspiring as they are unmemorable; alt ed-ers have sagaciously documented the telos of state-sponsored learning, if such it be, and they have boldly shouted that the emperor has no clothes.
That bunch has done many things well, but there is one thing lacking: they have not accounted for the true labor it requires to establish their ideals as a social reality. It has always struck me as a queer thing that individuals who not only apprehend the problems of modern instruction, but have had enough grace to act on their beliefs vis. homeschooling, publishing, etc., are completely apathetic to the discussion of making their ideals get traction beyond their immediate families. These skins put in great outlays of time, energy, and more, often at a certain personal inconvenience, and yet they do not seem to have a vision of things beyond their nose. After all, what is the point of unschooling for five or ten years only to produce a soul who will be as interchangeable a worker as one marshmallow is to another? What is the point of rejecting “public school brainwashing camps,” as the cringy rhetoric goes, when child turns man only to become a content soldier or solicitor or stockjobber, as employable (to employ, lit. “to use”) as any other publically (public, lit. “commercial”) educated municep out there?
I once scandalized a Catholic lady by suggesting that the Church’s objection to prostitution and pornography – namely, that it is unseemly to commercialize the marital act, and the individual bodies so engaged – ought to be applied to all body parts and actions. If it is wrong to commercialize Suzie Q’s mammary glands in a porno, is it not wrong to commercialize her brain as a teacher? If it is wrong for Chad to coin his genitive organ on a stage, why is it not wrong to sell the labor of his hands at a fast food joint?
Yes, the woman immediately rejected my suggestion. Why was it shot down? Not because it was false, but because the consequences attendant upon forbidding wage labor, be it in the bedroom or in the factory, would make our present economic arrangements impossible. And while it might indeed be counter-cultural to reject something as commonly accepted as pornography, she reasoned, it would be madness to extend the principle, however valid.
So too, bereft of Educational Leadership, do we see the same daunting of educational critics. “Thus far, and no farther,” go their principles and their imagination. Yes, a child’s wonder ought to be preserved, but it is a bridge too far to want as much of a man; yes, the school day is a great waste of time, but let us ignore that a career of fifty years is a beast exponentially larger; yes, state education was demonstrably instituted to mold society towards certain beliefs and behaviors, but let us not speak of ridding ourselves of a lifetime of telephonic formation whose affects run far deeper, and are far more successful, than our grade school indoctrination.
We must cut to the nerve here. Various educational reform modalities have flopped about for fifty years. Never have they ever dented mainstream enrollment, never have they cared to, and certainly never has alt ed cared to produce souls any more inclined to upend this society of parasites than their fellow publicly educated municeps. This is because we are double-minded: we see the problems in society, we may even be able to articulate how formal education has been carefully used this last century to engineer this condition, but we also want our children to fit in to this society. We wish to secede in equal measure to our wish to succeed.
From Death Comes Life
Life heroically lived must necessarily suffer a winnowing away of posours. There is something of death in this, to know the withdrawal of erstwhile colleagues and the collapse of friendships; there’s something certainly of death in the many times larger crowd which walk on by, careless of the issues at hand, issues which very much affect themselves (if they but knew).
Forsooth, the obliviousness of the herd is a more bitter thing by far than the bites of jackals. For the jackals, allies-turned-enemies: forget them, we will not even speak of that crew; may their chains – and their cigars and their flannel shirts – sit lightly. But, arrah, to have society care less, say it ain’t so. The work of cultural restoration, and all the sacrifices thereto, is for the mass of men who incarnate culture, after all, and for them to mindlessly walk on by is a rough thing. Yes, these are hard things through and through, and only hard people will weather them.
To take the constant collapse of relationships professional and personal on the chin, to see the much larger mass of men hurry on towards respectability, legality, and slavery, and to know that as long as the heroic energy flows in one there is nothing but this dreary slog ahead, yes, the soul which forges on knows something of death. But, muscha, as manys the saint and sadhu has taught, only from death comes life, and if such a soul knows something of death in all this, it knows everything of life.
To speak as the rebel on the run, the gladiator in the arena, the insurgent with the incendiary, these are easy things, and they are fun things. Like everything easy and fun, they do not last. Manys the easy and fun floozy has learned this the hard way, when your tear-stained and coughing Suzie Q stands in a plume of motorcycle dust, watching Chad #14 drive off into the sunset.
The world of educational critique is much too given to this ease and fun, this talking hard and flitting on to the next distraction. It is for these reasons alternative education has been a marginal thing, that it is a marginal thing, that it will continue to be such, and that – so long as this myopia obtains – it ought to stay a marginal thing. I’ve noticed in various groups so-adjectived, “alternative” this’ and thats’, that there is a perverse pleasure people take in their irrelevance.
The hotel room Latin Mass and the political conference with eight people, the kitchen table homeschool and the surreptitious naturist hike, there is a warmth and coziness to such congregations, but men were not meant to pray and save, and they are not put on this earth to be warm and cozy. Such luxury produces slugs where there should be men; things – hardly can they be called human – which are equal part effete, selfish, and cruel. A life well lived is a life of vigor, and that means hustling, that good things be made available to as many people as possible for their benefit. This principle is as true for education as for anything else. The hour is far too late for smugness and isolation. There is work to be done.
Perhaps it is the satisfaction of sitting on the truth whilst the herd trot about. The Pharisee can only be a Pharisee, after all, if he and his fellows form a party, a clique; when everyone is a Pharisee we call this the bourgeoisie, and such democracy of the elect is no fun. I’ve seen my fair share of this in my time, and I imagine some of you have too.