Why Military School Doesn’t Work Anymore

CULTURE

The Purpose of a System Is What It Lumps

By Librarian of Celaeno · July 29, 2026 · 12 min read

In another age, in the same place, the student in question would have been punished for his lackluster academics with a trip to what was then known as the “bull ring,” where he would have received motivation of a physical nature. Failing that, once he’d caused enough of a headache for the student leadership, he would be run around the campus and introduced to a holly hedge at full speed, a practice known as “bushing.” By my time, bushing had long since been proscribed by the ever-growing Blue Book of rules and regulations, along with glass bottles, PT in excess of ten push-ups, and harsh language.

The objective of banning corporal punishment? Safety. And indeed, the student sitting in front of me felt nothing if not safe.

He risked failing his senior year, as the panel of teachers flanking me kept reminding him. His grandparents had sacrificed no small amount of money to send him to this school. He shrugged it off. After 90 minutes of ineffectual lectures, my turn came. I told him that, as a senior in high school, this was likely the last meeting like this he’d ever attend with a group of adults in a circle anxiously trying to find some way to get him to put in effort. When he left the school, one way or another, every institution he found himself in would work to simply remove him. I told him there is nothing worse for an adult man than to be a liability, and that the only men worthy of respect were those who embraced responsibility. He shrugged that off as well. I knew he would. He was a lump.

I taught for six years at an all-boys military school I’ll refer to here as the Marathon Academy. If any of my former students stumble across this piece, they’ll get the reference. In the interest of not doxxing anyone, I’ve changed most of the identifying characteristics, but everything I relate here is true. During my time there I disabused myself of a lot of assumptions about what young men are like in the aggregate and learned some things that those of us interested in a more positive future for men in the modern world will find of use. In particular, my school, like most military schools, absorbed a large number of young men simply impervious to motivation and lacking all drive. This is an increasingly common problem across the world of education and for society as a whole, and dealing with it requires rethinking a number of assumptions about the ends of modern life.

There’s a sort of kid you meet who knows neither hope nor fear, the sort against whom neither bribes nor threats suffice to motivate. He’s an increasingly common subtype in society, one that neither the military, the schools nor military schools can fix. This is because he’s not really broken, any more than one can break Jello, but rather the conscious creation of a system designed for mediocrity and docile indifference to anything noble. Military schools used to be good at inculcating the habits of ignoring hardship for some higher purpose, but as they’ve disappeared or been ideologically co-opted, they no longer fill this role. The end product is manifest. This is the lump, and you probably know him.

You may have the impression that military academies are for hard cases, reform schools essentially. Certainly many of the parents who sought out Marathon had that impression. But that wasn’t really the case. The boys came from all over the US and the world. Many were the sons of important government officials in Latin America, or African businessmen, even a few sent by Uzbek oligarchs. The school used to get a lot of Cubans before Castro. Along with them were American boys from wealthy families, who would think nothing of flying their son and all his friends to their beach house for the summer. These kids sat side by side with the boys sent by local tradesmen, custodial grandparents, and single mothers. At its best it brought young men from all walks of life together into bonds of real friendship.

They came for all sorts of reasons. Some were legacies, from families that had names on campus monuments dating to WWII. Others were there because they hoped to prepare for the service academies. People in the community often mistook these kids for serving military personnel and thanked them for their service. Around town they were bright, industrious, squared away kids who I wouldn’t hesitate to toss my car keys to drive my daughters to the hospital. There were also some there as a prelude to juvie, the sorts who would unceremoniously disappear from my roster like out-of-favor comrades from communist Party membership rolls in Stalinist Russia when they were caught smuggling in drugs, sneaking out to steal beer at Walmart, or sexually assaulting their fellow cadets. One kid, a seemingly inoffensive Cambodian, was taken away in handcuffs in the middle of the night once security discovered a felony amount of ketamine in his footlocker.

There were other kids who were, for lack of a better word, nuts. Not wildly misbehaving, but genuinely, clinically insane. One boy lasted about three weeks before he decided to start swallowing disc batteries during a chemistry lab. He was taken to the hospital and quietly struck from the rolls. I suggested to the administration that he be listed as expelled for battery of a cadet. They were not amused. One troubled boy accumulated a large number of art books from the library in his room in the barracks, which most of the adults took as a positive sign of his progress, until it was discovered that he was cutting out pictures of Rubenesque ladies for disturbing levels of “personal use.” Points for going analogue, at least. It shows creativity, like the boy who just fired up a porno in the middle of biology class, presumably inspired to take a deep dive into the subject.

And that brings us to the final group composing the plurality of students at Marathon Academy: “lumps.”

Lump is not a diagnostic category, but rather my own term for something I often saw but that resisted definition, a sort of combination of democratic man, last man, and mass man, the larval stage of the bugman that never quite sprouts wings. A lump is neither especially good nor bad, but rather a defined mass of inert matter. It lacks energy, focus, and will. Lumps, like plants, passively sustain themselves from their environment, but while flowers grow towards the sun, lumps gravitate towards vapes, porn, and electronic stimulation. The lump is a hopeless addict of technology, a creature seemingly designed by Apple technicians for maximum consumptive potential. The lumps were impossible to motivate, as they wanted nothing from life beyond being mildly amused most of the time, but were largely easy to control for the same reason. Marathon was fairly strict on the use of electronics, contraband and otherwise, and fear of losing his phone made for a terrifying threat for the lump, one he would resort to tears and begging to avoid. I’ve seen it. Needless to say, lumps had no interest in non-digital women, and one of the saddest spectacles was always the annual school dances, where unfortunate girls were bused in to stand idly for a few hours amid loud teenslop music while the boys sat eagerly by the exits, waiting for the hour when their minders would allow them to return to their rooms and their customary online goonsimping.

Lumps were sent to Marathon by parents who believed that a military-style environment would relieve them of the embarrassment of having failsons. The adults generally believed, or told themselves, that proximity to stout servicemen would somehow rub off on their charges, that their sons would gain agency from routine and enforced responsibility. In practice, the staff was largely limited by the passive resistance of the lumps to dragging them through high school by their collars, depositing them across the graduation line with a diploma that said little about the lumps’ own efforts. If they improved at all, it was through a kind of dim awareness of their own lack of agency as a limiting factor. I always found it interesting that so many of the lumps, after years of estrogenic complaining about uncomfortable uniforms, regulation haircuts, constant inspections, and daily drill, ended up either joining the military directly or going to undemanding local military-style colleges. For the lumps, I suspect that the main thing Marathon taught them, at least on an intuitive level, was that they were simply incapable of ordering their lives in any secure and productive way. Some of the worst probably realized that without someone commanding them to wake up, bathe, or eat actual meals, they would neglect to do any of those things on their own initiative, which remained just as non-existent as it was when they were underclassmen. In other words, Marathon succeeded in inculcating a level of at least subconscious self-awareness in people Aristotle would have abandoned as natural slaves.

One might object that it was the close supervision and regime of rules that produced the lump, and that his passive rebellion against the impositions made upon him would end were he given freedom. I’ve never known this to be the case, save once or twice. A lump in my class, who had to be woken up daily from his desktop, one day informed me that he’d saved up some birthday money and purchased a pressure-washing business from a family friend, some $5,000 worth of equipment. I learned afterwards that he’d set himself up as an independent small businessman making decent money in his early 20s. But even there, I suspect he was what one might call a high-lump, the sort with just enough gumption to free himself from dependence on others, but otherwise committed to the same lifestyle. His go-getter attitude was in the service of purchasing a greater quantity of the same slop consumer goods the mid-lump gets from his parents into adulthood and the low-lump scrounges from SSDI. Freedom, in general, is not the lumps’ friend. For them, it is experienced as a crushing burden from which they immediately seek to relieve themselves. For all their hatred of rules and impositions and outside control, as noted, they really can’t live without them to an almost totalizing degree.

The lump is the end-stage refined product of neoliberalism, the perfect managerial object. He is the sort of lifelong boy a committee of women might design for maximum lack of systemic threat. His sole drive is to consume unmitigated by any sense of higher purpose, and he’s been thoroughly inculcated by the online world in which he spends every “free” minute pursuing his crude desires in the sure knowledge that the system under which he lives is the sole source of his dull pleasures. That his world is primarily online is a key feature of the phenomenon. Nietzsche, de Tocqueville, Ortega y Gasset, Lasch, and many others wrote about the grey little creature that is the lump, but never might they have guessed that the very proliferation of possibility would result in such a stunted excuse for a life. It’s never been easier to not be a lump, to learn and grow and become more than one is, and yet, the lump has never been more common.

The ease itself is the reason. The sad fact of the human condition is that suffering drives excellence, and the bumper-bowlingization of life wrought by the longhouse regime mitigates the reflection on pain and mortality needed for personal growth. In theory, lumps at a military school would be exposed to all of that, and there was certainly no shortage of staff who’d seen the horrors of war, great examples of moral and physical courage. But to the lump, excellence is a cautionary tale. In the history classes I taught, nothing about the warriors or pioneers or inventors or explorers or anything ever moved them. They understood in an abstract sense that other people needed to do those things, but to their minds, the struggle involved in meaningful activity was a poor trade-off for time that could otherwise be spent watching porn in an air-conditioned basement. Needless to say, the lump has no spirituality of any kind. Man lives by bread alone, bread one orders from Amazon.

Is there a solution to the lump phenomenon, educationally or otherwise? One might argue that it’s really not even a problem, since the lumpitude of others has little bearing on one’s own drive to higher things. But that’s a bit like a tree being indifferent to vines. Slowly but surely they choke out vitality. The lump, in his person, renders normative all the worst tendencies of modernity. There is a way out, but it’s not pleasant. As with so many negative trends in contemporary life, the lump will endure so long as he is able, so long as life is easy. The obvious corollary to that notion is that he will cease to be a lump only as things get harder. The kindest thing one can do for a lump is what I tried to do for that kid in the beginning of this essay, force him to face the practical consequences of his lifestyle. It’s not enough to know; it must be experienced. He has to feel the pain of mediocrity before he’s powerless to change the course of his life. What’s a lifetime of regret compared to a few moments of pain from sweat pouring into the gouges caused by thrashing around in a holly bush? Not that I’m advocating that, of course. What kind of teacher would that make me?