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The Inferno of Junior High
When I was 13 or so, my Mom pitched religion in such a way that I nearly became an atheist. It wasn’t the actual religion itself that disturbed me so much as her sales pitch.
Me: Why do you believe in g-d?
Mom: Because I was raised that way and it makes me feel good.
Me: But Socrates says that believing in stuff that isn’t True is evil.
Mom: Well, I was raised that way.
Me: But isn’t that evil because it’s not about Truth?
Mom: I don’t want to talk about it anymore.
To be fair, I was probably more obnoxious and rude than I remember.
At that age, I wanted to be like Martin Luther King or Gandhi but especially Socrates. I wanted to pursue Truth over everything and be murdered by an ignorant and vulgar crowd.
I was in junior high at the time and the environment was nihilistic. Regrettably, I am a human and, therefore, I cannot be objective. My particular variant of humanity has biases towards depression and cynicism. Possibility, most of that horrible school experience was the usual pettiness and vanity that teenagers are prone to. But I beneath all of the typical vulgarity, I see Cain killing his brother because he hated his brother being good.
In junior high, you were permitted to be interested in sports and certain kinds of music, but that was pretty much it. Being interested in books, or philosophy, or history, meant that something was malformed within you.
I remember in a computer class when we were making a website, about half the students couldn’t think of anything to write about.
Student: What should I write about?
Teacher: Write about what interests you or write about yourself.
Student: (utterly blank face)
I also recall a new teacher in his science class. He believed in figuring out what kids were interested in and then focusing the class on that. The poor guy had to learn that the kids weren’t interested in anything. It was a dull existence where the only things of interest were things immediately affecting yourself.
Gratitude and interest were hated in and of themselves. Believing in anything good or noble was for suckers. The ideal that everyone strived for was to be a cynical jerk that resented the world.
For example, let’s say that we had just read Romeo and Juliet and I foolishly thought to discuss it with another student.
Me: I thought the language was pretty but the characters weren’t very interesting. Did you think Romeo and Juliet were interesting characters?
Student: (Shrug) Shakespeare writes a lot.
Me: Well, did you prefer Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth?
Student: (Shrug) I don’t really care.
It wasn’t just Shakespeare. Literature and ideas were all disdained.
Theodore Dalrymple perfectly described this attitude in his conversation with the poor white underclass in his British Hospital.
The young condemned to live in an eternal present, a present which merely exists, without connection to a past which might explain it or to a future which might develop from it. Theirs is truly a life of one damned thing after another. Likewise, they are deprived of any reasonable standards of comparison by which to judge their woes. They believe themselves deprived, because the only people with whom they can compare themselves are those who appear in advertisements or on television…
The gimcrack pedagogical notion that education should be “relevant” to children’s lives gained currency in England in the sixties. The thought that this would confine children to the world that they already knew—and a pretty dismal world it was, too, as anyone with the slightest acquaintance with English workingclass life will testify—apparently never occurred to those educationists who claimed such exceptional sympathy with the relatively disadvantaged. The result was that a route—perhaps the one most frequently traveled—to social advancement was substantially closed to them.
That was the prevailing belief of my junior high. Against such nihilism, sentimentality and unthinking adherence to tradition had no appeal to me. I needed something philosophically and spiritually substantial to withstand the world.
As many of the Ricochetti are aware, churches that become lefty or tone down their fervency are quickly abandoned. Conversely, Christianity has often grown when the world was remarkably hostile and cruel to the faith. This makes perfect sense to me. When the world is corrupt, you want a way to reject the world and attain something better. You want someone who is willing to tell the Truth no matter what. You don’t want to feel peaceful about how vulgar and indecent the world is. You want to be asked to be braver and nobler than you are. When your world becomes dark you want to be the guy that shouts, “Then we will fight in the shade.”
Christ rejected the vast majority of the world (politics, sex, and money) for nobler and more platonic ideals, and he did so in a brave and self-sacrificing way. By associating him with the world, his appeal is diminished. The world is usually not worth venerating. Virtue always is.
Published in General
Great post, Henry.
There’s a cliché that states “everything goes back to high school.” I agree.
Ah, the youthful dramatic appeal of a martyr’s death. Of course we never truly believe we will actually be martyred. But the noble idea of it? Well, that is a thing of beauty to the blossoming teen-age philosopher.
The older I get, and the more I examine what the public schools were, and are becoming, the more I am convinced that Hell has a certain warm spot for Mr John Dewey and his educational edifice. As a self proclaimed pragmatist, his legacy in how to structure “progressive public schools” is empirically showing to be a dismal failure, and is getting hi jacked of late by the Marxists. The Progressive Marxist are gaslighting entire generations on their concepts of subjective truth.
I use to think home schooling was a peculiar route for a child’s education, however the people whom I have met that have been educated by that route are impressively well grounded. Let’s hope that perhaps the internet, and the general unhappiness Americans are displaying with the value they think they are getting from higher education, all the way down to primary school can be up ended by disruptive technology.
The children deserve better.
AMEN!
But I would guess, given Dewey’s hostility to any religion that didn’t serve an explicitly American jingoist interest, that he would feel right at home there.
It’s too bad you were not able to attend a better school. For all I avoid my old classmates today (they’ve mostly become hysterical lefties), and for all I mourn what my school has become (an elitist leftist hothouse whose tuition now exceeds many colleges), students had to be bright to survive there, and had to be able to think and reason about books and philosophy. I think you might have done well there, and you most certainly would have found a lot of people agreeing with you that Romeo and Juliet, as characters, were annoying.
I would note that a teacher who traffics in ‘”relevant” to children’s lives’ is also…hip; which is its own reward and is something that some teachers put in front of many lesser concerns such as, say, teaching.
So familiar to me; the iconoclasm born of resentment for demands being made in the name of anything not specifically me-examined, the feelings of persecution, the lead-dull world (which is a defense against the work of succeeding).
Ah, to be young again.
This is why I always say we never leave high school. We see the some social structure in life as we did in High school. The elites are elites for pretty much only external reasons. Either they were the prettiest girls, the most athletic guys, and if they weren’t either of those they had money or some connections somehow. Such as “He can score sweet tickets to see Dave Matthews. He knows a guy”. Most of the time the elites in school were not elevated due to any intellectual pursuits and most didn’t’ have much between the ears. We see that now, the elites are movie stars, athletes, slimy politicians and journalists. They all have to toe the line or else they might get tossed out of the cool kid club. Social ostracism was the worst punishment imaginable in High school. At least then when you graduated you could move away and start over. Now we see that same tactic used in real life not just high school and it is worse because with social media it is hard to move on when every google search has some god awful accusation put out there whether it is true or not. But that is only IF you step out of line. You can do what you want as long as stay within the Heathers groupthink.
If you want to see how we got here as a society go back and watch a few John Hughes movies.
I understand the existential angst and dislocation kids go through in jr/sr high; I was lucky, though, my existential angst was mostly caused by existential threats, so I kind of got inoculated. I enjoyed school. I’m sure there’s some psycho out there, applying lipstick and putting circles and stars around my name on his list, but for the most part I think I got on well.
A finely written post, Henry! Thanks.
I didn’t find junior high that way. But it might be because I was a perennial new kid and didn’t get involved in the cliques. Though no one ever hassled me, either.
That was my high school experience, too. (We didn’t have jr. high.)
Man, I hope not.
This is familiar and a bit strange to me, because that’s what I would have said to a teacher, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested. Same with my parents, for example a typical after-school conversation with my parents:
“What you do at school today?”
“Nothin’.”
“Anything interesting happen?”
“Not really.”
So yeah, I was interested in stuff but I wasn’t going to tell adults about it.
I was always the new kid as well, but I was a constant target of harassment in both my junior high and high school years. It also didn’t help that I was short for my age, sickly and spoke with a speech impediment. Being shoved around was a daily occurrence for me, but when I got to junior high, the shoving turned to beatings. When I got to high school the beatings got serious to the point that I got in serious trouble for using a knife on one of my attackers. I learned nothing in school, but out of school I learn how to survive in a tough old world. I taught myself to read and do basic math with the help of my grand mother. That was over 50 years ago, it appears the system hasn’t gotten any better.
A great reflection on a source of the misdirected veneration in American culture.
This conversation is part of our Group Writing Series under December’s theme of Veneration. There are plenty of dates still available. Have you had an encounter with a saint, or someone who is truly venerable? Is there a sports figure who you believe is venerated, and what do you think of it? What is venerated in our society today? We have some wonderful photo essays on Ricochet; perhaps you have a story to tell about nature, art, or architecture that points to subjects worth venerating. Have we lost the musical, written, visual language of veneration? The possibilities are endless! Why not start a conversation? Our schedule and sign-up sheet awaits. As a heads-up, our January theme will be Renovation. I’ll post the sign-up sheet mid-month.
Splendid.
Dewey, no doubt, deserves much criticism. However, he himself was explicitly against abandoning the entire tradition, against living in the small worlds we know, against narrow self-interest, and fiercely against both nihilism and moral relativism.
It is possible that I came off as an adult. I had a pedantic way of talking.
Boss, I’ve always thought of you as a purveyor rather than a recipient of existential angst.
Wasn’t he also the one who said “Education’s goal is to make a man totally unlike his father” (or something to that effect) or am I confusing him with someone else?
Nope Woodrow Wilson, however he was in the Dewey camp as this was the means to accomplish this reform to the unreachable Deplorable’s of that period. To change a society, one has to march through the institutions. This parallel prescription was going on in many of the European societies during the same early period of the 20th century (Fascism, Nazism, Communism) all had elements of capturing the young for rapid changes in a society.
Ferris Bueller was a pretty bad example, but I think that Breakfast Club was the worst. A competent adult tried to get a bunch of misbehaving teenagers to do a little introspection, justify their existence, and think about their path in life. The response was a whining harangue accusing the adult of not caring. And the little twits were presented as the heroes.
I recall not even liking it at the time, when I was in high school myself.
Movies that idolize youth are usually based on Roussean garbage. There is something in people that wants to pretend that people are better than what they are. When they want to pretend that, they tend to write about kids who can be good without adults working hard to make them good.
Were is that easy to be good.
Dewey, no doubt, deserves much criticism.
However, without having studied the matter, I’m not prepared to say that this is not a case of a politician making a lousy philosopher.
Dewey’s a Pragmatist, and that means he’s a radical empiricist. That does mean that all inherited moral codes are subject to revision in light of future experience. It also means that there is a presumption in their favor; the reason we’ve inherited moral codes from the past is that they’ve worked in the past.
A pure moral empiricism is radical, liberal, progressive in what it is willing to do with moral standards. It is also very conservative in what it presumes we should do at the moment. Every inherited rule can be changed; none should be changed without some darn good evidence.
It’s the same with scientific empiricism: Every scientific theory is subject to revision; we are willing to discard any of them in light of future evidence; there is still a presumption in favor of the established theories.
I always find it amusing (comforting?) to be reminded that Abraham Lincoln, arguably the greatest and certainly the most articulate president, between the ages of 7 and 21, endured a total of no more that 12 months of formal education.
Then why are the followers of Dewey impervious to neuroscience and all the empirical studies that suggest content-rich education is good for kids.
Because they’re bad followers of Dewey.
Because they aren’t followers as such. They are striking out for new ways to educate. Which are new. And therefore better. Because new.
But the ‘new’ ways of educating are decades old.
It was about 10 years ago when there was a presentation for a K-12 program involving graduate students at my workplace, about how we need new ways of science education. I forget the specifics that were being proposed, but I raised my hand and pointed out that I had been hearing the same message for 40 years, and that we’ve been trying these “new” ways for the past 40 years, with the same unsatisfactory results, and I asked when we’re going to learn from that.
I forget just what the response from the podium was, but later in the lunchroom one of the young grad students came up to me and said, “John, I didn’t know you were that old!” She then said it must be my bicycling that led her to think I was younger. But now I am older.
That comment deserved to be expanded upon and made into a post in and of itself.