The Birth of Venus

Boticelli, 15th century

Is Education Even a Good Idea?

There is more than one side in the ongoing debate about education in today. School vouchers, private schools, charter schools, No Child Left Behind, even private school access to government grants for safe playgrounds have aroused the defiance of secular groups. Yet these subjects are not always easily divisible into for/against arguments. The knights ask, very seriously, is education even a good idea?

This may sound like a shocking question. Pop culture has so permeated and saturated the present political and cultural landscape that most people simply consider education one of Plato's Goods which are good to possess for their own sake.

But is that really the case?

Disclaimer

The title of this article is meant to provoke rather than entertain a negative answer. We do not mean to suggest that it might be a god idea to forswear education and raise a generation of unlettered fools. There are already third-world countries doing this and the results speak for themselves.

Obviously, it is good for children to learn how to read and write and apply mathematical knowledge to

real-life problems. The question is whether the modern education establishment is even useful for anything.

This article is particularly aimed at men who are just coming of age and at those who are now well into their manhood and considering spending time and money on education.

If you want to become a highly-skilled professional whose work will have visible and lasting effects on the real world, then the answer is most-likely affirmative. Future engineers, doctors, computer programmers and others need access to great minds and the certification apparatus which universities and associated organizations can provide.

The problem with taking that route is that you will inevitably expose yourself to an Orwellian culture managed by thought police. As long as you are choosing to study some sort of applied science, your exposure may be limited since the type of person sustaining PC culture is generally unfit to handle the intellectual requirements of these fields.

That is why you absolutely msut avoid a university if you have a desire to "study" English, history, philosophy, etc. Humanities-based fields have been compromised by PC culture. In such environments, you always find yourself "learning" things which are completely incongruent with reality and common sense.

What Is Even Being Accomplished in College?

In the interest of full disclosure, I had a classic, All-American college experience and enjoyed it immensely. I graduated from the University of Arizona in 1995.

I always expected to have to join the army to get my education but I was blessed with scholarship offers after scoring particularly well on the SAT. I got to to a four-year state college with help from parents for rent but my tuition and books were paid for. I stayed in a dorm my first year, lived with buddies in crappy apartments for the next three and graduated with a fairly useless degree in the Humanities but which I definitely did not regret earning.

But I have to wonder if it might not have been better for me to learn something useful. I enjoyed writing and had taken a lot of writing courses. This led to me ending up as a semi-miserable teach for more than a decade.

When I finally left teaching, I did so after googling how to make a living on the Internet. I became a content writer. I worked for pennies at first but eventually earned the equivalent of my teacher pay after a couple years. Not only that, I actually learned how to write clearly and concisely.

The experience left me wondering: what was the purpose of my college education? I had learned much more in just a few months of writing for a living than I had as a student.

Now, I certainly understand that I learned much more in college. I took a wide variety of classes in pursuing my liberal arts degree and I really enjoyed most of them. But the content of a lot of these classes was actually available to me in the real world. For example, my humanities classes showed me a lot of art which I could see in museums and learn about by reading encyclopedias. Had it really been necessary to take out four years of my life to "learn" in a college classroom?

Today, with the Internet available to everyone, this question is even more pertinent. While I am willing to debate the necessity or value of my college experience in the 90s, I cannot imagine an argument which would convince me that taking four years out of your life to learn about art and literature makes sense when you could just do it in your free time while you plied a trade.

So, I have to wonder what kids in college today are doing if they are not studying the hard sciences. Philosophy can be learned and discussed on the Internet (though one wonders if that is actually happening anywhere). The same goes for Art, English and many other fields of study.

Take foreign languages for an example. I learned Spanish in middle school, high school and for two years in college. I still couldn't speak it. I ended up in Juarez, Mexico after college and was speaking fluently within a matter of weeks.

Sure, my college learning did provide some foundation for my fluency. It was clear to me, though, that some things in life are best learned by simply doing them rather than "studying" them,

What Should a Man Do? 

Whatever your station in life, you should carefully consider your next step if you are contemplating higher education.

• If you are going to work in medicine, science, nursing or some technological field, you need to go to school. 
• If you are planning on studying the liberal arts, you would be ultimately happier if you learned a trade and studied these things on the side. By the time your peers are graduating with their worthless philosophy or communication degrees, you will be earning plenty of money and able to set aside plenty of time for reading and trips to the museum. And you will not be less educated than a bunch of overgrown kids who have spent four years sitting in classrooms and taking multiple choice tests.
• If you want to become a lawyer, psychologist, teacher or work in a related field, you might complain that you need the seal of approval that a college gives. I would simply counsel you to not pursue these dreams. Lawyers are scum and psychology is bullshit. As for teaching, it is not a profession that a man should expect to provide him a living nor is it respectable.

It is long past time for educators and learners to embrace technology. Most of what we need to learn, after a modicum of early instruction in reading, writing and arithmetic, is available for free on the Internet. If you have a hankering to learn more about the Renaissance, Google it. Don't waste your life and resources on attending a course taught by someone who has a piece of paper declaring his worthiness to "reveal" information that is easily discovered otherwise.

What Are the Great Books?

If you agree with us that we need to start reforming our educational system in the West, you may very well not agree on the way to do it. Even prominent supporters of the Great Books have stark disagreements about which books to preserve in the canon.

 A famous edition of the Great Books came out mid-20th century and has been controversial since, Hard-core, traditional Catholics would remove a lot of the post-enlightenment philosophy and leave Aquinas as the sum of all things. Certainly they would punish Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with banishment for its excoriation of early Christians.

Those with a more lenient view of modern works would drop a lot of medieval books as forgotten and replace them with great authors of the 20th century who were not recognizable as great when the first edition came out.

In fact, a second edition of the Great Books was eventually published with just such changes. Thanks to the Internet, it is not really necessary to ever publish another expensive edition of the books. We are still left, though, with the question of inclusion. Which books are great?

Ancestral Memory

While we are somewhat educated and possess degrees, we are none of us in possession of doctorates which would give our opinions on the matter some weight. There do seem to be some characteristics of great books, however, that would appeal to most if not all proponents of instruction in these texts.

The original compilation of texts certainly meant to appeal to some sort of ancestral memory. In other words, the books should be those that we once told around the fire and still do in one respect or another.

At the time of original publication, these were all books that were still being studied in colleges. The idea of creating and publishing an official canon was to reduce the entirety of a liberal education to its core and provide that core to the general public. The editors never intended this to be a list of forgotten works which we must all rediscover.

This makes it difficult to make the Great Books relevant today. The modernists were clever and actually removed most of these texts from college education. Few educated adults and fewer children are even cognizant of the names of these books, let alone their contents.

Therefore, efforts to popularize these texts are faced with an uphill battle because these are not works which the elite study and the common people desire in order to elevate themselves - instead, they are forgotten works which must be dredged up from the deeps of time and be read in clunky translations so that people are bored with them immediately.

In the face of this challenge, we must remember to avoid tossing something from the canon just because it seems like a dead letter or that it has no bearing on our world. Perhaps it should have a bearing on our world. Perhaps, in a world that had not gone so far off the tracks like ours did several decades ago, the college boys would still be reading these works and the girls would still be planning on being mothers rather than killing their children in the womb.

An Example

I know that, if it were left up to me a couple years ago, even though I was already a big fan of the Great Books with experience in implementing their instruction in an elementary school, I would have tossed Rabelais into the bin and never looked back. It just seemed like asking too much, I have to rethink that now.

Furthermore, we must carefully consider which books from more recent ties to add to the collection. There were some atrocious additions made to the second addition, simply in an effort to be more inclusive and have more works from women authors. While my own biases would not go in that direction, I could certainly end up adding works that simply appealed to my personal tastes but which had no real bearing on whether it was a work which would be valuable to my descendants in 200 years.

So Which Books Are Great?

For the time being, until society has recovered from this spell of cultural amnesia, we believe that it is best to leave Mortimer Adler's original edition as sacrosanct and to consider judiciously some additions.

Obviously, being a fan of the great books does not mean that you read nothing else. Listing the great books to a small list is an attempt to define a core of Western civilization, something on which we can all agree.

The Great Books and the Knights of the Resurrection


None of us has read through the entire canon and, even if we did, we would not have incorporated it
all into any kind of coherent philosophy. We depend on our liturgy to provide that foundation. However, the canon of the Great Books is the Tree of Knowledge to which we turn to whet our intellectual appetites. We will provide guidance and even curriculum for those who wish to join us in our appreciation of the greatest works known to Western Civilization.

The Miseducation of Western CIvilization

I used to be a high school history teacher. I only did it for a few years before I drifted out of the profession and became a full-time bum.

I think that my divorce probably had something to do with my departure from teaching but I was definitely disenchanted from the get go. I recognized quickly that it was just a conformity factory. I had both positive and negative memories of my own schooling before I got into teaching in my early 30s. After teaching in a high school with adult eyes, I couldn't see how anyone could enjoy their stay in such a hell-hole.

And I am not talking about a ghetto school. This was a decent, middle-class suburban school. But few of us teachers were really teaching anything useful. Furthermore, the principal tolerated scum bags by simply sending them back to class with big grins on their faces after you sent them to the office. Worst of all, no matter how hard I tried to alter the format, class always became a matter of getting everyone to "sit and listen".

Sit and Listen is a learning format for girls and emasculated boys. This is no way to raise young men. Sure, if they want to learn calculus or computer programming, they are going to have to sit still occasionally. But then their minds are active, problem-solving. The average high school is just a prison for young men with high T-levels.

I recognize that maybe I just wasn't a good teacher. Robert was a teacher for much longer than me, mostly in elementary, and claims to have loved it. But we both agree that there has to be a better way to teach young men. As it is, we are just criminalizing their natural behavior by putting them in cages and lowering the T-levels of those young men who submit to this imprisonment.

After I resigned from teaching, I gained an interest in the Great Books and realized that there was another, even greater defect in what students were learning. Or rather, what they were not learning.

We're More Intelligent Now?

Discussing matters historical with my students, one of the girls chimed in that things were different now because "We're more intelligent, We have more education."

I tried not to laugh at this declaration from one of my least-functional students. More educated? More intelligent?

These kids are literate, I will give them that. Facebook and texting demands that one be literate to some extent.

But truly more educated? More intelligent? What makes them think that?

I think that I know. They equate the number of classes passed with actual education.

That's why you hear so-called college-educated women spouting off about their education proudly when all they have really done is attended a bunch of classes about gender or culture in which all they had to do was write papers about how they felt and get the spelling and punctuation reasonably correct.

And what are they literate in? I looked at what the English teachers were having them read. Granted, there was a core of good American literature being taught. But the approach even to that is so nauseatingly politically correct that any value is really lost.

As for "world" literature, it is some of the most shallow tripe you have ever seen. After a snippet of real classics such as Homer or Dante, the teachers indulge themselves in tripe pushed out largely by modern authors (modern because outside of Western Europe until a century or so ago, you didn't even have anything resembling literature).

What's the Big Deal?

Some of you reading this may wonder what the big deal is. Many people today, cut off from their cultural birthrights by the educational excisions of the past few decades, have come to believe that it is enough to learn to read, write and do math. History and culture are extraneous, in their opinion.

It is this mental rape of the present generation that is leading us to our downfall. People do not know what they are being robbed of because the past is practically a blank slate for them. They have a PC-skewed version of the history of the last few generations in their head and ignore the preceding millennia because that was all "just a bunch of racist, sexist stuff." Or so their teachers told them.

This is true even for young men who think of themselves as libertarians or alt-right. They have been raised on a history so revised that, even after they rebel against political correctness, they still do no understand what is missing from their perspective.

The knights wish to preserve, at the very least, the racial memory of our finest moments. These include historical works and accounts that remind us of just how strong, and how weak, we can be. This includes the most gossamer delicate poetry as well as the martial beat of the psalms given in our liturgy.

So What Would the Knights Do?

The knights wish to retain all of the beauty that posterity has passed on to us in the Sistine chapel, Westminster Abbey, the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Ovid and Virgil, the wisdom of Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, even the philosophy of the men who questioned our own sacred beliefs, such as Hegel or Kant.

The West has been having a very satisfying conversation for the last few thousand years. This conversation begins with Sumerian tales such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Jewish collection of scriptures known as the Old Testament.

Today, though, we are threatened with the loss of the entire thread of the conversation as ignorant, weak men have turned away from confrontation with ideas and have acquiesced to the women in their lives. Now everything is acceptable and nothing is contested because potentially good men fel that they have no basis from which to begin an argument.

Why Should We Expect Opposition?

This goal is apparently modest. After all, we are simply talking about the preservation of a small collection of books and a body of artwork that could all be captured easily on a flash drive. In addition, there is all the architecture of Europe and America.

But you would find, had you the opportunity to implement an education in any school today, that teaching these things would cause a firestorm of protest.

Robert has already encountered this protest, even from people who are ostensibly on the "right" side
of these matters but act like shrieking liberals. Teach Latin in a Catholic school? He found that did not go over well.Yet all of our recent ancestors, both Protestant and Catholic, found Latin to be an indispensable part of a real man's education. Even the Greek Orthodox taught Latin, spiteful as they are against all things Western.

You see, these texts and paintings and buildings and ideas derived from our rich past offend modernists on a very fundamental level. Subtly or not, they expose the lies and reveal truths known since the beginning of time:

• Men are not equal one to another, nor are women. 
• Valor and strength are positive qualities.
• The family is the root unit of a nation
• A nation consists of a people, and is not defined by political borders
• We were meant to shape this world to our liking

There are many other things that you will learn from reading the Great Books. Most of the are repellent to a population of people that are changing their sexes and abusing their children with drugs, hormones and the filth spewed out by Hollywood.

You do not need this website to do so but we hope to provide a guide and some resources to make it easier to read the Great Books. It is unlikely that you have the time to dedicate to familiarizing yourself with your birthright like you did when you were young. 

This is another great crime of our time. In his late teens and early 20s a man has plenty of time, absent family and responsibilities, to learn in depth about his ancestors and their beliefs. If you are past that time, working and/or supporting a family, your opportunities to study are reduced.

But you must take every opportunity. Allow yourself to read the Odyssey or passages from scripture and you will soon find yourself drawn into this tapestry that includes you and every one who has ever existed.

Most importantly, fight against those who would take it away from you and your own posterity. They are waging a war against you and your children.

Get angry.

Read.

Stay angry.