Once the child has been exiled from the home, handed over to strangers by exhausted parents seduced by the illusions of the world, they enter the gears of the mass school. What awaits them in these enclosures, forged in the image of Prussian prisons, is not the light of knowledge, but a systematic process of spiritual mutilation. To comprehend the tragedy that unfolds there, it is imperative to draw upon the warnings of Mario Casotti, the monumental Italian Thomistic philosopher and pedagogue, who dedicated his life to combating the educational heresies of our time.

Casotti demonstrated, with irrefutable rigor, that every pedagogy presupposes a vision of man. Classical and Catholic education started from the premise that the human being possesses a horizontal dimension (his biological and social nature) and a vertical dimension (his immortal soul, ordered toward the Highest, toward the Supreme Good). To educate, in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, was an art of cooperation with nature: the master did not “manufacture” knowledge, but guided the intellect of the disciple, ordering his passions and his will toward the contemplation of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful (Verum, Bonum, Pulchrum).

The modern school, however, was erected upon the deliberate denial of this vertical dimension. Poisoned by Rousseaunian naturalism—which preaches the false idea that the child should be abandoned to their own instincts—and by utilitarian pragmatism—which views the student merely as a future piece of the market—the theorists of contemporary pedagogy have reduced man to his strict animality.

If the student does not possess a soul to be elevated, what remains? Only the lowest appetites. It is exactly from this materialist premise that the moral and aesthetic degradation that plagues schools worldwide today is born. Vulgarity, the leveling down, and the abominable premature sexualization of children are not accidental management flaws; they are the logical consequence of a system that has banished the Sacred from the classroom.

The corruption of Beauty is the most lethal weapon of this conditioning. In the Classical Order, contact with High Culture, the demand for posture, cleanliness, respect for the master’s authority, and the beauty of the school environment served to elevate the spirit, instilling in the soul a natural repudiation of barbarism. In our time, the managers and developers of modernized curricula have suppressed the mastery of grammar, logic, and rhetoric—the Trivium—and replaced it with ideological pamphlets, noise, and ugliness. Beauty elevates man toward God; the ugly, the deformed, and the vulgar keep him wallowing in the mire of his biological impulses.

As Casotti rightly warned, by rejecting the loving and rigorous discipline that submits the passions to Right Reason, the school creates literate barbarians. The modern student is instigated to focus obsessively on himself, on his bodily sensations and on supposed rights, becoming a slave to his concupiscible appetites. A youth enslaved by his own flesh and severed from true wisdom does not question the tyrannies of his age; he becomes the perfect prey, the ideal consumer, and the docile subject.

This is the consummation of the modern educational fraud: current educational institutions receive children who once carried the potential for sanctity and heroism, and return them to society as cynical, utilitarian individuals, corrupted in their essence. The cycle of ruin closes: exhausted parents, devoid of intellectual tools, hand over defenseless children to a State completely alien to the Sacred.

Faced with a scenario of such devastation, the mere “reform” of the school system is a puerile illusion; after all, one does not patch a building whose foundations were erected upon the mire of materialism. The true answer for those who still preserve the light of intelligence does not lie in vain rebellion, but in a profound moral awakening. We know that the harsh economic constraints of our age often impose upon families an obligatory coexistence with the structures of the system. However, the time has come for parents to erect an inner fortress, reassuming the sacred responsibility to filter the lies of the world, apply the antidote of virtue, and order the minds of their children—a reclamation of the intellectual authority of the home, which will be the object of our final reflection.