Strong female characters have been pervasive in American popular culture for decades. They star in movies, feature in comic books, are TV heroes, and are protagonists in thrilling novels. In some cases, their strength is supernatural in nature, but more commonly, they’re just portrayed as women imbued with male talents, spirit, and other qualities wrapped up in the package of a beautiful woman. Americans and other Westerners love these particular entertainments, and aren’t especially allowed to notice that they’re not plausible. The implausibility and falsity to life is often something that pop-culture fans love about it.

Because actual experience in the military has transitioned from something that marked the lives of entire generations of men at once into something that only a professional minority experiences, modern democratic societies have profoundly changed the relationship of their cultures to their military organizations. What used to distinguish democracies from the alternative was the concept of universal conscription on behalf of a popular government which obeyed the votes of all those men dying in the trenches for their nation.

Given this change, it’s easier for academics and journalists who primarily live in the land of language and imagination to then use their authority to conflate the imaginary world in which they live with the real social world that supports all that abstract thinking. The same people who live mostly in the world of popular culture become upset when they see segments of the real world that deviate from the idealized stories that they immerse themselves in.

The military, being mostly concerned with killing people and breaking things, still deviates from these popular stories in that the combat arms aren’t womanned by millions of grizzled she-lions who are eager to fertilize the grass with the blood of America’s enemies.

The people in the military tend to be more than willing to acquiesce (in stages) because they need to ask the people who shape the culture to support their requests for more money. And the military is quite expensive, with most of the costs going to pay for salaries and retirement benefits. In return for funding, the military needs to reform itself to appear to be more like the stories that our cultural leaders love so much. While it may be easier to pretend that men and women are the same in an office environment, it’s much easier to falsify gender equality in more physical pursuits.

Most of what’s in the media has become internally reflective. Wire services and newspapers write original reports, which are then digested by secondary news providers (TV, radio, and the web). Then, authorized pundits tell you how you are supposed to feel about the news. The pundits and the secondary news-mongers then provide fodder for people to react to on tertiary communications networks like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. While this system might not be capable of developing perfect consensus, people tend to feel a need to pay (and that payment is costly, even to people earning $8/hour) attention to what the consensus is — or at least what the fragmentation of consensus happens to be.

This makes sense, because the operating assumption of democracy is that generating consensus is what a legitimate government does — it verifies the consent of the governed, providing a moral patina to the state which wouldn’t be present otherwise. They might not be able to garner 300,000,000 signatories to the social contract, but the opinion-molders can generate a serviceable consensus reality. Not everyone will agree, but most people will agree about the fundamentals of ‘reality,’ and even if they don’t agree, they will know what those fundamentals are supposed to be.

At the personal level, all this consensus-generating is enormously wasteful and is often quite damaging. Paying attention to crashed Malaysian planes means that you have less attention to devote to the actually important matters of life within your locus of control. Knowing all the details about the latest lurid scandal means that you have less space in your mind for the people, tasks, and things that actually matters to you.

In this way, democracy generates a pervasive mental pollution which wouldn’t be present otherwise. The media isn’t an entity independent of politics, despite all the pretenses about a free press. The reason for this is because every man is supposed to be a political micro-sovereign. Each person is, at least in theory, supposed to be sufficiently educated so as to be able to ably exercise their tiny slice of authority. And the only way that sovereigns can act with confidence is to accumulate enough support from all those micro-slices to do whatever it is that they wanted to do in the first place.

This goal has never proven to be possible, but it creates a demand to make it appear to be plausible.

In some limited ways, the internet as a technology has made it possible for people to carve out their own islands away from the consensus. This brief resurgence in freedom is probably coming to an end. Important people have noticed that the little people have been evading the consensus. If there are people evading the consensus, then it becomes more challenging to legitimate the popular government. The government’s popularity needs to be lockstep and uniform for it to be truly consensual, so it’s only logical to just eliminate everyone who doesn’t consent to the way of things, who doesn’t see things as the administrators of the state believe that they ought to be seen.

Michael Strong, a serial founder of charter schools, has written a concise blueprint to educate a child for less than $3,000 per year. It’s worth your time. I found it through Isegoria’s posts on the essay.

I managed to hit all three of his performance metrics in a conventional private school that cost much more than that, and I’m confident that his method is many multiples better than anything I’ve seen a contemporary private school teach.

The other key that parents should keep in mind is that plenty of private schools have a student body that’s morally dissolute — and we should expect that dissolution to be much worse in the next generation. The high cost is also a major factor.

A year at a top high school for most middle class families who won’t qualify for financial aid often exceeds $40,000 per year. That’s more than enough to seed a business or just to maintain the family assets. It also means that your kid will be associated with a lot of high-achieving dope smokers, sluts, and irredeemable nerds whose parents can afford tuition.

What’s key is in teaching superior skills in reading, writing, arithmetic, and some sort of practical art with real world value. The cost comes from hiring expert tutorial help, which should be within the range of anyone earning a lower middle class household income or better:

Twenty-five dollars an hour buys an excellent tutor (or academic coach) in most parts of the country.  Many graduate students or retired people would be glad to teach a well-behaved, motivated young person for $25 per hour.  Two days of mathematics coaching would thus be $50 per week; another two days of humanities (reading, writing, and conversation) coaching would be another $50 per week.  At one hundred dollars per week one can buy thirty weeks per year of personalized academic coaching for $3,000.

Whether it requires more or less than this to educate your child depends on his or her motivation, your own skill set and time, and your local talent pool.  Your child might need more hours of contact time per week, you may be able to supplement tutors so that your child needs less contact time, you may find great people willing to tutor for less, etc.  In an alternative model, the parents may provide 100% of the instruction until secondary school, at which point you could budget more than $6,000 per year for custom secondary instruction.

By means of creating joint lessons with other home-schoolers with children interested in similar subjects, you could hire tutors for small “classes” of students and share the costs.  Thus if there were four students engaged in a given set of lessons/tutoring sessions your $3,000 would stretch to four times as many contact hours.  Indeed, in some cases these informal tutoring arrangements can result in the creation of a “private school.”  The point is not whether or not it is a school – it is whether or not your child is getting first-class, personal attention from a talented and caring educator who knows and loves their academic subject.

The more fundamental point is that by means of focusing on truly essential core behavioral characteristics, such as responsibility, motivation, politeness, etc., and on very high-level core academic skills, including serious reading, writing, and mathematics advancement, it is possible to provide a superb education for your child at home for very little cost.

To the extent that we still have the liberty to provide this sort of education to our children, we ought to use it as much as we can.