Here in the foothills of the Sierras, the elevation of around 1000′ to maybe 1400′ is considered ideal – above the fog (and the Tule fog of the Central Valley is legendary and not to be trifled with) but below the snow. Of course, it varies by region, but roughly speaking, elevations of around here are the sweet spot.
But not today:
This morning, around 9:00, at about 1400′Starting to stick on the road.
We live at 750′ – definitely below the snow, but, alas, not above the fog. January was full of grim grey days, where driving became a bit challenging. But no snow.
Tule fog, extreme case, filling the entire Central Valley. It’s not just that visibility is about zero, it’s that it’s not always near zero: you can drive along with reasonable visibility, and all the sudden hit a patch where you can hardly see your hand in front of your face. Lot of nasty pile-ups on Interstate 5 and Highway 99. From Wikipedia: “Visibility in tule fog is usually less than 600 feet (200 m). Visibility can vary drastically; in only a few feet, visibility can go from 10 feet (3.0 m) to near zero. The variability in visibility is the cause of many chain-reaction pile-ups on roads and freeways. In one such accident on Interstate 5 near Elk Grove south of Sacramento, 25 cars and nine big-rig trucks collided inside a fog bank on December 12, 1997. Five people died and 28 were injured.” And so on.
We drove up the hill to go to mass, and transitioned from cold rain to mixed flakes to real snow as we drove up to 1400′.
Of course, we realize this is sissy snow. I lived in New Mexico – Sant Fe at 7,000′ and Albuquerque at 4,900′ – for almost a decade, and at least a couple times saw – and had to drive in – good old 2′ in under an hour snowfall. This is not like that.
The real stuff is happening in the High Sierra, Donner Party style. 1o idiots back country skiers went out with 5 professional guides right before these current storms, got hit by an avalanche in the back country, then the rescue people had to work in a blizzard to try to get them out. 9 of them died. Winter is real in the Sierra.
The two passes – Donner and Echo – are shut down. The CHP is saying don’t even think about it. One weird thing about the geography of the area, the weird thing that got Donner Party members killed: under modern conditions, you start in Reno with no problems, and in a little more than an hour, you’re descending into the valley. Back in the Donner Party days, it looked like a few days to get from Reno to the Sacramento Valley. It seemed like not that big a risk – just get up the mountain, and down the mountain.
Reality is that, above say 5,000′, it’s a different world. Yes, a few miles in either direction is relative safety. That hardly matters if you can’t travel. So, even though the entire dangerous stretch is maybe 70 miles, that’s a tough 70 miles. The temptation to risk it keeps getting people killed to this day.
On the update front, have started and abandoned a number of blog posts this year. I’ve made meager progress on the education history book. Starting to feel better physically and less brain fogged, so maybe things will pick up. All this rain and fog make it hard to get anything done outside, even when I’m feeling up to it.
Year end update: trying to work on the book on education history. Got the introduction, 2/3 of chapter 1 and many pieces that need to be corralled. I’ve gotten mostly to the ‘it’s just work’ stage, where I’ve got an outline, got some stuff down, so it’s a question of filling in the blanks to get to 1st draft. So, improvement? Making myself sit down and write for 3-4 hours a day is, to put it very generously, intermittent.
So, for 2026: get in 3-4 hours of writing every day. I’d really like to get back to writing fiction, but need to get this first one done.
Ranch life is good. We’re up to 5 cows, which is maybe 2 cows too many for the amount of pasture we have.
From left to right: Dido, one of the original twin heifers; Bandit, our new bull, a 2-year old Aberdeen who is here to impregnate all the girls; Salley the calf (that[s what one set of the grandkids call her, and who am I to dispute it?); Hera the mom, and Shey the other twin heifer.
The fence repair project that would bring another 1+ acre of pasture on line got postponed last Spring so that I could work on the garden:
A very poor picture of the garden, taken November 1. It’s about 5,000 sq ft; another 10,000 sq ft is dedicated to an orchard. Only have 4 trees planted so far; got several more plus some on order. 500 feet of 8′ deer fencing – big project, not to mention then making the pasture into a garden. From the other direction: corn. Still have a bunch of ears in the freezer. Cows love corn stalks.
Still need to finish that fence, I hope over the holidays. Of course, we cut and pulled a ton of brush and trees, much of which has grown back – sigh.
Here’s the last of the pumpkin harvest:
White, ‘blue,’ and sugar.
I’ve inflicted pumpkin soup, pie, cookies, bread, and will try to make a pumpkin cake tonight. Not getting any complaints.
Up to 6 grandkids, the oldest is 4 and the youngest 5 months. Life is good. Once the fig trees I’ve planted get a little taller, I can get all biblical – resting in the shade of my own fig tree, surrounded by my children and my children’s children. How cool is that? At a profound level, I am very happy and blest.
Problem: my health has not been good. The obvious issue is knees – trying to get scheduled for knee replacement on the right knee, but the left is as bad. Maybe February? But overshadowing the mobility issue is energy – I’m just exhausted and ill-feeling much of the time. Hey, I’m old, and, sadly, fat. Gotta work on that. At this point, in the cold of winter, I’m good for about an hour and a half of outdoor work before I have to stop for the day. Hope that improves.
Blogging has taken a hit (duh). As of today, I’ve been blogging for 16 years. Yikes! Over 2 million words. Knocking off a novel or 10 should be a piece of cake, by comparison. Right?
Re: the last post – this morning, we were back at the church where hang the banners listing deceased parishioners by the year they died, so we can pray for the repose of their souls. Last week, I observed a curious discontinuity. Today, I counted: 6 names listed on the 2020 banner; 27 names on the 2021 banner. Last time, I had failed to count the names.
As of January 2021, the CDC asserted 350,000 people died in 2020 *with* the Coof. Yet, using the rational method for computing excess deaths outlined here, there were no, as in zero, excess deaths in 2020. The indefensible amateur methodology used by the CDC baked in 100,000 ‘excess’ deaths in 2020, but even using that flawed methodology leaves the CDC a claimed 250,000 deaths *with* the Coof short.
While I went hammer and tongs at the numbers throughout 2020, what I really discovered was a) the methodologies used to collect and analyze those numbers were so flawed as to render all claims based on those numbers dubious; b) the people promoting the panic were not honest; and c) few people were even willing to listen and think about it.
The reality is that, by early 2021, I was disgusted and exhausted with all the obvious lies and misdirection, but most especially with the True Believers and their spittle-flecked rejections of even the most bland logical questions* if those questions cast the slightest doubt on the claim We’re All Going to Die if Anyone Doesn’t Get the Jab!!!! So my analysis and writing petered out.
Today, ran across a wonderful post-mortem by the estimable Dr. Malone, delving into the psychology of mass formation, and defining the terms misinformation, disinformation, epistemic capture, etc. The Science!tm around health has been captured by Big Pharma, so that what gets funded, studied, and accepted as the Science! is never allowed to contradict the goals of the funders. Never want to get another study funded? Want to have your career destroyed? Go ahead and defy the ‘scientific consensus’ shaped by corporate funding, and see what happens.
He also adds a discussion of Synformation, a term new to me, describing how AI generated ‘science’, with all the hallucinations and bad actors AI entails, now threatens whatever shreds of credibility science still retains. We think AI is getting so good that an AI photo or video is getting hard to tell from the real thing? That ain’t nothing to AI-generated ‘science’ with all the trappings of what passes for the real thing, except it’s all made up. Yet another bear-trap on the road to truth.
As to the unreality surrounding the tyrannical terror campaign that masqueraded as prudent public health policy, Malone says, “Personally, I find this general topic intellectually boring. I have covered it for years in hundreds of essays, podcasts, and interviews. I feel as if it has all been said before, at least in the USA.” I feel you, man.
* Example: if one were to test the efficacy and safety of a drug for three months, exactly how long can that drug be claimed to be safe and effective based on actual test data, under hypothetically ideal conditions?
Bear with me, we’ll get to the Coof in a minute. November, in Catholic liturgical tradition, is the Month of the Dead, during which we meditate on the Four Last Things and pray for the Faithful Departed. At Mass yesterday morning, the church had a set of banners hanging on the columns flanking the nave, upon which were listed the people who had died that year. There are 6 columns; the years thus were 2020 through 2025.
Anyway, this method yielded a result close enough to ‘zero’ excess deaths in 2020 to simply call it a bad flu season and move one – BUT – there was a measurable uptick in deaths starting in 2021, which, at least here in America, has yet to recede back to ‘normal’. What, oh what, changed in 2021? Did the WuFlu mutate, contrary to logic and history, into a more virulent form? Or did something else happen?
Like many people, among my family and acquaintances there seems to be a shocking uptick in cancers and heart problems. Latest: a niece in her mid-20s is being treated for bowel cancer. (Prayers would be appreciated.) Grok says the median age for onset of this cancer for women is 72 years old. Anecdote, but still.
Anyway, back to the banners in church: the 2020 banner had fewer than 10 names on it; 2021 had a couple dozen. 2020 was by far the lowest year in the 6 year span 2020-2025. Another anecdote, for sure, but it makes a fellah think.
Rained all day. About an hour ago, brought the cows some bread to eat, and went to check on the calf.
While the cows were eating their bread (we supplement their diet with bread that has been returned to the local high-end bakeries. Mostly grass fed, but I guess there’s a little grain in there too) I got to look around for the calf.
Mama cow seems to like to hide her calf down in the brush near the creek. This time, I got to pet and talk to the little calf. Newborn calf fur is very soft! She was very still and quiet, which figures I suppose. 
Our big cow, Hera, just gave birth – as in yesterday evening – to our newest cow:
Standing next to mom.Curled up in the bushes.
This is the first calf born on our ranch. We – the co-owner and I – bought Hera about 6-7 months ago already with calf – a standard way to build a herd. She was due August or September, according to the friend who sold her to us. Had her calf on September 30, barely making the window.
Her calf is a heifer, so, as a daughter of Hera, I’m thinking Hebe as a name. Comet has been proposed by the co-owners grandkids, but – huh? They can call her Comet when they are around, nobody’s stopping them…
Hebe. The resemblance is remarkable.
Hebe is the cupbearer to the Gods, and the goddess of eternal youth. She doles out the nectar and ambrosia. That is a bit of a handful for a cow, but what ya gonna do?
Hera – the cow, not the goddess – is being protective. That top picture I had to zoom in to get, as the usually passive cow was backing away as I approached. When I went looking later, Hera had hidden her calf – not unusual, based on YouTube videos. Hera was lying down – she gave birth less than a day ago, she can lie down if she wants – but as I approached, she got up, and moved to keep me in front of her. When I saw little Hebe and started coming in for a picture, Hera started walking towards me. YouTube also has little movies about momma cows throwing and stomping people who got too close to their calves, so I figured that was close enough.
Hera is an impressive cow, if it’s not too ridiculous to say such a thing – big, square, black, filled out. Hebe is beautiful, as calves go. We seem to have gone all in on this cattle ranch deal without really setting out to do so. (We might even buy a Dexter cow – a friend of a friend is trying to sell her. Yet another female! We need bull calves to make steers to make steaks and burgers. The old-timers look dimly on slaughtering fertile females, especially when the market for beef is high, as it is now. But I’m just a schmuck with a couple cows, not a ‘real’ rancher….)
Next, I’ve ended up with a complicated garden/orchard set up. We have an upper garden, where we grew some sweet corn not very successfully; a middle garden where we grew cabbages and beets successfully, broccoli and Brussel sprouts not so successfully. It’s now full of green tomatoes:
We were hoping we’d get an Indian Summer through October; instead we got fall in September. I don’t know if tomatoes will ripen if it’s only the low 70sF. Average temperature here for September is mid-80s – it was cooler than that on average. 80s in October are not unusual, this being California. Low temps are a bigger problem in the big garden:
Sweet corn that needs another 3-4 weeks of warm weather. Okra, ditto. Yams, pumpkins, potatoes – should be OK, unless it soon gets even more cold and damp.
Because of a confluence of forces, I didn’t get this garden ready until the end of July. So it was a stretch to plant corn, but, what the heck, had the seeds. This is my first drip line setup. I built a little yellow table upon which to mount the drip line gear:
I’m all about cute. It’s sad, really.
This Big Garden, to be distinguished from the Upper, Middle, and Lower gardens (that last we didn’t use this year) is about 4,000 sq ft. I’ve only planted maybe 20% of it, but plan to go whole hog in the spring.
Attached to the big garden is what will be an orchard of about 10,000 sq ft.
Only planted 4 trees so far. Hoping to plant about a dozen more in the spring. The Big Garden is to the left in this picture. Looking up the hill, the big garden with the orchard behind it.
We have also planted 14 fruit trees toward the top of the property, a number of trees around the house, and have maybe a dozen very old apple and pear trees in the pastures, left over from when the original estate was orchards.
Progress is being made.
Speaking of progress, I’ve spent the last couple days going through the +/- 2 million words on this blog, bulling and sorting out materials for the book on education history I’ve long said I want to write. Have maybe a hundred pages of note so far, and I’m less than 10% through the topics I’m searching on.
Following up on the last post, we have before us the question of cause and effect. Is sending our kids to school for 6 or 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, 10 months out of the year, for 13+ years, plus daily homework, sports and other extra curricular activities that effectively consume nearly all their time, the result of our modern society, or its cause?
For what I assume are the vast bulk of parents, not sending their kids to school would be, at the very least, a major disruption of their lives. Mom and dad both work all day; with perhaps a few exceptions, their neighbors work all day (that’s what they assume, because it is unlikely that urbanites or suburbanites know more than a few of their neighbors); all the other kids in the neighborhood are at school.
So what are their kids supposed to do all day? More and more parents are becoming aware, even if dimly aware, that screentime is actively destructive to their kids. Endless Zoom school is a non-starter for most parents, even the largely clueless. So that’s a no-go. There do not seem to be any real options, unless you’re one of those crazy homeschoolers, or crazy-rich.
Then there’s the pushback: just as modern schooling simply IS education to most people, modern practices simply ARE the world we live in. In both cases, most of us frame ourselves as passive participants in a world where we have no say. Both of us have to work. Therefore, our kids have to attend school. We have no choice in the matter.1
The historical story is a bit different. First, of course mom and dad both needed to work, since time immemorial. Men may have done the hunting and farming – never forget that up until very recently, a minimum of about 90% of everyone everywhere in any society had to work at procuring food, if there were not to be starvation – but women were hardly idle. Women’s work ran from farming to making clothes (in some cultures, building a house was women’s work!) to caring for the younger children. Women’s work was every bit as essential and grueling as men’s work.
Yet schooling, meaning here putting your children under the direction of somebody else for the purpose of learning, was not common until very recently, at least not until the child was old enough for apprenticeship. It’s laughable to contend that parents before modern times had more time to devote to their kids than we moderns do, yet they managed to care for them, and to educate them as described in the last post, none the less.
But modern society is so much more demanding than more primitive cultures! We need much more education to properly fit in! While I, for one, hesitate greatly to say a modern cube-dweller, for example, is somehow more educated, and requires more education, than a farmer (especially since we’re now trying to hobby farm a bit – it’s eye-opening), let’s grant, for purposes of discussion, that modern city or suburban life requires much more learning than farm life now or in the past.
The claim is that, in this modern world, a kid needs to master many more diverse subjects just to have a place in society. Instead of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, say, or even how to do their father’s or mother’s jobs, kids these days need years of math, science, writing, history, languages, and so on. So our kids these days are fabulously well educated, no matter how objectively ignorant and uncurious they are.
The common copes – we’re way smarter than most ancient people, who didn’t even know how to read and only had to farm, and so were clearly stupid, and the risible ‘front row kids‘ convenient mythology (in the sense of lie) – fail to line up with reality.
Our high school graduates are experts – experts, I tell you! – in math, science, history, and speak multiple languages and so on. How could they not be? After all, they’ve had certified educators spend thousands of hours teaching them these things. Under those conditions, we should expect a very high level of mastery, rather than the functionally illiterate2 and innumerate children who can hardly speak one language, with not the slightest hint of a grasp of math, science, and so on, that we do, in reality, have. These kids graduate high school in droves, often with honors.
To be sure, some people, those who identify as front row kids, for example, claim to be very well educated. They have all the right degrees and test scores. Outside, perhaps, certain highly technical specialties, there’s no evidence today’s ‘successful’ products of schooling, with all the right degrees and test scores are better educated than our ancestors. And even that difference, when it exists, is a difference in training, not in education.
The front row kids, the mindless drones who kissed up to teacher and absorbed the lie that the most important thing in life is success at school, have become the vanguard of the NPCs. They have absorbed the modern intellectual impedimenta: doing as you’re told is ‘following the science’; don’t credit anyone who isn’t an expert just like all your teachers; credentialed expertise trumps demonstrated expertise; that intelligence simply is believing and doing whatever the approved experts tell you to believe and do.3 Anyone who disputes this in any way is stupid or ignorant, and needs to ‘get educated’. Right.
These people occupy positions at Orwellian-named ‘think tanks,’ where real thought is vanishingly unlikely to take place. Or they take positions in government or the news media (insofar as those are different) where they can continue to scoff at the stupid, ignorant people who don’t buy what they’re selling. They end up with their hands on the levers of power. I’m tempted to say ‘we are so screwed,’ but I prefer (and am commanded) not to despair.
This is the world of modern schooling. This is the world created by modern schooling.
There’s no reforming this mess. It’s not the curriculum, or the teaching methods, or the mounds of homework, however much those things are abominations. It’s the fact that we’ve let school dictate to us what world we will live in: where, for 13+ years, every waking moment of our children’s lives are dominated by school. Family life, parental influence, informal fun, must be snuck in in the gaps. Parent are praised for making their kids do homework instead of sharing a home life with them. Our worth as parents hinges, in the eyes of this world, on how well our kids do in school. We, ourselves, no matter how competent we are in our adult lives, embrace the idea that we lack the competence to teach our own children. We think we lack the time, because the world we live in leaves us little, and the schools take hours to teach what can be learned in minutes, days for what can be learned in hours, and years for what can be learned in weeks.
Further, unilaterally imposed ‘standards’ like Common Core reframe requirements in such a way as to baffle and frustrate any parent who might want to help their kid learn. Thus it has been from the beginning of compulsory state education: parents were to be cut out of the process by the expedient of teaching subject, or embracing teaching methods, that parents could not easily master. Teachers – excuse me, ‘educators’ – became a priesthood of the sacred mysteries, not to be challenged by mere family. By now, with 4 generations or more processed through the schools, this arrangement seems normal.
Now, finally, some of us are awakening to the truth that hardly anything the schools teach is anything a sane parent would want their children to know. The three Rs? They were never the point of schooling, because, if they were, you’d be able to test out at any point. Many of us could read, write, and had enough math to balance a checkbook by 5th grade at the latest – but our schooling had hardly begun! Learning the basics is not the point of compulsory state education. Here’s my boy Fichte on this point:
Now, assuming that the pupil is to remain until education is finished, reading and writing can be of no use in the purely national education, so long as this education continues. But it can, indeed, be very harmful; because, as it has hitherto so often done, it may easily lead the pupil astray from direct perception to mere signs, and from attention, which knows that it grasps nothing if it does not grasp it now and here, to distraction, which consoles itself by writing things down and wants to learn some day from paper what it will probably never learn, and, in general, to the dreaming which so often accompanies dealings with the letters of the alphabet.
Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation
It’s up to us change this. Insofar as your state allows it, just say no. It will require major sacrifices to make sure your kids have plenty of family and friend time in which to learn a culture and cultivate social skills. You will have to rethink your whole financial outlook on life. But it is so worth it! 4
A story: once met a priest in Mexico who asked a couple preparing for marriage how many kids they intended to have. They said two, and added that they could not afford more than that. So he asked them how many brothers and sisters they each had – many. So he said, wow, your parents must have been rich! They said no, they weren’t, our parents were very poor. I think the priest just let that hang to see if they would figure it out. ↩︎
Not reading is functionally indistinguishable from not being able to read. ↩︎
We have one acquaintance who will discount anything you tell her unless it has been reported by a ‘reputable’ news source. Your logic is invalid if it raises contradictions with those sources. She was a professional teacher for a number of years. As Chesterton said, kids ignore what you say but inevitably absorb what you assume. ↩︎
To answer the obvious question, this is how we did it: I was the breadwinner, going the MBA route, but eschewing any job that would place insane demands on my time. Managed to find a sufficiently remunerative career that only required an average of maybe 50 hours/wk. My wife worked on the staff of the Sudbury school we helped found, and so was in our kids’ lives during the day. We managed to have dinner together almost every day, and I read or told bedtime stories to kids for years. When the kids were a little older, we’d read something while we cleaned up after dinner, and talk about it as a family. Is it harder for most families these days? YES! Is it still worth the sacrifices? Well, to put it bluntly, you can sacrifice money or your children. There’s no other escape. ↩︎
Hey, dads and moms – you’ve been robbed. Grandpas and Grandmas – you, too. Uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, friends, neighbors – a humanizing and fulfilling job has been taken from you. Culture has died as a result.
For as long as there have been people, up until about 175 years ago everywhere and much more recently in most places, the family educated its children. This is how culture was passed on. Sons and daughters learned the lore of the village or tribe, the work of the family, and how to be a part of the community.
While mom and dad were by nature the leaders, everybody in the child’s life more or less consciously contributed. Children worked alongside their parents and siblings. If dad was the town blacksmith, junior would be helping before he could lift a hammer; daughters learned spinning, weaving, and needlework. Farmers farmed, with children joining in as soon as they could walk.
Universal are accounts of friends, neighbors, and visitors gathering to tell and hear the community’s stories. I imagine the children in the fire’s shadows, wide-eyed, hanging on every word, while Homer sang to the Argive lords and ladies, or the warriors told of Beowulf in the mead hall. Or the children of the Hebrews hearing again the story of the Exodus or Eden or even Job. Much of Gilgamesh was over the heads of the Mesopotamian children, but most of it wasn’t. Young children want to understand, and will by nature turn to a trusted adult to explain.
No one at the time would have dreamed of framing it this way, but culture was being handed along.
I’m not trying here to glamorize the very hard lives of our ancestors. Rather, I want to note something assumed without comment: that parents, families, friends, and neighbors were competent to teach their children whatever they needed to know. For more specific and detailed crafts, apprenticeships filled whatever gap there might be. Finally, as a last resort as it were, masters in academic subjects might be employed, for those few who were interested in such things. But such recourse was only resorted to, when needed, after all the basics had been learned at home.
Parents had to first be convinced that they were not competent to teach their own children. As Fichte put it in 1809:
To put it more briefly. According to our supposition, those who need protection are deprived of the guardianship of their parents and relatives, whose place has been taken by masters. If they are not to become absolute slaves, they must be released from guardianship, and the first step in this direction is to educate them to manhood. German love of fatherland has lost its place; it shall get another, a wider and deeper one; there in peace and obscurity it shall establish itself and harden itself like steel, and at the right moment break forth in youthful strength and restore to the State its lost independence. Now, in regard to this restoration foreigners, and also those among us who have petty and narrow minds and despairing hearts, need not be alarmed; one can console them with the assurance that not one of them will live to see it, and that the age which will live to see it will think otherwise than they.
Nothing creepy about that. We enlightened few just want control of your children until you stick in the muds die off. All those recent stories about parents raising objections to school boards and educators, only to be smirked at and ignored, or worse? This is not something new or extra to the project of public education. Normal Schools/Teacher Colleges/university education programs are primarily filters. Their mission is to select for those individuals with the program, and eliminate troublemakers. If potential educators are stupid, so much the better – less chance they will figure any of this out. Convenient that educators are primarily from the bottom quintile of college students1
A forgotten point in history is that educational reformers taught that parents were the problem that compulsory state schooling was designed to solve. Sometimes, it was lack of parents – the 18th century’s endless wars left a lot of orphans and otherwise abandoned children. But for kids who had parents, those parents themselves were the problem: enslaving their children to the past – that would be family, village, and church – thus preventing them from gaining the glorious future imagined by the reformers. Educated by ‘masters’ – you know, ‘educators’ – our children would inevitably progress toward the Promised Land. But only once those children are ‘freed’ from the primitive and enslaving ideas of the parents. No, really – as Fichte put it in 1807:
Of course, it is not to be expected that all parents will be willing to be separated from their children, and to hand them over to this new education, a notion of which it will be difficult to convey to them. From past experience we must reckon that everyone who still believes he is able to support his children at home will set himself against public education, and especially against a public education that separates so strictly and lasts so long.
That efforts had to be made to convince us parents that we are incompetent had largely succeeded over a century ago, so that virtually everyone is unaware that such a program ever took place. Of course, we hand our kids off for their entire childhoods to state-certified teachers! What, are you nuts?
Back to the original claims of this little essay: For thousands of years, parents took it for granted that education was their job, and that education meant learning to live life as they found it. In Christian lands, this education included the moral code needed for Western Civilization to exist. This moral education was primarily practical, not theoretical – every little village had its church, virtually everyone attended, village and family celebrations centered on religious feasts and sacraments. Everyone knew what was expected of them, morally – and knew that the local lord and far away emperor answered to same God for the same set of moral obligations.
Without such a common moral foundation, applying to everyone, a society in any way free cannot exist. We are seeing today how that imperative plays out.
Every father and mother absorbed how to teach from their father and mother. I doubt it often rose to a conscious level. Dad and mom had mastered certain skills, and had certain expectations, and children absorbed these. Other people in the village could step in if the child needed some other skills – thus, apprenticeships, both formal and informal. Finally, if some academic training was needed, in Christian Europe, the boy might approach the parish priest, who (theoretically at least) knew some Latin and how to read and even had some books! A girl’s family might need to have contacts among the nuns in convents – this did in fact happen.
But such academic training was only for the talented very few. (For one thing, there were no books to read, for the most part, prior to Gutenberg.) In later centuries, the ubiquitous Bibles became the tools for learning to read. In America, there are endless stories of children sitting on Grandma’s lap, learning to read the King James Bible.
However it came about, all those educated men and women prior to 1848 in America and at most a couple decades earlier elsewhere, got that way without the benefit of schools or state-certified teachers. I and others have made the case, which is all but obvious upon inspection, that Americans at least were considerably better educated, more learned, more articulate and broadly read, before compulsory state schooling than after. Today, the disaster which is public schooling takes real commitment to ignore. Many are so committed.
Imagine the satisfaction you might have had seeing your child master whatever it is you taught them. Imagine the bonds you would forge with such children. imagine sharing in the joy your child’s achievements under your direction would engender. Imagine the satisfaction of seeing your culture carried into the future by your own children.
All that has been taken from you. And our culture is dying hideously as a result.
In resent years, the average IQ of college students has converged with the average IQ of the population in general. This suggests that teachers, coming as they mostly do from the bottom 20% of college students, are most likely in general stupider than the average kid they ‘educate’. My fairly extensive sample of educators would confirm this. Also, the occasional bright educator – to be fair, I’ve met plenty of those, too – will need to make heroic moral efforts to not think himself brilliant. I mean, he’s way smarter than the average teacher! ↩︎
Could you expand on the “not wanting to go to school” thing? Children don’t want to go to sleep, eat their vegetables, share their toys, and all manner of things that are difficult, onerous, and necessary, even to to later enjoyment.
My daughter didn’t want to learn to write, but I wasn’t about to let her off it, and now she reads books like Elements of Style for pleasure.
This can be a very tricky question, both philosophically – to what extent do I, as a parent, have a duty and right to compel the behavior and choices of my children – and even more so in any applied situation – right now, am I as a parent required to intervene in my children’s life, based on my answer to the philosophical question.
Many more or less reasonable answers to the philosophical question are possible. A Roman paterfamilias would guide his children to honor the family and the Republic, to be obedient, disciplined, and orderly, to do his duty up to and including dying if honor demanded it. A 19th century German father would see it his duty to break his children from any willfulness, going so far as to make sure they failed just so that they might be disciplined. A Carthaginian noble believed it his right and duty to cast his infant children into the fires of Moloch, if required. Our own forefathers probably believed that a hickory switch was the way to focus their children’s attention on proper behavior. And so on.
But we Christian parents have a very different philosophy. We believe that each child is a unique and blessed creation of our loving Father, endowed with his own sacred will and intellect, and that we are mere caretakers. It is the duty of the Christian parent to act always in our child’s interest.
But as human animals, our social behaviors are formed almost entirely by our tribe. In the old days of say 75 or a 100 years ago, there are plenty of stories about how anyone in the neighborhood felt it their duty to discipline anyone else’s kids, up to and including spankings and hickory switches. And everybody accepted it – in a world where that little town WAS the world to the people in it, what everybody did was what everybody did! The standards of behavior were the same among all families, and everybody knew everybody else.
But those days are long gone.
Instead, we now inhabit a world where standards, where any exist, are promulgated and enforced by some combination of government, schools, entertainment, and media. It’s not our neighbors who recognize and enforce the rule about staying out of Farmer Maggot’s cabbage patch, or not talking back to our elders, or addressing adults with respect. Nope, we are informed about what is or isn’t hateful or violent or bigoted, about what we must or mustn’t do or say, by talking heads or invisible writers. These people are not members of our community sharing our standards, who would be ostracized if they, themselves, violated our norms. They live, as it is often said, in a bubble.
Any sane person recognizes and rejects this hostile takeover of public morality. This state of affairs, where we cannot rely on community norms for our rules of basic civilize behavior, put those of us who recognize this state of affairs in the awkward and unnatural position of having to find some subset of our society that does share our standards, or, worse, adopt standards on our own. Man was not meant to live alone; life involves more than mere biological survival. A good life requires friends and family.
This may seem far afield from the question of what a parent is justified or obliged to make his own children do. I am attempting to describe the environment in which we make such decisions. We can’t follow the lead of the broad society, not if we wish to remain sane and raise sane children.
Every long term reader here knows what I think of schooling: Current K-grad school schooling is an unmitigated disaster, to be avoided at all costs. Burn it to the ground and salt the earth where it stood. (Exceptions being made for those institutions which recognize this fact and attempt to do something else – much more common on the college level than in K-12.) Yet we are reminded, as Slate puts it:
You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.
People who say such things are insane. They bleed Cool Aid, they’ve drunk so much of it. We did without this ‘essential institutions’ entirely here in America until 1848, then mostly did without it until almost 1900. Somehow, Washington, Jefferson, Adams (both Mr. and Mrs.), Hamilton (to include someone not ‘privileged’ from birth) etc., managed to develop intellects – and leadership, eloquence, a sense of civic duty, and courage – that are nearly as rare as unicorns these days.
Thus, we sane parents need to recognize that the forces of ‘society’ are deeply against our and our children’s happiness, and we must critically examine anything such people demand we do. The whole point of the above digression is that, naturally at a very basic level, we as pack animals/tribes are instinctively inclined to go along with the pack/tribe. That instinct has been weaponized against us.
Fortunately, my wife and I conducted the experiment, so we have at least one data point for what happens if parents don’t make kids do things society insists they do. We always asked ‘why?’ and if a really good reason wasn’t immediately evident, we let it go – we let the kids do whatever they wanted.
What we got out of this experiment were 5 happy kids who now, as adults (the surviving 4 – we were happy with our deceased son for the 20+ years we had him) live exemplary lives that make their daddy happy. They are kind, loving, gentle people who are deeply involved with their fellow man. Three have married quite well, to good, loving spouses; all are extremely well educated (4 Great Books educations, one Theology Masters, one double major in Theatre and Music, etc.) We’ve got 6 adorable grand kids and counting. They all love and respect us.
Not so much bragging here as simply pointing out that letting kids do what they want – and avoiding k-12 school like the plague it is – somehow didn’t ‘ruin’ our kids.
I’m now going to list examples.
We had a few rules, enforced without comment: we all eat dinner together, we all help clean up around the house, we all go to Sunday Mass together, and we must be kind and helpful to each other. (also: whining gets you nothing. Each of them tried it, each found out.)
We did our best to serve nutritious meals – it was then up to the kid to either eat it, or go hungry. You hate the vegetable? OK, your loss (my wife and I and all the kids are really good cooks). There’s other stuff, eat that.
Two of our kids hated wearing shoes. OK, we insist you wear them to church. Other than that, living in California as we did, it’s up to you. Our kids were most often barefoot – like kids should be, frankly.
When the kids were little, around 9:00 p.m. I’d put them all in the big bunk bed and tell them stories until they fell asleep. Once they got older, say 8 or 9, we would simply explain to them that tomorrow morning, they had such and such on the schedule, and it was up to them to get enough sleep. Live and learn.
Obviously, we never made our kids go to school, nor take any tests, nor be measured as society demands. Instead, we founded a ‘school’ with no grades, no classes, no tests, only state-minimum attendance requirements. They’d drop in (usually barefoot) sometime in the morning, then stay to closing because it was fun.
In order, our kids learned to read at the following ages: 3, 8, 14, 8, 13. The one who learned at 14 is the one with the Theology master’s; the one at 13 is a junior at a Great Books school on pace to get honors. Note: our kids grew up in a house full of books, with parents who read to them, where Aristotle, say, was as likely as anything else to come up over dinner. We didn’t make them learn to read, but we did remind them of the costs of not doing so.
We measured thing for building, sewing, cooking, and needlework. They all learned basic math without ever taking a class in it.
Now, we of course had to adjudicate disputes over whose turn it was with what toy, or remind kids to be nice to each other, prohibit them from playing in the street – all that kind of stuff. But we saved our ammo for bigger issues: God, each other, and family.
What principles are involved?
Do not take what our current society demands as valid. In fact, our bias was against doing anything ‘society’ demanded, unless clear, valid reasons were given or developed.
The assumption is that our kids are independent beloved children of God, each with their own lives and destinies, and we as parents are to safeguard and, when necessary, guide them as lightly as possible. But mostly, they need to learn to exercise their own wills, and to suffer the consequences. We only stepped in when safety was a concern.
Not saying anything here about my beloved readers, but in general, as I observed other parents over the 30+ years we raised our kids, it seemed that the parents, in keeping with tribal instincts, wanted their kids to behave in such a manner such that they, the parents, would receive ‘society’s’ approval. We, on the other hand, were routinely told by family and ‘friends’ either that we were ruining our kids, or that our kids were special geniuses and our approach wouldn’t work on their (presumably undisciplined idiot?) children. I can only imagine what they said behind our backs. So, there’s that – buck the ‘norms’, pay the price. But reap the benefits.
Could we have done better? Of course! There are a million things I wish I could do, redo, or refrain from doing. But within this fallen world, I’ll take it, with appropriate gratitude to God and His saints, and all the people who pray for us.
UPDATE: after all the stuff below, I ended my day watching over a rattlesnake. My daughter spotted it on the walk to the front door. I came over to stand guard.
It was a smallish one, maybe 2.5′, but not a baby one. They are beautiful animals, that, all things being equal, I’d love to leave alone. They eat vermin – I approve.
But – hanging out near the deck/front door makes all things very unequal. Now, I didn’t want to kill it, even if I knew how, but needed it out of there. So I called a rattlesnake removal service.
For about $200, they will come, catch it, and release it someplace else. Sigh. After describing the situation to him, the guy I ended up chatting with said that, as long as I have a deck with unhindered access below, I’m going to have rattlesnakes. It’s just too attractive an environment for them. He suggested I either spray it with a hose and wash it down the hill, or get a long-handled rake, pick it up, and throw it down the hill.
Um, sure, no problem. While all this is going on, the snake slithers along the front of the house and over by the garden. While it was nosing around the garden gate, which has small wire mesh on it that it was far too big to get through, I go get a rake. When I return, the snake has discovered the chicken wire fence proper, which it could and did squeeze through.
The garden backs up to a retaining wall and hillside. The snake never got out in the open enough to even consider trying to rake it up. Finally, it decides to climb up the hill.
Now I need to leave the garden and circle around to the hillside. By the time I get there, the snake has slithered up into the brush – again, no chance to rake it up.
I circle around again to the very top of the hill (snakes can go up the side; 67 year old me with bad knees needs to take less challenging paths). I don’t see it – until I do, a couple feet in front of me. If I acted fast enough, now was my chance to rake it up. But the snake was moving fast (for a snake) toward the property line and the other side of the hill.
Lat I saw it, it was behind a big rock behind the woodshed on the property line. Sigh. Well, gone for now. Guess I’ll add snake proofing the deck to the ‘to do’ list.
End Update.
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We’ve been at our new ranch for just over 2 years now. I’m a somewhat more competent Oliver Wendell Douglas. As I’ve told the people we’ve had to hire to do certain things here, I’m suburban homeowner handy, not ranch hand handy. But I’m learning.
First, we have a ground squirrel problem. Those adorable, if meth-addled, little rodents are not as harmless as one might suppose. Raiding and trashing your gardens is the least of the problem. They create massive interconnected burrows, sometimes excavating a cubic yard of dirt in the process. They love the lower embankments of streets and driveways, as well as the foundations of buildings, for their little homes. Left unchecked, they can cause serious damage, causing cracks and collapse.
There are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ squirrel years. They are more abundant this year than any of the neighbors remembers seeing. I heard a local commercial farmer has trapped 2,500 of them this year! Let’s hope next year is much less fruitful, squirrel wise.
The rule of thumb is that however many you might see, there are 10 times that many you don’t see. We see several every time we drive to or from the house. I’m guessing there are a least 100 of them on our property or adjacent properties. They’ve excavated burrows under the road, under the driveway, under the foundations of the (unused) horse stables, my workshop, and a couple of retaining walls, in addition to the many burrows out in the pastures.
This is serious. Something must be done.
Thus, I Am Squirrelbane! (I’d be the Squirrelinator, except that name is already taken by the traps I’m using.) Among the many things I’d never thought I’d be doing is killing squirrels en masse. A week or so ago, I bought 2 Squrrelinator traps – flat wire boxes that have two opposing one-way doors for the squirrels to get in, but make it all but impossible for them to get out.
I don’t like killing things, but I make exceptions. These furry little vermin needed to go. So far, I’ve killed 24.
But there are difficulties. What does one do with the little carcasses? I dumped them in the brush along the fence line, assuming that the many predators and scavengers would take care of them.
And they did! But then, a problem: last night, I got in late from a shopping trip, and it was already almost dark before I got to check the traps. I could see three squirrels in one and one in the other. I also needed to switch irrigation lines, so I did that first. By the time I was done with that, it was difficult to see. The trapped squirrels all looked dead – they seem to die within a couple hours if the trap is in the sun, a little longer if the trap is in the shade. I’d been gone all day, so I was thinking they were all already dead.
I decided that, rather than try to empty the traps in the dark, I’d just get them first thing in the morning. So I walk down the hill this morning, gloves and bait in hand, to dump and reset the traps – only to discover a family of live skunks in one, and a big adult skunk in the other! Seems that dead squirrels are perfect skunk bait!
We were on our way to Mass, so I had an hour or so to think of options. When we got back, I grabbed the 12′ extensible fruit picker, extended it to full length, and used it to hook and release the little spring-loaded clips that hold the top door (used to dump the contents) and then to open the door. The big adult hissed and snipped at the picker as I clumsily maneuvered it, but the cage prevented it from getting into spray position. Once I got it open, it jumped on top and flipped its rear end around in that charming skunk way, but I was already backing up fast. When I turned around, it had high-tailed it to the creek.
The other trap had what looked like mom and a couple pups. They were less aggressive, which was good because it took me a minute to get the main door unlatched and opened. Once I got it opened, they huddled together in one corner and wouldn’t leave. So we (my wife came down to join the festivities) left them there. An hour later, my wife checked and they were gone.
One amazing thing: a full grown skunk is over twice the size of a ground squirrel. The doors on the trap are by design just big enough for a squirrel to get in. How the heck two full-grown skunks got in is a mystery. The pups are right about the same size as a squirrel, so that figures. But the adults? We’re talking some serious contortions.
Moral: DO NOT leave dead squirrels in the the traps over night. Also: these skunks killed time by eating the dead squirrels – there are just scraps left. Skunks look goofy, but they’re serious predators and scavengers.
I’m going to keep trapping. It won’t feel like progress until I’ve captured 30 or 40. Even then, I’ll leave the traps out until winter at least, and then put them in the orchards in spring. The little punks sometimes girdle fruit trees, in addition to destroying the fruit itself.
Next, we have 3 cows, two young heifers and one proven mom. The mom we bought pregnant – it is a usual way to build a herd – and she’s due any minute now. She’s a big black cow, and is very large with child, and her udder is very full – signs she should be dropping that calf! Get a pregnant cow, hear all the horror stories. I’m praying she just drops the calf, because if there are complications, it falls on me to act. This is a bit much for a suburban brat like me.
We’ve fenced and put in a 4000 sq ft garden and a 10,000 sq ft orchard. Only have 4 trees planted in the orchard, and maybe 20% of the garden planted. This next late winter/early spring, we will plant a bunch more trees. Then, in early spring, plant a huuuuge garden.
Should be fun.
One endless task is repairing the irrigation lines. Most common problems are with the sprinklers. The sprayer gets blocked, or something jams the rotating mechanism. Or the cows, looking for something to scratch their heads on, break the sprinkler head. Most of the time, I’ll clean out the head and, if that doesn’t work, replace it. We have around 90 sprinklers on the pastures. Hardly a day goes by where something doesn’t need to be fixed. A few times, I’ve had to dig holes to work on the lines themselves, which are old and brittle. Had to repair a failure in the main irrigation line – that was ‘fun’. Sometimes, a cow will break the pipe leading to the sprinkler head. It’s a lot of work. And I still have one pasture we haven’t used at all yet – it’s the steepest hill on the property, and has around 30 sprinkler heads on 4 lines to fix.
Yard Sale of the Mind 