De-Industrialize education and piety.
De-Industrialize education.
Horace Mann, the Yankee despot, was wrong.
Education can be neither mandated nor industrialized.
Educated citizens cannot be mass-produced.
To spec out a machine is one thing.
To spec out a human person is quite another,
and quite demonic.
Typologically, what Mann established as mandatory public education is what Speer and Riefenstahl created for and from the Nuremberg Party Rally of September 1934: the feeling and the imposition of aggressive messianic collectivism. This feeling is the antithesis of education. Two movements, chronologically separate but typologically identical, each moving toward a predictably Pyrrhic dénouement.
- History is both sequentially incidental (chronos) and serendipitously soteriological (kairos). The latter are the personally, culturally, and historically affecting phenomena, the inflection points.
The wormwood legacy of Horace Mann now paralyzes American formal education public and private. Each person is unique. There is no assembly line for intelligent citizenship or leadership. Teachers cannot be hired. They can only be born. They are always few in number, never enough to supply a mass education regime. A mass propaganda regime never lacks for practitioners, messianic collectivism is that appealing to the always-present cabal of perverts.
In education, you take the most God-fearing, self-confident children you find and who find you and train them in the professional guilds, according to their own, their personal interior predilections.
Over fifty years ago, Bob Theobald and some others observed as present and foresaw as future a central national struggle in America: what to do with two progeny of prosperity: a surfeit of money and a bounty of leisure time, both distributed widely enough to justify regarding USA as an abundance rather than a scarcity nation. This struggle, then present inchoately and recognizably gathering to effloresce ineluctably, Theobald accurately believed was scooping up all Americans. What shall we do with more money than we need to survive and more time than we need to earn a living? In France Jacques Ellul and in Chicago Milton Friedman also wrote out results of inquisitions regarding that struggle.
The garage inventor of legend arose from this struggle. Steve Jobs and Dave Packard did not have to work the fields for subsistence or the factories for income. Industrialization to sustain life succeeded and brought in its train a peculiar struggle typified for all of us by this man and his sister.
- Mann’s industrialization of education — his model was the Prussian factory, Alles In Ordnung — and making of industrialization (widgets) mandatory upon the general population contributed to the surfeit of money and bounty of leisure time with which Americans struggle since about 1955.
- The homeschool is the model for both public and private schools, not vice versa.
Agreement was had that Mann’s education mandate — itself depending on prosperity sufficient to free children from field and factory — was a good thing up to a point. The point was when basic socio-economic competence was achieved. This competence was, in the classic phrase, reading, writing, and arithmetic. Beyond that much competence, it was agreed, mandate for education of citizens was unnecessary and undesirable.
Governments and NGOs launched quasi-mandates for mass education beyond The Three Rs when national sovereignty was felt to be under threat, as when Yuri Gagarin circled the earth in a metal box. There were inducements, but no government or NGO mandated mass proficiency in professional-grade Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). That would have been unthinkable.
Comes malicious use of the most nefarious piece of Mann’s mass education regime: the mandate. Perverts position themselves to use the mandate to self-aggrandize for this fantasy and that, quite not anything worthy of the word education. This first became evident in the advent of teachers unions. Everyone knew then that education was no longer a goal of the American system of education. Income for teachers was the new goal . . . along with punishment for challenging mandater mandates.
Later, say about 1980, teachers unions made producing generations of students steeped in aggressive messianic collectivism the goal of spending taxpayers’ surfeit of money and bounty of leisure time. Widget-ize self-alienation. Socio-economic competence was pushed to the rear of desired outcomes and repetition of slogans pulled to the front, along with regimented, ritualized property destruction and standing threats against targeted persons’ freedoms.
To this Horace Mann’s mass education regime has come. And gone. Just in its own terms, its utility is over, gone. The mission of general socio-economic competence remains valid and desirable. New means of accomplishing this mission are indicated. They start at the homeschool and at the daily duties, the daily chores of clean living, to include the daily piety. Duty is God. Work is worship.
The problem or issue, as we like to say, is surfeit of money and bounty of leisure time. Ideology is not really the issue. Nor, really, is the mandate. The problem is the profusion of money and time, and specifically, how best to spend them. Spend them one must; one cannot not spend money and time. So, the struggle one faces is, spend one’s money and time to what effect, where, how, and why?
The national and even global surfeit
of money and leisure time is permanent,
efforts to induce confusion notwithstanding.
What to do with that treasure? Here are some ideas:
Eliminate restless travel.
Construct and endow Prayer Halls for all believers, one at least per town-sized area.
These have to come up organically, expressing locals’ love and yearning for palpable peace.
One can start in true dedication and others will come soon to help.
These are far more than libraries new Carnegies can offer towns to build for them.
Induce governments to build or zone for Religion Parks.
Homeschool one’s own children and grandchildren if their parents concur.
Construct civil defense battalions attached to the county sheriff,
to protect human and mechanical infrastructure.
Invent. Study. Hike. Plant. Shoot. Cook. Repair. Clean. Play. Write. Carve. Produce.
Organize and endow religious processions in your neighborhood and town,
to process singing sacred songs to drive away
the demons of fear, anger, envy, and lust.
Organize and endow monasteries for same gender individuals (traditional)
and/or married couples with children (procreational).
Organize and endow free medical care for students and other indigents.
Clear abandoned urban areas to place on them forest paths and pleasant arbors,
and to let run through them their natural creeks and streams, some to form lakes.
One can start in true dedication and others will come soon to help.
Organize and endow craft markets and produce fairs with sweet and beautiful entertainments.
Yearn and learn to purify the earth where she is abused.
Become proficient in deep knowledge of sacred scriptures and their native languages,
not to quote but to experience and understand.
Principle I
Principle II
Principle III
Aspirants for mental peace should reduce the luggage they have to care for; the more the luggage, the greater the bother. A house cluttered with lumber will be dark, dusty, and without free movement of fresh air, it will be stuffy and suffocating. The human body too is a house; do not allow it to be cluttered with curios, trinkets, trash and superfluous furnishings. Let the breeze of holiness blow as it wills through it; let not the darkness of blind ignorance desecrate it. Life is a bridge over the sea of change; pass over it, but do not build a house on it. Hoist the Prasanthi Flag, on the temple, that is your heart. Follow the prescription it teaches – subdue the six enemies that undermine the natural bliss in man, ascend the Yoga stage when the agitations are stilled and allow the splendour of the Divinity within (the Atma) to shine forth, embracing all for all time.