Henry Dampier

In recent decades, Westerners adopted an androgynous social ideal. The notion was that gender segregation oppressed everyone. The only way to unlock true human potential for both men and women was to break down the barriers between the genders. The thought, which took over a century and a half to germinate, was that if men and women could be raised in the same institutions, they would behave to the male standard, and that that would be a good thing. Later on, it became a common belief that gender roles were oppressive to both sexes. The authorities encourage men to be more like women, and women to be more like men, with more roles being freely interchangeable.

What this tends to lead to are social groups conditioned down to what women feel safe and comfortable with. Male humans, like males of many other species, spar with each other in the course of their maturation. They fight with each other verbally and physically in direct competitions of strength. Toughness, ability to endure pain, and strength are more male values than female, although to some extent the androgynous regime attempts to dampen the differences.

When men aren’t permitted to compete with each other directly as is their natural inclination, they become stunted and weak. Feminine institutional values like ‘no fighting, no loud shouting, don’t be mean’ will tend to just produce soft and stunted boys who never make the full transition to manhood. They have to be tested by each other and their elders to become strong. Otherwise, they stay feeble, cringing from conflict like beaten dogs.

Mixed-sex friendship groups also exacerbate this, encouraging both groups to mute sexual polarity in the name of the equality idea.

This informal socialization has been necessary to make the formal, forced integration regime feasible. If people didn’t at least feel like it could be possible, the support for the laws would weaken. Because everyone is now socialized into mixed-sex institutions from a young age, what’s actually unnatural and unusual appears to be the opposite. This argument is only controversial now. It wasn’t controversial 60 years ago. It probably won’t be controversial in 30 years or less.

In order to reverse this, the early integration also has to be reversed. Trying to go about it from the opposite direction is only likely to result in halfway success at best. To some extent, all the people raised in a society with androgynous ideals will be somewhat androgynous, if only by force of habit.

John Taylor Gatto, the great contemporary critic of formal education, should be more influential, but his name is rarely spoken above a whisper, even though most who hear his critique know that he’s correct. His Underground History of American Education is a must-read.

Getting into Gatto isn’t what this article is about, even though it’s derivative of his work. What I want to do is to persuade you that educational ideals of bringing equality to students and to the broader society are deeply misleading to parents.

Not only does it attempt to create a course of character formation which fails to make room for unique characteristics distinguishing each child from another, it also breaks down differentiation between boys and girls. Further, it creates an artificial age-segregated environment which is totally unlike any other social environment that the child will experience once they enter adulthood.

Parents give their children up to egalitarian institutions in the hopes that the school will form their minds and moral characters in such a way that will make them successful and happy — at least as understood by the parents. What it tends to do instead is to mold the students in a way that’s convenient for the state, along with some of the friends of the state.

Given that the modern West tends to be dominated by the state, it makes sense that those same parents would want their children to be well-adapted to the world that that state created. Because to fail to conform to the needs of the state is to become, usually, a less successful and happy person.

In this, egalitarian education does what it says on the label. Parents who want their children to be well-socialized, that is, to conform to democratic society, are entirely well-served by these institutions. They demoralize the high performers and encourage the low performers beyond their capacities. This constituency forms the majority.

The difficulty that the state — and parents — have with the education system is that the system is poor at producing human flourishing.

Society needs productive, unique, nonconforming geniuses. The state even needs them, to make for more room for the leftist ratchet.

Egalitarian education does its best to create a uniform product, in which one unit is much like another unit, with some slightly premium or slightly inferior models slipping through quality control now and again.

Parents tend to believe that conformity will make their children happy. It instead makes them drones with overly high expectations for themselves. As of 2014 in the US, over 2 million children were being home schooled, with a long record of low double digit percentage growth going back to around 1999. While it may not be an ideal solution, it’s the best one available, especially given the accreditation requirements for private schools and the increasing interference from the Federal Government upon religious schools.

The long term goal ought to be to pressure the formal schooling system until it becomes much more like the prison system — mostly for the lower classes and criminals. This requires less political activism, and more of a significant change in mores.

Rather than attempting to reform the reformers or to scream and moan about the latest outrage of Common Core, instead, let the future generations of your enemies become stupider. Treat them like they belong to a foreign country, because they do, when you boil down to the essence of it. It’s not worth the effort to rescue them from themselves, especially when you have your own to care for.

Educate your own to their advantage. And never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.