The Antidote to Western Education

Have you observed that your children’s pride in their community and history is eroded in the media or at school? Have you seen the reduced interest among the young in family life and in helping society progress, replaced by zombie-like addiction to social media and victimhood? Are you worried you will lose your children to unhealthy fads in current mainstream education?

I and my colleagues have seen it getting worse for decades. We were deeply moved by what we saw happening to our own children and the students we taught at universities – even the top universities. We saw bright-eyed, hopeful young students become fearful to speak their minds in a matter of months after starting their studies, taught to be ashamed of who they were and cowed into becoming bureaucratic followers, not confident leaders. They became increasingly lonely, shallow, alienated from their family and self-obsessed, not proud builders of their own lives and of new communities. Lockdowns made it all much worse.

Yet, what to do? We were academics, consultants, educators and policy advisers. LSE, Yale, the World Health Organisation, Washington, the EU organisations: these were our haunts. We were not billionaires used to setting up complicated organisations or working 80 hours a week. Nevertheless, we thought, why not? What else are we going to do with the last 20 years of our professional life?

Among an initial group of a dozen academics and thinkers, Erika and I were willing to take the lead. We were born in the Netherlands around 1970 and met early in our studies, building a life together. Three children, a successful academic career and stints in four continents later, we took the plunge in setting up this new academy, backed up by Gigi, Tjeerd, Michael, Willem, Andrew, Dolf, Esther, Benno, David and many others who shared the same dream.

So, in March 2024 we bought a 260-year old castle in the middle of the Ardennes: Chateau de Hodbomont, once the ancestral home of an entrepreneurial Portuguese sheep-herding family with a proud history of having sheltered refugee families in the Second World War, the building once served as an eye-injury sanatorium. The region has as its official motto ‘Pays de Liberté’ (‘lands of freedom’) and displays a strong streak of independence from Brussels. The stars seemed aligned: a place of refuge, of helping people see again, in a region dedicated to freedom.

Gradually both the castle and the organisation became populated and connected. Professor Gigi Foster, educated at Yale and now working in Sydney. Professor Ulrike Guerot, working in Berlin and a former supporter of the EU. Dr Delsing, the architect and libertarian entrepreneur. Jeffrey Tucker, Director and founder of the Brownstone Institute. Dr David McGrogan, Associate Professor of Law and long-time contributor to the Daily Sceptic. Dr Piers Robinson and Dr David Bell, experts in propaganda and former leaders of world health institutions. Lodewijk Regout, artist, peace activist and theatre director. Liberals, conservatives, Marxists, Christians, libertarians and influencers. Many bright minds working towards a common cause: a brighter, more informed future, fuller of the various joys offered by the human experience.

Over 100 students from all over the world have come and joined for parts of the programme. This programme is intense with free-flowing discussions. It combines the Socratic method of 2,000 years ago with the latest AI – as a tool that adds, not a crutch that replaces. Teachers work together to harmonise their language and arrive at an integrated curriculum, something unique in this world as atomisation among academics is the rule. Yet, our teachers want to find common ground and enjoy learning new things themselves, not just debating to dominate.

Our programmes and our audience?

In the three-month summer program (June-July-August) students are taught the equivalent of seven ‘regular’ university courses at Master’s level. Students get taken through the main useful ideas of economics, neuroscience, psychology, history, sociology, marketing and leadership. Students also get the basic tools of statistics, writing, presenting, debating and how to make a community function. These subjects are integrated such that the student can apply every idea to every area: a unique method of instruction that recognises no disciplinary boundaries.

Students do not merely get graded on particular subjects like statistics, but also on things like “ability to entertain a thought without accepting it”, which corresponds to the definition by Aristotle of an educated mind.

Because we are completely free of governments and their prescriptions about content, we added another unique feature, which is the gulf between appearances and reality. We point out this distinction in everything and help students understand both. For instance, in statistics we teach the usual (statistical tests and hypotheses), but also the less talked about art of preparing data for analysis (‘cleaning it up’, ‘weeding out inconsistencies’) and the reality of gathering data (inevitable ‘framing effects’ everywhere). Similarly, we depict organisations dragged down by corruption not in terms of ‘evil people taking over’, but rather the way in which most organisations meet their end: as the virility and pride in the organisation fails, workers and leaders in an organisation stop cooperating to improve the organisation and instead become parasitical on the resources of the organisation. We do not moralise such parasitism but pose the deeper question of how to reform organisations to keep them virile and internally cooperative.

The typical weekday has intense academic sessions in the morning, connected over the weeks and months by leading questions, like

Suppose you are the lead architect of a new constitution for the country of Albiona.

How would you set up its institutions, its media, its health system, its education system, its legal system, its economic underpinnings, and so forth?

How would family life function and the relation between communities and larger overarching institutions?

 How would you transition from where it is now? Who would be your allies and your enemies?

These leading questions encourage students to re-imagine their own countries and their own lives. Their answers very quickly become quite intricate, with detailed transition plans on how to get from where we are to where we should be. There is steel in the classroom discussions as the students realise that the job of reforming their societies may fall on them and therefore necessitates a realistic understanding of how the world works. Mental bodybuilding.

In the course of the three months students go through the looking glass, learning how each major sector of the economy and society really works, whilst generating ideas on how they might work better.

In the 12-month programme, students follow the same initial three-month programme, then deepen their understanding of each of the contributing disciplines in months four to six. In the last five months, they are then individually mentored and set themselves to particular tasks, like thinking of radical reforms to the legal system in their country, or reforming the property market or media sector. They learn the skills one sees in top public servants, consultants or the founders of start-ups. They can read data and board rooms. They spot the difference between well-oiled new businesses and decaying departments overtaken by parasitism.

Whom is this programme for?

The 12-month programme is ideal as a gap year for smart school leavers or those who already have a few years experience in a study or a job. It is for young people who want to get a good overview of how things really work and how to reform major sectors of the economy and our society.

The three-month programme is ideal as a summer education experience for students between 18 and 25 who want an intensive reveal of how organisations work and what their own role could be.

Whilst the mornings are led by academics, the afternoon is for student-led activities, primarily arts and sports. This grows emotional and social resilience and fosters a greater appreciation of aesthetic movement, creativity and beauty. A core community activity is communal eating, with cooking done in rotating teams so that everyone learns how to cook for others. To help coordination and prevent conflicts, there are sessions on attentive listening, and group lessons where the students work through modern social challenges (atomisation, gender relations), which they then implement in their student community.

Alumni help the next group learn the ropes, but as with the academic programme, the students start as followers looking for instruction and gradually morph into leaders who take the community by the hand in their endeavours. Students organise trips to towns nearby like Aachen, the birthplace of Charlemagne. They garden together and protect each other. There is a lot of experimentation on campus: students practise leading initiatives by designing and implementing new projects and endeavours, ranging from making a list of the medicinal plants found in our forest to mapping the perimeter with a drone.

Our first alumni are now making their way in the world and our community is slowly expanding. A cat guards the stairs (and the pantry). Our aim is to be a place of re-growth for our society, spawning similar endeavours throughout the West. Students who want to join the journey and teachers who hope to set up their own new academies in their own countries are welcome.

What do students get out of it, apart from a certificate and a final project? Realism about how organisations and sectors function; ideas and plans about what can be done; and a new community of other critical thinkers to build a career and a life with. Parents get as the added bonus that they won’t lose their children to modern education fads as students are given a pro-family, pro-community outlook.

Professor Paul Frijters is Visiting Emeritus Professor at LSE and Academic Director of Academia Libera Mentis. You can subscribe to the ALM Substack here.