Guru or Teacher
An essay about education by Paul Schloss from Outside the Castle
[This essay is recommended to all those involved as teachers or parents of pupils, onlookers observing the steady decline, or concerned about the training formally known as education.]
It ain't necessarily so,
It ain't necessarily so
The things that the teacher is liable to teach ya
It ain't necessarily so
[With apologies to George Gershwin]
Agh, Paul, you might as well have posted a Substack note reading “if you liked school you’ll love work.” This is seriously good, though.
For how many years have so many children stared out of the rain-flecked classroom window dreaming of freedom, running in the fields, finding knowledge of the plants and the animals and the weather, staring at the stream holding tadpoles and returning later to delight in a pool of frogs? Back to the classroom and that soppy-stern teacher droning on about the things that don’t matter and don’t inspire.
16 or 18 the doors of the prison are opened; I felt the air of another planet, the world opened, and my education began. And the books I read and the things I saw and the life I lived.
“You always said that no one would strive for education if they knew how unbelievably small the number of truly educated people actually was, or ever could be. But that it was impossible to achieve even this small quota of truly educated people unless a great mass of people were tricked, seduced, into going against their nature and pursuing an education. As a result, we must never publicly betray the ridiculous disproportion between the number of truly educated people and the size of our monstrously overgrown educational system. That is the real secret of education, you said: Countless people fight for it, and think they are fighting for themselves, but at bottom it is only to make education possible for a very few.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions
Where did the reading of thousands of book take me? I sit on the train, a few stops short of the terminus where the ticket collector will inform me of what I already know; that I was given a one-way ticket and no return, and where has this got me? A job in a call centre. No one cares that I can talk about the novels of Henry Green or the essays of George Orwell or The Gospel According to St Matthew or the philosophy of that grumpy fecker Schopenhauer. It puts curry on the table is all.
Paul is right. “The purpose of education should be to produce epiphanies. A moment when we are replete with meaning and insight”. My education began when I left school; in common with most students. If only if it were different, if only formal education was not a state programme to train little children, filled with wonder and beauty, into a cold hard conformity to a cold hard system of acquiesce and acceptance of the state norms of forever war, slaughter, hatred, division - a veritable death cult - but to nurture those little souls to take their place within the beauty of the world, to friendship, love, peace, and deep meaning of this incredible creation; as equal participants and not as mere cogs in a demonic arrangement.
