So-called education can be used to produce slaves, soldiers and snobs, as well as gentlemen … You can Bolshevize people by education, or you can make them into the perfect Nazi. Unless the intended victim has trained himself to think for himself.
— Thomas Thompson, Lancashire for Me (1940), pp. 22, 25
In late 2021, UK Column's Alex Thomson recorded a one-and-a-half-hour discussion with his father, which is embedded here as an audio upload. That discussion has been turned into three transcribed segments of half an hour each, which in turn concern the 'why', the 'who' and the 'how' of dissidents who educate themselves without waiting for directions from the Establishment.
The project that Alex Thomson senior refers to was produced for an underground cultural preservation body and is not available for public dissemination, but he discusses here the key findings and statistics from it.
This podcast and transcript should be considered in conjunction with the work of the late New York State Teacher of the Year (1991) John Taylor Gatto and the former U.S. Department of Education senior policy advisor Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt.
Alex jr: I’m looking here at a folder that you’ve put together, Dad, and it’s called The Serious Student Project.
Alex sr: Yes, I’ll tell you about that. I cannot tell you about names too much—I’m sworn to secrecy and commercial confidence and all that sort of thing—but basically, some years ago, a group of Americans, and one or two interested British people, realised that Western culture was in jeopardy, as they thought. The Americans described themselves as being “neither rich nor poor but comfortable”, and “not socialist or redneck but moderate and conservative”.
Alex jr: Ideal low-key dissidents; they had some means and some time.
Alex sr: Ideal, yes. They’re not ‘fundies’; they’re not independent fundamentalist Baptists—some of them may be—but they’re basically conservative evangelical sensible businessmen.
Alex jr: Concerned Americans?
Alex sr: Concerned Americans, and Brits, yes. They saw the way that their culture was going—things were being destroyed and lost—and also how digitisation is destroying things, and they decided that they wanted to preserve not intellectual culture, nor low-brow rubbish, but they wanted, bluntly, unashamedly, to preserve, really, middle-class Western Christian values. You know, the decency and the production …
Alex jr: All the stuff that started getting mocked in your student days by the television characters.
Alex sr: Yes, basically. All the things [about which] everybody says, “If you have that, you must be a hypocrite.” Also, there were one or two other influences, like the change to modern Bible versions, especially when the New International Version (NIV) came out.
Alex jr: A broader section of the audience will be interested in this than our regular churchgoers, because they understand that the Bible is the foundation of values.
Alex sr: The [original] 1978 NIV really started it. And then, of course, when it came to the [major new edition of] 1984, they realised that that was here to stay. But they saw the decline of the King James or Authorised Version, and other such things. A number of things just came together, really. And also, they wanted to get a truthful idea of what Bibles people were actually reading and studying from. What the serious student [was using]. Now, we defined “the serious student” [in this project] as not being a university, college or seminary student …
Alex jr: … who’s doing it because he has to, to get a [clerical] collar round his neck …
Alex sr: … nor the guy who just occasionally reads his Bible, nor—and we don’t want to be unfair here—the guy who simply says, “I like my Bible because I get daily inspiration from it.” We’re not pooh-poohing that, by any means, but [we mean] the guy who says—and, of course, I include the ladies by ‘guy’—“I want to study my Bible seriously.”
Alex jr: In many Protestant countries—and Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, actually—you had the idea of the Pietist or devotional reader, who reads a small extract of the Bible [at a time]. You also have the agnostic and atheist appreciator of the literary foundational quality of the Bible.
Alex sr: Yes.
Alex jr: But you’re talking about something which has died the death in many parts of the world, but which when you were growing up in Scotland was extremely strong, and has been very strong in parts of the American South, where I think your guys are from, which is a stereotype but a true one: a backwoodsman, or, in your case, a disadvantaged boy …
Alex sr: In British terms, a working-class man who’s not an idiot; who actually can read, and does read.
Alex jr: One of the best books you gave me recently, by the way, is The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Jonathan Rose): an absolute gem focusing on the English industrial towns. But particularly in the Scottish and North American context, you’ve got these people who are extremely literate
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