The Hedge School: New Courses

I am now three weeks into my two courses on Shakespeare: one online for adults and another in-person—and in my yurt!—for homeschool kids. I could not be having more fun! I’ll be starting another one online next week for a homeschool co-op in Chicago. Shakespeare, who was born on 23 April 1564—May 3rd, my birthday, according to the Gregorian calendar. Not a coincidence! So let’s have nice a round of applause for Taurus poets!

But I have two more courses that will be held in the coming months at Stella Matutina Farm, home of The Center for Sophiological Studies.

The fee for the courses is $120 per individual or $150 per couple (assuming some people would like to bring a spouse). The farm is situated in the middle of Michigan’s Waterloo State Recreation Area which has plenty of camping spaces available as well as cabins to rent (though of more limited availability) and there are also other B&B accommodations in the area. Grass Lake is approximately 30 miles west of Ann Arbor and 15 miles east of Jackson, Michigan. Contact director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com to enroll.

The Heart of Sophiology

Friday, April 21, 2023, 7:00 pm & Saturday, April 22, 9:30-5:00

This will be a combination seminar and workshop, since Sophiology is more experiential than it is theoretical. Therefore, we will combine both lecture, phenomenological inquiry, and artistic work.

Recommended reading: The Heavenly Country: An Anthology of Primary Essays, Poetry, and Critical Essays on Sophiology

Biodynamic Farming and Gardening

Friday, May 19,2023, 7:00 pm & Saturday, May 20, 9:30-5:00

Biodynamics, while it has a solid theoretical framework underpinning it, is more than anything a hands on enterprise, so I intend to combine theoretical, practical, and, yes, artistic and festive aspects into the course. The idea is to have a lived experience of the implications of biodynamic farming and gardening and how such a way of being connects to the traditional year and the astronomical and mystical elements that inform it.

I am also planning online courses on The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Love and Romanticism in the near future—so keep in touch.

Come all ye!

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: Flesh & Spirit and The Regeneration Podcast. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

The Hedge School

In my book Transfiguration, a kind of manual of practical Sophiology, among other things I propose the idea that what the world needs now is to take up the idea of the hedge school. Hedge schools were part of Irish society when that brave nation was under the domination of Britain and the only schooling available to the Irish was an Anglo-version that did its best to erase Ireland’s culture, history, and religion from the Irish imagination. The British educational model, much like modern secular schools that promote the “gender spectrum” silliness or the residential schools to which Native Americans were subject, was essentially a program of propaganda and “social engineering.” The Irish weren’t having it and ran their clandestine hedge schools—illegal until Catholic emancipation in 1829—in barns and other places outside the panopticon of the Empire.

The hedge schools were a prime example of what later came to be called a “parallel polis” promoted by Válcav Havel and other Eastern European dissidents under Communism and which also included the idea of “the flying university” in Poland that had also been in existence from the late 19th century. I have written on the parallel polis here and you can hear my conversation with Mike Sauter on the topic from last summer.

The time is certainly ripe for the regeneration of the parallel polis and the hedge school. I have been in education for the past thirty years, and it is a toxic, disorganized mess. And that’s on a good day. On a bad day, and there are many, it is an environment inhospitable to creative or original thought, or any thought that deviates from a very narrowly proscribed set of allowed opinions. Not only have the alleged concerns for social justice (usually neither social nor just) compromised the educational project, but the diminishment of the humanities in higher education has almost wholesale destroyed the search for wisdom so inherent in the young. A generation or two ago, the study of the humanities was the core of higher education, while now the humanities have been reduced to a tragi-comic level of irrelevance. Not only that, but humanities departments have been disappearing at an astonishing rate from most liberal arts colleges and their presence has been profoundly reduced at state and private universities. Prior to the COVID pandemic, the majority of us in higher education thought most liberal arts colleges in the United States would soon be shuttered for good, demographic winter, excessive tuitions, and diminishing returns on the higher ed investment all taking their toll on a model that has outlived its usefulness. But “quantitative easing” and a flood of COVID cash that flushed through the educational system via government decree postponed the immanent fall of liberal arts colleges for a time—but they are once again facing difficult decisions—removing even tenured faculty, condensing or eliminating entire departments of disciplines as they try to find new ways to avoid the inevitable. But inevitable it is. And everybody knows it.

The predicament some of my own children are facing has also inspired me to think of educational alternatives. My eldest son is in business and attended but did not finish college. My next two sons and eldest daughter did go to college, the boys studying automotive design and biology respectively and my daughter studying music. But the next one, a gifted young man of intelligence and initiative, dropped out of college at Detroit’s Wayne State University recently because of the dreadful quality of the education he was receiving in mathematics and physics and his being unable to justify the return on his investment. It wasn’t worth the money. But the situation with the next two, young women now 18 and 19, really caused me to rethink the educational opportunities available to them. Neither one wants to attend college, though both have strong gifts in music and writing and interest in the world. They could use a hedge school—or even a number of hedge schools—in order to nourish their innate desire for truth, beauty, and goodness. And that is where we find ourselves.

Outside of the Matrix that is higher education and beyond the tyranny of so-called “accreditation” racket, the hedge school offers a forum that would allow an organic unfoldment of the in-born human impulse to seek wisdom. This is really a project of self-development and entry into what John Keats called “the vale of Soul-making.” For an education that does not feed the soul is no education at all.

Of course, this idea is nothing new, but cultural conditions, I think, call for a reimagination not only of the hedge school but of education writ large. And, besides the educational projects of the past already mentioned, there have been other initiatives—some still in existence, some relegated to posterity, and some modified in mission and scope.

The Lindisfarne Association, for example, started in 1972 by rogue academic William Irwin Thompson and a number of colleagues and drew a number of extraordinary members, including Christopher Bamford, James Lovelock, and the poet Gary Snyder. In the mid-eighties, I remember buying cassette tapes (!) of lectures held at their gatherings by the great poet and Blake scholar Kathleen Raine and geometer Keith Critchlow. I learned so much. I think some of Raine’s lectures have since been digitized and are available on YouTube.

Likewise, Schumacher College, named after and inspired by economist E.F. Schumacher (author of the classic text Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as is People Mattered), has been around since 1990 and offers courses in ecology and horticulture in the quest to find more sustainable methods of integrating human flourishing with that of Creation.

There is also the Temenos Academy, founded by Raine and others under the patronage of HRH The Prince of Wales, now HRH King Charles. They have published a journal, given conferences, and regularly sponsor lectures in London, including by contributor to Jesus the Imagination Jeremy Naydler. Their bedrock is the perennial philosophy that Raine so passionately defended. They do a better job of teaching philo-sophia as “love of Wisdom” than probably any university or college philosophy department now in existence.

None of these initiatives would be able to survive without the generosity of patrons (I mean, come on, when you have the King as a patron you have probably arrived at the top of the patronage food chain), Lindisfarne, for example, was at times supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Schumacher College is fortunate to be underwritten at least in part by The Dartington Trust. I think the Fetzer Institute may also have supported projects like this in the past.

More power to them, but this is not the model I have in mind when speaking of the Hedge School. For one, who pays the piper calls the tune and I would dread getting into the awkward relationship with a patron who might threaten to pull the plug on funding such a project over a disagreement once I became addicted to the money. It’s happened to others. And I think “addiction” is the correct metaphor.

Also, I want the Hedge School to more flexible than these other projects, allowing me to respond to needs of participants and demographics. By this I mean being able to offer courses or seminars for school-age children as well as to college-age students and lifelong learners. For example, just this past week I have been asked to give a seminar in Sophiology here on my farm (more below), give a mini-course on Biodynamic farming for interested parties in my immediate community, and give an online course to high school students in Goethean-Sophiological science. And that is in addition to the online course I’m starting next week on Shakespeare, Religion, and Magic (still a few spots available).

In addition to responding to requests and needs, I also want to offer courses that I think should be offered, such as “Romanticism and the Meaning of Love,” “The Metaphysical Poets,” “The Poetry of William Blake,” “Mysticism,” or “The Alternate Modernity.” Eventually—hopefully sooner rather than later—I will bring in other teachers (actually, I need to find a better word, like “druids” or something) to offer courses in myth, woodworking, being human in a transhuman world, creative writing, the festival year (okay, I might do that one), mushroom hunting, broom-making, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Celtic spirituality, sacred geometry—and so on and so forth. There is no limit to possibilities in the Hedge School.

As for now, I have a few courses already lined up—and more to come. Stay tuned.

Shakespeare, Magic, and Religion

Online. Fridays from 1:00-2:30 pm ET.

February 3-March 24, 2023

The Heart of Sophiology

In-person at Stella Matutina Farm.

Friday, April 21, 2023, 7:00 pm & Saturday, April 22, 9:30-5:00

Biodynamic Farming and Gardening

In-person at Stella Matutina Farm.

Friday, May 19,2023, 7:00 pm & Saturday, May 20, 9:30-5:00

You can read more here.

Oliver Cromwell was the unintended founder of the Irish hedge schools.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: Flesh & Spirit and The Regeneration Podcast. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

Education, the State, Sophiology

Today, the 4th of May 2021, marks the fifty-first anniversary of the killing of four college students and the wounding of nine others by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, an event recorded in the annals of infamy as “The Kent State Massacre.” This event, more than almost any of my life (with the exception of 9-11), has been indelibly burned in my memory since its occurrence. Certainly, this has something to do with it falling on the day after my eighth birthday and the confusion and fear it evoked in my tender psyche at the time. But it also has much to do with my subsequent thirty year career as a teacher and professor. Campus violence is a real thing in my imagination, as is the threat of military power. And when the two are one and the same, they represent the totality of a society’s moral and spiritual degradation.

My Waldorf teaching career ended before the days of “Active Shooter Drills” (which should be called “How to Make Sure Children Get on Antidepressants for Life” drills), but I remember my anxieties after a deranged milk truck driver murdered five students at an Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania in October of 2006. I wondered what I would do if the same thing happened in my school. Should I start carrying a concealed weapon? How would I keep my students safe if that happened? I didn’t have an answer. There isn’t one.

I left Waldorf teaching a year later and became a full-time professor at a small (and now defunct) Catholic liberal arts college, though I had been teaching part-time there for about six years already. I continued to worry about these things happening, even at colleges, as that was becoming a regular occurrence in those settings as well. But, even more importantly, I began to consider the political climate and its increasing hostility and polarization, and wondered how the coercive arm of power might be leveraged on college and university populations.

Every semester since I’ve been teaching college, I have at some point in the semester played the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young angry lament “Ohio” for my students and showed them the horrific images of that gruesome moment of shame. I always tell them, “Don’t think it can’t happen again.” I’ve never shown this clip to students without weeping.

Of course, governments now have more subtle methods for engineering the consent of the governed than loaded rifles and tanks, particularly with college students who, by the time they reach the hallowed halls of academe, have been so traumatized and acclimatized to fear of saying the wrong thing, to manipulation and to propaganda that they are no longer able to feel free enough to think or even challenge the status quo. In my long experience in teaching, “critical thinking” is a value more honored in the user end agreement known as the syllabus than in the classroom. And the professoriate is to blame, as alternative ways of thinking are typically discouraged not only in the classroom but even more so in the faculty meeting. College and university faculty, by and large, are a very fearful breed having lived under the threat of punishment for dissenting opinions in both graduate school and the tenure track. These people understand the threat of being canceled. Higher education is dead, as it is no longer either higher or education.

And these things are not only a problem in state schools and universities. Not long after I published The Submerged Reality, which has a section on Rudolf Steiner and his contributions to Sophiology, Waldorf education among them, I started receiving emails from a good number of former Waldorf teachers who had left the profession when they saw a holistic education acquiescing to the educational zeitgeist that promoted all manner of medical interventions into compromising the Being of the Child. This, from an educational system once the refuge of people seeking a holistic, chemical-free alternative for their children. Depends on who’s paying full-tuition, I suppose. Nevertheless: game over.

For these and many other reasons, I have been mulling over the prospect of the return of the hedge school as a way to save the Idea of Education. At our farm at the moment, we are about to embark on a building project (a yurt) that will house such an endeavor in the near future, hopefully offering classes for other renegade homeschool families and courses for those interested in a deeper relationship to Sophiology and even biodynamic farming.

I have dedicated much of my adult life to the idea of an education that would contribute meaning and hope to this project of being human. I know I’m not the only one. But the institutions available to us owe their allegiance to forces other than the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. It’s time we reclaimed our souls. But expect pushback.

Krishna Killing the Dhenukasura Demon

I remember about thirty-three or so years ago attending one of the Sunday feasts at the Hare Krishna temple at the Fisher Mansion in downtown Detroit. Before the feast, the Krishnas always had a short service followed by a sermon. The speaker that day was a man by the name of Ravindrasurhu (I hope I spelled that correctly!), whose “real” name was probably “Jeff Smith” or something. He had a shaved head, floppy ears, glasses, and a gregarious and almost goofy manner which made him very endearing. And he was also great storyteller (which means he was a great teacher—you can’t have one without the other). He told a story, most of the details of which I forget, in which he contrasted the devotees of Krishna and the evil powers trying to compromise and pollute them. Though I’m paraphrasing, what he said went something like this:

“The devotees, you know, they were pretty blissed out. They were there with God in the pasture, just into samhadi, dancing, you know. Stuff like that. But then here come the other guys, like Nazis, trying to take the devotees away from Krishna. But it’s impossible! As we like to say, ‘If God gives you a gift, there is no way you can refuse.’ The devotees had the gift, and the Nazis couldn’t take it away—even if they took everyone away.”

That’s how I envision the hedge school—and not just the one we’ll start here.

More to come.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Garden.