The Order of the Quest

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

Re: Why are you so anti-school?

Because I’m a survivor of the K-12 public school system.

And things were way mellower in the 1940s and 1950s.

I graduated in June of 1959.

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According to David Knight (The David Knight Show, Jun. 14, 2021) …

“Let’s defund these schools. Schools are not the same as education.

“These schools — whether it is a university, whether it is a seminary, whether it is K through 12 — these schools have turned against our children.

“You need to get your kids out, and we need to defund the schools.

“Let’s make that a cause. Defund the schools!

“That is the fount of all this corruption into our society, and the way that they’re doing this is with Marxist Hegelian tactics.”

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John Taylor Gatto (The Underground History of American Education, Revised Edition, 2006) wrote …

“In a famous book, The Proper Study of Mankind (1948), paid for by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Russell Sage Foundation, the favorite principle of true believers since Plato makes an appearance: ‘A society could be completely made over in something like 15 years, the time it takes to inculcate a new culture into a rising group of youngsters.’ Despite the spirit of profound violence hovering over such seemingly bloodless, abstract formulas, this is indeed the will-o-the-wisp pursued throughout the twentieth century in forced schooling — not intellectual  development, not character development, but the inculcation of a new synthetic culture in children, one designed to condition its subjects to a continual adjusting of their lives by unseen authorities.”

According to the same source …

“Plato, Augustine, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and a host of other insightful thinkers, sometimes referred to at the Boston Athenaeum as ‘The Order of the Quest,’ all taught that without compulsory universal schooling the idiosyncratic family would never surrender its central hold on society to allow Utopia to become reality. Family had to be discouraged from its function as a sentimental haven, pressed into the service of loftier ideals — those of the perfected State.”

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