Observe closely the routine of contemporary man regarding his material possessions. Consider the meticulous, almost religious zeal with which he treats his own automobile. He would never hand the keys of his vehicle to a complete stranger on the streets to carry out his daily affairs. If the vehicle malfunctions, he demands the mechanic’s credentials, questions the replaced parts, inspects the provided service, and remains on high alert to ensure that his corruptible asset does not suffer the slightest scratch. The instinct for the preservation of matter is absolute.

Yet, this very same man—who locks his doors and demands guarantees for his metal—suffers from an appalling spiritual blindness. Daily, he escorts his most precious treasure to the gates of a secular institution and hands over the immortal souls of his children to the gears of the modern school apparatus. He does so without hesitation, without investigating the moral stature, the creed, or the rectitude of those who, for the next several hours, will fill and shape the intellect of his offspring. He ignores what his children contemplate, is ignorant of the humiliations they are subjected to, and does not care, does not notice, or even tolerates the false virtues instilled in them.

The child, a gift ordained by God whose formation was entrusted to the sacred authority of the parents, has been reduced to a mere logistical burden. The silent pact established between the families and schools of our time is dreadful: parents finance the structure—through taxes or exorbitant tuitions—and, in return, demand only the relief of remaining undisturbed. The cultivation of the spirit is outsourced so that adults may dedicate themselves, unhindered, to exhausting labor, the accumulation of temporal wealth, and the dictatorship of their own vanity.

How did the West descend into such a state of lethargy? When did the school cease to be a subsidiary instrument, an adjunct to domestic education, to become the sovereign and incontestable master of the time and mind of the youth?

The answer does not lie in a mere failure of didactic planning, but in a profound ontological and civilizational rupture. To comprehend how what we call “education” devolved into a leveling of the masses—a formatting that ignores eternity and corrupts right reason—and to forge the intellectual weapons necessary to overcome this institutional treason and rescue our children in the last trench that remains to us: the sovereignty of the home, we must trace the root of this evil.

With this in mind, I wrote this series, and I invite you to read the upcoming essays where I expose this downfall that spanned centuries: it began in a philosophical wound that denied objective order and shattered Christian unity; it advanced when the coldness of utilitarian ambition exiled the family, emptying the homes; it found its instrument of domination in the Prussian model, where secular power seized the minds of children to produce docile bodies; and it culminated, ultimately, in the corruption of matrimony and pedagogy itself, where the contemplation of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful was replaced by a vulgar pragmatism that mutilates the soul and keeps the student crawling in his animal impulses.