Priesthood of the plebs

A pregnant paragraph from Gellner. He discusses the challenges of specialized education in traditional societies, where specialists are “viewed ambivalently”:

“In the end, modern society resolves this conundrum by turning everyone into a cleric, by turning this potentially universal class into an effectively universal one, by ensuring that everyone without exception is taught by it, that exo-education becomes the universal norm, and that no one culturally speaking, shaves himself. Modern society is one in which no sub-community, below the size of one capable of sustaining an independent educational system, can any longer reproduce itself. The reproduction of fully socialized individuals itself becomes part of the division of labour, and is no longer performed by sub-communities for themselves.”

Several things here: Modern societies are organized by a secular version of the priesthood of the plebs. Insofar as this is a product of the Reformation’s assault on Catholic order, we can broaden Stanley Hauerwas’s comment and say that not just America but modern society as a whole is an experiment in Protestant social formation. Finally, the last two sentences clarify the stakes in contemporary debates and battles over education, whether Christian schools or home-schooling. Insofar as Christians are capable of forming their own educational systems independent of the public systems, just so far they can sustain themselves over time as “sub-communities.” If successful, the establishment of such sub-communities would be a massive blow to the modern state. And for that very reason modern states cannot abide the prospect.

Parents who teach their kids at home, or put them in Christian schools, may simply want a better, more Christian education for their kids. But, wittingly or no, they are participating in a grand political project, that of taming statism.