High School, Low School

I wonder what’s going on with these zoomers in high school right now. Are they getting a proper education? Are they similar to most universities in being controlled by leftists? That’s the age when you’re just waking up, when your consciousness is just powering on, arguably the age when you’re most impressionable to the loftier ideas of life.

Most people are biased in that they only went to one high school so it’s difficult to speak broadly about high schools in general. I went to high school in a small town and the peak of my experience there was being introduced to American Transcendentalism, mostly through Thoreau, and including some Emerson. They made me an individual. That’s the closest thing to philosophy I was exposed to until college. I was ready for a lot more. As were maybe a dozen or so in my grade.

As much as it will make the over-protective schoolmarms faint to hear it, I probably had more than a few 16-17 year olds reading my posts over at XS, not even for “education” purposes per se I’m sure, just for “shits and giggles”. All philosophy is is questioning, typically questioning what shouldn’t be questioned (by the standards of the status quo). I think the kids here in America are more ready for it than most expect, given that philosophy is not taught in most high schools. It would probably be best to begin somewhat cautiously and offer courses only for seniors, and maybe ambitious juniors. This is a key way to advance the citizenry on all levels- teaching people at an impressionable age how to ask questions–lofty questions–and escape robotic patterns of thinking.

As I’ve said before, philosophy is about showing people an alternative and thus giving them the ability to choose between different options. Often, by the end of high school, people have a general, if vague, idea of what they want to go to college to study. Without some notion of philosophy in their minds, typically the idea of what they want to study in college is a product of what the status quo wants them to study.

Let’s backtrack the trajectory of the people in power who we all adore so much. They were primed to be who they are in college, and they were primed to be primed to be who they are in high school. If more high schools offered courses in philosophy we might not even have a cathedral to critique right now. (Jee, then how would we spend our time? Reading poetry? That would be awful.)

“The Establishment” starts in high school. If people got the right education there they’d never even turn on the news, and the news would go bankrupt, making way for the emergence of truth-outlets. With the right education, people would vote for more competent candidates. The benefits to society would be endless.

You know I like to expound on the ideas of the thinkers I find to be most dangerous to the system. High school programs need not be so extreme obviously. Just the minimum basics would improve society tenfold. The kids these days aren’t even getting that.

I know you haven’t forgotten that essay of Dugin’s I posted, the one all about the Übermensch and how he’s made his ideas accessible to children. Is there anything like that in today’s high schools? Or are they mostly focused on teaching people how to be good “World Citizens”? I expect the latter, I don’t expect ideological neutrality–I’m sure it ranges from subtle to explicit globalist bias. The kids should be given a choice between the two.