The Rise of the Hedge Schools

Education gone rogue.

My grandfather, Michael Patrick Conlon (4th from right in the back) at school in Carrick-on-Shannon, Ireland, c. 1920

First of all, let me apologize for my apparent absence over the past couple of weeks. I have been deep in the weeds of a kitchen remodel project (phase 1) and it took much longer than I had anticipated. As such things always do.

Nevertheless, I have been doing a lot of thinking related to the collapse of all of the institutions of the West lately—from the political structures to “health care” (often nether health, nor care) to the Church (however you want to interpret that slippery little term) to the arts and education. This collapse was really brought home to me this week when I had to take a break from my kitchen project to drive to Detroit for a rehearsal for The Concert of Colors, an annual even in which Detroit native and legendary music producer Don Was hosts a variety of Detroit-area musicians to celebrate the healing and redemptive power of music. I came out of musical retirement for this one to play with my comrades The Corktown Popes with Don on bass, Luis Resto on keys, and some other legendary players from the Detroit scene—some of whom I’ve known for forty years. This is the third time we’ve played at one of these, and Don and the other musicians are now like old friends. The theme this year is “Peace, Love, and Understanding,” and we’ll be kicking off the show with the Beatles classic “All You Need Is Love” and Elvis Costello’s rendition of Nick Lowe’s masterpiece, “What’s So Funny (About Peace, Love, and Understanding)?” The show starts at 8:00 tonight at The Detroit Film Theater, housed in the magnificent Detroit Institute of Arts. It’s a free show for those of you in the neighborhood.

Laughing at rehearsal with Don Was

I know that was a big leap from education to this wonderful gig, but, though it seem madness, yet there is reason in my method.

I was really struck at this extraordinary building(s)—both the DFT and the DIA—and how things like these are simply not built anymore. I’ve been to both hundreds of times: I used to go the DIA almost weekly in my late-teens/early-twenties and I was a regular patron the DFT during my twenties—it’s where I first saw Wings of Desire in 1988, probably the most impactful (shattering, really) cinematic experience of my life. But why aren’t buildings like these erected anymore? I’m sure there are reasons (I mean “excuses”), but what we’re talking about here—and it is more than obvious once you start paying attention—is civilizational decline.

Combined with my visit to Detroit’s cultural center this week, I also caught a news article shared on X by my friend John Milbank and written by Professor Arash Abizadeh entitled “Academic journals are a lucrative scam—and we’re about to change that.” As over the past four years we’ve all seen how tainted by lies and propaganda medical and scientific “studies” can be, all I can say is “Just wait until you see the humanities.” Academic publishing is a racket in which professors anxious about tenure write articles that no one reads and for which they aren’t paid while academic publishers rake in fortunes. It’s a Ponzi scheme for intellectuals that turns their work into “standing reserve” (yo, Heidegger!) for publishers who are the equivalent of pimps. And I know what I’m talking about. My first book, Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England, an updated version of my doctoral dissertation (incidentally, defended right across the street from the Detroit Institute of Arts) was published in 2014 by Ashgate Publishing (subsequently acquired by Routledge/Taylor & Francis) for which I receive an astonishing 2% royalty. The book initially sold for $110 (now the hardcover sells for $155!). To date, I think I have received royalty payments of around $50, though access to just one chapter of the book amounts to nearly that. And now you know why I moved to Angelico Press.

Much of what does get published in academic journals and by academic publishers—because of the deplorable habit of “peer review” (another scammy part of the scam) and the equally repugnant practice of academic tenure and promotion—is nothing other than the faux-intellectual pablum of a self-perpetuating wokeness generator. There’s a reason nobody reads this junk. And it is also no mystery why colleges and universities can’t get students to enroll as humanities majors.

“Peer review,” ladies and gentlemen, is complete bullshit. In fact, it is the brainchild of Robert Maxwell (international criminal and Ghislane’s father. Yes, that Ghislane) the entire utility of which is to control the greater cultural narrative—and not, as may be thought, for the august and noble idea of furthering knowledge. Don’t be such a sucker.

Higher education, whether captured by corporations in the case of the sciences or wokeness in the case of the humanities, is dead, brothers and sisters. At best, the institutions of higher learning—like the Church—are in their zombie phase. They might be moving, but they’re dead. Like decapitated snakes.

Now, among the many activities in which I find myself, the role of teacher is a more or less natural one—though I don’t think I actually “teach” anything. I think it’s more along the lines of showing people things that are interesting and enlivening. My assumption (and I have decades of experience supporting this) is that if the teacher or guide is excited about a topic, so are those with whom he or she is engaged. It’s called “enthusiasm,” the etymological roots of which mean “to be filled with the god.” I really think that’s what happens in good teaching. The enthusiasm, the being-filled-with-the-god-ness, is infectious. That is, it works soul-to-soul, spirit-to-spirit.

A week ago Saturday, for example, my recent online course on Christian Romanticism began. The course is a complete thrill for me (and I hope for those enrolled) and yesterday, while discussing Jacob Boehme’s The Way to Christ, I even got chills (the spiritually affirming kind) at a few moments as we disclosed things in Boehme and his text that I never realized were there—but which are there nonetheless. These moments of astonishment are truly life-giving.

In fact, I get pretty enthused anytime I teach poetry or literature—sometimes I even get so caught up my eyes well up with tears—because I actually love the works I teach. All too often in humanities instruction, not only in colleges or universities but increasingly (and shamefully) in K-12, students all too often are served heaping helpings from what Harold Bloom called The Schools of Resentment, an assortment of bellyachers who try to expose literary works as frauds perpetuated by the patriarchy or capitalism or colonialism or whatever. These kinds of people aren’t happy unless everyone is miserable.

My approach to teaching is in no small part inspired by the great Romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge who writes in the Bibliographia Literaria the following sage advice:

“He who tells me that there are defects in a new work, tells me nothing which I should not have taken for granted without this information. But he, who points out and elucidates the beauties of an original work, does indeed give me interesting information, such as experience would not have authorized me in anticipating.”

And I would be remiss were I not to include this juicy quote from Rudolf Steiner:

“This is the terrible product of a materialistic age: scholars write commentaries on art. But these academic explanations, Faust commentaries, Hamlet commentaries, learned descriptions of the art of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, are coffins in which genuine artistic feeling, living art, lie buried. If one picks up a Faust or Hamlet commentary, it is like touching a corpse.”

Anyway, this is a long way for me to say that I have hope for the educational future: and that future, at least in the humanities, is in the way of the hedge school.

In my book Transfiguration, I have a chapter on “The Postmodern Sophiological Hedge School,” which explains a little of the background of the idea and proposes some notions for moving forward. Here is an excerpt:

“From the early modern period until well into the nineteenth century, rural Ireland was home to the educational phenomenon known as ‘the hedge school.’ In the hedge school, illegal prior to Catholic emancipation in 1829, itinerant teachers would travel the countryside offering clandestine instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, Irish history and literature as well as in Greek, Latin, and the native language. The curriculum was very plastic and could also include bookkeeping, navigation, and physics, as well as other subjects. Classes were not conducted near hedgerows, but usually in a barn or some other hospitable space. The community provided fees for the teacher, and the level of instruction was often very accomplished. As one State inspector reported in 1835:

“‘Amazed at the skill of the twelve-year old boys in reading the new books, and considering the possibility that they were reciting from memory, I invited one of their number to read me a passage from the gospel of Saint Matthew. Evidently the child misunderstood me. He searched in his satchel until he found his tattered book, stood up, and proceeded to read me the account of Christ’s passion—in Greek.’

“Following emancipation, Catholic children eventually migrated to the parish schools or to the State schools, the latter which, for the most part, were non-sectarian; the hedge schools dwindled and eventually disappeared. The hedge school model, however, offers us at least some possibilities as an example of sustainable non-cooperation, practicality, and efficiency.”

Now, what I am essentially doing with my courses is a digital hedge school model (though I plan on and will offer courses in-person on my farm in Michigan). Not only can people study subjects important to them (and to human flourishing), but they can do so without supporting a higher educational ecosystem characterized by administrative bloat and intellectual poisoning. This is the kind of thing the American Transcendentalists were doing long ago. This is also what happened in Communist-era Eastern Europe with the Parallel Polis proposed by Václav Havel and his contemporaries and the “flying universities” in Poland. Hell, this is what Plato and Aristotle were doing millennia ago. This is how it was meant to be: education gone rogue.

There are many such initiatives now underway. Two that come immediately to mind are Michael Millerman’s Millerman School and my friend Martin Shaw’s Westcountry School of Myth. These projects are very different from one another—and very different from what I am doing—and that’s is a very good thing. The task of reimagining education is not to erect an unmovable monolith to replace the one we already have. The task is to liberate education from the claws of the machine. I would love to see more and more of these kinds of hedge schools flourish and eventually replace Zombie State University, Inc. and the Schools of Resentment that so degrade, ossify, and poison the cultural landscape.

In closing, I just want to share the final paragraph of my chapter on education from Transfiguration, written six years ago. I think we’re on the verge of a real revolution:

“It should be clear that changing our perceptions concerning the being of education is inextricable from changing our perceptions about how we live in general, that is, in terms of oeconomia. I don’t pretend to think that what I propose as a postmodern sophiological hedge school will have much if any societal impact, not that I’m concerned that it should. The classical Irish hedge schools worked because the communities who adopted them saw a need; and they disappeared when that need disappeared. I also see a need for a paradigm shift at our cultural moment, but postmodern life is so exceedingly crammed with diversion, busy-ness, and distraction, that many people, even if they see a need, may feel powerless to do anything about it. We are paralyzed by a postmodernity that more and more appears an ultramodernity. I understand that. Such paralysis, however, comes at a cost: the tacit and mostly unconscious acceptance that makes people ‘like their inescapable social destiny,’ (Aldous Huxley) robbing them of all save the illusion of agency. But there comes a time when people finally say, ‘Enough.’ Saying ‘enough’ when it comes to education, however, quickly leads to saying the same thing when we consider how our lives are ordered in every sphere and by whom or by what. That may be too much for some people. Good.”

So what kinds of course would you like to see offered?

As I mentioned before, I will be speaking (and probably playing the guitar/singing) at the Estuary Northwest Conference: Encountering Face to Face. The only bad part is that, if you attend, you have to see my face. But I play a really mean guitar.