(Watch our interview with Paul Frijters, discussing Academia Libera Mentis, on Propaganda In Focus’ YouTube Channel.)
The recent Hallet inquiry and the UK school lockdowns remind us of an important lesson: those who failed to learn from history will not only cover up their mistakes but repeat them. Politicians, unions, and bureaucrats prefer to throw British children under the bus again rather than admit to having done so before in 2020-2022. They have not learned, and one should abandon the hope that they will magically see the light, come to their senses, or stop doing insane things.
Worse: online safety bills, ubiquitous censorship and propaganda, and the relentless pushing of woke themes is making Britain feel like occupied territory. School books now inform children of such important themes that Joan of Arc was non-binary, whilst university students are deemed in need of spaces so safe that they will never hear anything that challenges their views. Education is thereby a vehicle for social re-engineering, not developing young minds into adulthood. The blossoming of free speech unions at UK universities tells you the situation is so dire that even mainstream academics who never protested against lockdowns, mandated medical interventions, or relentless war propaganda are starting to resist.
Face it: our elites are now part of the problem and even at best it will take many years for new elites to arise that restore sanity to government.
Meanwhile, what are most teachers, academics, and parents going to do about the new school closures and other continuing attacks on children’s mental health and their future? Nothing, of course. The vast majority of teachers, academics and parents will collaborate in the destruction of the future of their own children. They do not want to own up to their previous mistake, nor have the courage to stand up to the stupidity of the powerful. Just as they did not stand up to woke, to the destruction of British culture, or their own impoverishment. They will keep quiet, run with the herd, and simply hope the damage to their children is not as bad as it seems.
But what are we going to do about it? We are not cowardly sheep, right? So, seriously, what is our plan for our children in these times of mass propaganda and the rapid destruction of your culture?
As I see it, we have two options. The first is to do a bit of extra schooling at home, to push a few good books into the hands of our children, but to otherwise entrust them to regular education, including the indoctrination centres that now pose as UK universities. I think of this option as ‘abandon and hope’.
Our second option is to take the protection and education of our children onto our own shoulders: to set up new schools, new academies, new businesses, new communities. It is almost like choosing to become a Mormon or an Amish: one really takes responsibility for providing a community for one’s children in which they have a good education and a good future. One gives them that community by becoming part of it ourselves, accepting the re-education we need for that role. It is a lot to ask, so I fully understand that many will prefer to abandon their children and hope. The alternative I offer must seem its own kind of crazy.
Yet, that second option (‘Plan B’) is the direction that Academia Libera Mentis supports. We want to help proud communities form and educate themselves to survive and thrive in these times. Whilst we accept individual students, we prefer to see whole families go through our programs, though we are also happy to support groups of families with the curriculum we have developed, leaving the actual teaching and venue of learning for those families to organise themselves.
The founding ALM families have themselves taken this second option. My own son has learned at ALM and is now engaged with the daughter of another founder who also came to ALM. My own daughter could have gone to Oxbridge with her 4A*s earned at a prestigious London school, but I dissuaded her against that route. Professor Augusto Zimmermann got his smart 18-year old son a job in a well-run company rather than abandon him to the propaganda and soullessness of regular universities. Dr Nick Blismas and Dr David Bell have homeschooled their flock. And so forth.
ALMers are thus deadly serious about the view that sending our children to regular universities, particularly in any subject to do with the humanities (history, economics, law, psychology, sociology, leadership), is tantamount to abandoning our children. Things are less bad within technical studies (physics, biology) or trade schools, but social sciences at regular universities are now in my opinion designed to indoctrinate the new cadre of enforcers and professional minions in our society: students learn how to become part of the problem and often start to despise their parents’ culture.
This is now also increasingly true of regular secondary and primary school. Mainstream education is designed to make students somewhat mindless followers whose hope is that the system does not collapse and that AI does not make their education obsolete. Mainstream education does not teach broad skills and resilience to fall back on, let alone a community to weather the storms. Hence you might say that option 1 (‘abandon and hope’) is a quite risky strategy that bets on the continued survival of a system so clearly crumbling already. It is a strange thing to bet on for those aware of the ubiquitous propaganda around them.
The second option is to develop tight communities again, like our ancestors were in for 99.99% of our history. Western populations only exchanged small communities for anonymous big cities and large bureaucracies in the last 100 years or so. ‘We’ have lost those communities and it is that loss which now makes the young defenceless against the big bureaucracies: the young no longer have communities to live in and to protect them, so the best they can do is renounce their culture and their parents and hope for some crumbs off the table of the powers-that-be. They become invested in the survival of their overlords. To save them from that fate, one needs to help them form new communities. Of course they would still be British, Australian, American, Dutch, and so forth, but they would once again be a tight group with other families. They would look to marry and set up businesses with others in those groups, and in many ways help and protect each other.
Academia Libera Mentis is a revolutionary new type of academy: we are an incubator of communities as much as we are a place for accelerated learning about economics, leadership, history, psychology, statistics, propaganda, science, and health. At present, we have a castle in Belgium where we can teach up to 50 students at a time for 3-months and 12-months. Our students consist of whole families (with children aged at least 16) and individual students up to the age of 30 (with some exceptions who are older). They all live there as a community, cook for each other, run aesthetic and sports activities for each other, and in all ways rapidly develop their intellectual, emotional, and social muscles.
After three or twelve months of intense developments, the families and students coming out of our program are not just aware of how things really work and far ahead of others in their understanding of humanity. They have become a new community of students and families who remain in touch, set up businesses together, and in some cases have formed new families. Within those communities they have become immune to (government and commercial) propaganda, the attempted destruction of their culture, the lure of woke, and other attempts at belittling them. They have a proud community wherein they are each other’s keepers and from which they can interact successfully with the rest of the world.
As far as I know, this is a unique concept, not done before in history, essentially because never before in history has a population become so thoroughly detached from community life, and then been so utterly betrayed by the authorities in charge. Never before has there been a need to once again form communities virtually from scratch: in previous centuries, the vast majority of the population still lived in tight communities. Now large parts of the population need to (re)learn what it is to be human and thus to be part of a community. ALM combines that community formation role with intense personal and intellectual development.
Where did ALM start? Why should you trust it? What do students at ALM do? What do they learn? And can you set up your own franchise to do something similar in Britain or elsewhere?
We started from the ashes of the lockdowns and vaccine mandates as a group of academics from all over the world. I guess I am the main instigator, but over 30 other academics soon got involved, including Dr Piers Robinson, Professor Gigi Foster, Dr Tjeerd Andringa, Dr David Bell, Professor Ulrike Guerot, Professor Kees vd Pijl, and so forth. We saw what was happening, as will all readers of Propaganda in Focus, and we decided to do something about it. If nothing else, we were going to save our own families.
Why should we be trusted? We should not, at least not immediately. Look us up, check us out, see if we merit trust. I can tell you that I and my wife Dr Erika Turkstra put our life-savings towards setting up this alternative, and I can tell you that I am a good guy with a good academic record who did not need to go into this direction, but I know that I wouldn’t trust what I read here. I would look me up and I expect no less from others. Check us out at liberamentis.org and elsewhere.
Most of all, read our book “Minds that Dare”. It tells of our journey so far and gives a detailed description of many of our lessons and how we tackle problems regular universities do not even acknowledge: social media addiction, mobile phone overuse, hyper-sensitivity, bad diets, and immaturity. I co-wrote that book with Sienna Baker, a 23-year-old student of ALM who gives the story from the student perspective.
What do the students at ALM do with their days? We have developed an unusual formula. During weekdays, there are three hours of intensive academic lessons in the morning, plus breaks. Then we have lunch together, prepared by some of the students – we rotate chores. Then there are aesthetic, physical, and religious activities for a few hours in the afternoon, usually organised and taught by the students themselves. Gardening, harvesting (we have an orchard and a herb garden), meditation, running, wrestling, walking, yoga, archery, chess, embroidery: you name it, we have done it. Then, before and after communal dinner, there are maybe 60 minutes of individual homework and reflection on the learning of that morning and of the material covered so far, followed by 60 minutes of group work and peer-reflection wherein students teach each other what they have deduced. After that, social activities.
We do this five days a week, wherein Friday has an emphasis on presentations and data. Weekends are then to discover the area, to catch up on homework, to visit friends and family, and to recharge the batteries. The three months is made up of thirteen such weeks, the twelve-month program of twenty-six such weeks followed by about twenty weeks with a different structure more amenable to working on a big individual project supported by a personal mentor.
The intensity of living together comes from sharing a noisy castle, meals, and social activities. People cannot avoid each other and have to become comfortable with each other’s traits. Rather than run away from conflicts, they have to solve them by negotiation with others. That is confronting and overwhelming at first – and indeed about 5% of students run away within the first few days because they cannot cope with other people to that degree – but after a while they become used to it and relearn the ancient skill of truly living in a community. As Csenge Kovacs, a visiting Romanian ALM student remarked after just a month with us: “I left with skills I never thought I would have, but more importantly, with a sense of belonging and the belief that community can make us stronger, freer, and more human.”
Note that ours is a radical departure from regular universities which do teaching in bite-sized courses where each academic confuses the students with his or her own jargon and niche knowledge that usually conflicts significantly with what all the other academics in the other courses say. Our set-up is more similar to primary school, which is exactly what we are: we are a primary school of top-level social science and adult community formation. Unlike any university in the world, we have an integrated curriculum with a single common jargon and insights from all social science disciplines completely interwoven, just like the material one learns at (good) primary schools, but then at the top level. We bring families and students up to the frontier of social science knowledge whilst also forging them into a strong community. After that, they fly the nest, preferably together.
What is so unusual about the content?
As hinted at, we have developed an ‘integrated’ curriculum. This means we have taken ideas and key concepts from all disciplines in social science (biology, economics, neuroscience, history, sociology, management, governance, etc.), stripped them of the jargon and excess fluff one normally finds those ideas infested with in regular academia, and then used them to illuminate all areas of human activity. With about 100 anchors in total, students learn the real dilemma’s of leaders, the reasons why all bureaucracies and large organisations are organised in divisions, the reasons why budget wars are ubiquitous and unavoidable in large organisations, the reality and uses of propaganda, the value and habits of free speech, the reality and uses of flattery, the great value of the stock-flow model in science, the do’s and don’ts of presenting to others, and the fallibility of all data and yet their great value.
Intellectual development is much faster at ALM than at regular universities. Not only do we teach twice the number of academic contact hours one gets at regular universities, but our radical stripping down of the main ideas in the social sciences to their core means we can cover far more territory far more quickly. One needs a full year to really get on top of the material, but three months is enough to see the point and to be able to take the rest of the journey in other ways.
We do not merely develop the intellectual muscles. Students also learn to be comfortable and forgiving towards their own inner nature, as well as to extend that forgiveness to others and help others with their struggles. They develop a view of the world of their own, something that is a lifelong project. And they do all that whilst situated in a beautiful castle in the Ardennes where they are in contact with nature, healthy food, and meaningful connections.
Can one do this oneself? I would love nothing better than that several of the readers set up their own franchise with this concept in the UK and elsewhere. After all, even when fully operational, we cannot have more than 100 students a year at our castle, which is a mere drop in the bucket of what needs to happen to restore sanity to the West and to help all those who should be helped. So, the potential for growth is enormous. We have a curriculum and blueprint ready to be implemented anywhere, but to really learn ‘how it’s done’ some co-teacher would need to spend at least 3 months with us.
ALM is then a unique concept run by unusual people. We are hard-nosed academics who see the importance of community. We were successful in regular top-universities and international organisations, and yet have abandoned them in order to create an alternative. We come largely from the more exact sciences and yet embrace some of the experiential insights of anthropology, religion, and leadership. We used to be blunt speakers, yet recognised that today’s youth can only slowly be rescued from their hyper-sensitivity to criticism and thoughts alien to them. We read Machiavelli and Twilight, 1984 and Hunger Games.
I thus invite you to read our book and join our project.
Our next 3-month program starts in June and the 12-month program in September (inquire at info@liberamentis.org). Read more about our adventures at liberamentis.substack.com.
Our book Minds that Dare: Restoring Western Education — A True Story is available at Amazon.
(Featured Image: “Surrealistic Concept of Freedom” by Easy-Peasy.AI is marked with CC0 4.0.)
