One is greater than zero—as only the thoughtful know

This is war.

I’m not joking. I like to play with words, but this is no game, no drill, no prank. The purpose of Guerrilla Schooling is to explore strategies for wresting an education for your children from an educational establishment that, by accident or design, does not educate.

There are five words, at the top of every page: “Liberating education. Liberating the mind.”

“Liberating education”—stealing it, appropriating it, spiriting it away when no one is watching. On another page, I make this joke: “Save the world from home in your spare time!” But this is no joke, and your goal is not to save the world but simply to get a rigorous academic education for your children. Whatever is the state of state-funded schooling, whether or not it can ever be ‘reformed’, your task is to beg, borrow or steal the best education you can get for your own children, regardless of what happens to anyone—or everyone—else. This is a manageable tactical objective, and Guerrilla Schooling is a tactical guide to achieving it.

“Liberating the mind”—freeing it not from the chains of the state but from the bonds of savage nature. We are born ignorant and incompetent. We do not know, and we do not know that we do not know, and left to ourselves we might never discover more than a baboon knows—eat, sleep, fight, rape, run. To the extent that our schools manage to teach anything, they teach vocation and indoctrination—baboon training. It is a matter of thought to name the ultimate ends of education, but surely one of them is to liberate the mind from the shackles of thoughtlessness, behavior that is unexamined, habituated, random. That a mind free of the unconsidered might also devise the means of escaping coercion is a secondary consequence. The liberty that is the objective of a liberal education is freedom from the filth and corruption and savagery of the unreasoning animals.

Will Guerrilla Schooling ‘save the world’? Probably not, at least not soon. But if you want to save the world, here is how you do it: One mind at a time. Start with your own. Then work on your children’s. If you can take care of that in anything less than a lifetime, branch out. Chaos spreads, but so does order. The zero of filth and corruption and savagery can never be superior to the one of beauty, of harmony, of grace. You know this, and your children can learn it if you can liberate an education for them. If it remains undiscovered by others, that’s tragic. But it’s not your fault, nor is it your responsibility. Your responsibility is to your children, and if you deprive them of the best education you can obtain, that tragedy is your fault, is your responsibility. You can’t ‘save the world,’ but, luckily, you don’t need to. Save yourself. Look out for your own. The world may in fact be going to hell, but that won’t keep you and your children out of the earthly paradise of thoughtfulness—if you are thoughtful in your actions.

And this is war, but it’s a light-hearted, heavy-handed kind of war. Our enemy is not force but inertia, not fearsomeness but a cringing timidity, not intellectual gigantitude but a squealing, squalling minisculity. Not even a non-entity—an anti-entity. Anti-anything, the ultimate zero, without even the wretched presence of a fetid squalor. And this is not a joke, and that’s why it’s so funny. We are true guerrillas, and our best weapon against the empty posturings of nothing is to laugh. We may not beat them, at least not soon, but we can horse-whip them, and that’s almost as good.

—Greg Swann

—GSS