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This chapter emphasises that myths, including tartan mythologies, are not false or inauthentic history, although they may have historical roots. It suggests that they are embodiments of often rich contradictions that demand exploration, analysis, and understanding, and cannot simply be dismissed as ‘backward’ or substituted ingenuously by new ‘progressivist’ mythologies. It notes that one of the key tartan myths involved its role as an identifier of clan or family membership. It considers the ways in which tartan appears to have come to be linked to clans or families in order to see whether such words make sense. It observes that it is common ground that the process of linking specific tartan setts to specific families was systematised only in the early nineteenth century, particularly in the context of the 1822 royal visit to Edinburgh.

This chapter focuses on Éclaircissement sur les sacrifices (1809), which revolutionized the European understanding of the relationship between society and violence. The Éclaircissement is a historical progressivist text. While it does not use the word “progress,” it consistently alludes to the systematic, totalizing, radical, and rational improvement of the human condition. Like progress, Maistrian sacrifice—the most controlled and regulated form of violence—enables humans to advance continuously toward higher stages, even unto rebirth. In this the Éclaircissement exceeds the Enlightenment. Where the philosophes had aspired to improve humanity physically and morally through reason, Maistre looks forward to the complete and essential transformation of humanity, out of itself and onto a higher state, through the reasoned and measured manipulation of violence.

This chapter examines the teaching styles of Arbor Town teachers. It describes a typical day in the classrooms of two teachers: Theresa, a modern traditionalist and Patricia, an old-fashioned progressivist. The chapter also discusses the features of a teaching style that is relevant to students participating in the Canford Program.

By the time the twentieth century rolled around, few places on earth had changed so completely as the Hawaiian Islands. In the midst of educating her pupils for the radical pace of modernization that was rushing Honolulu forward, Pope had a startling revelation. As time-honored Hawaiian traditions were subjugated under the transformations, she realized her pupils had been deprived of their culture and that she had, unwittingly, been a participant in this. Almost as an apology, Pope went into the new century at full steam, making sure Hawaiian girls knew they had a distinct cultural identity, one that must be acknowledged, respected, and enabled to flourish in the midst of the Americanization of the islands. At Kamehameha, Pope was an activist, complaining to the trustees that not enough was being done, but abroad, she acted as an ambassador for the school and the success of its programs. The more Pope wrote, traveled throughout America, and visited educational intuitions, the more people heard about the Kamehameha School for Girls. She was proud that influential people began to look to her school as a prototype. Pope was invited to join an organized tour group of American educators in the spring of 1906 on a grand European tour.

In his book Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams makes common cause with Nietzsche in rejecting the view that the Greek epic and tragic poets had a “primitive” conception of human agency and responsibility, and he sides with Nietzsche in arguing for the superiority of that poetic view over the institution of morality. But Williams’s case for the “tragic culture of the Greeks” is much more limited in scope than Nietzsche’s. Appreciating this difference in its details allows one to see that Nietzsche had a much more distinctive account of human agency itself, and a very different view of true self-knowledge and the difficulty of achieving it, than Williams, despite various convergences on these two issues. These issues are also shown to be relevant to Williams’s sense of Nietzsche’s historical significance.

In his book Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams makes common cause with Nietzsche in rejecting the view that the Greek epic and tragic poets had a ‘primitive’ conception of human agency and responsibility, and he sides with Nietzsche in arguing for the superiority of that poetic view over the institution of ‘morality’. But Williams’s case for the ‘tragic culture of the Greeks’ is much more limited in scope than Nietzsche’s. Appreciating this difference in its details allows one to see that Nietzsche had a much more distinctive account of human agency itself, and a very different view of true self-knowledge and the difficulty of achieving it than Williams, despite various convergences on these two issues. These issues are also shown to be relevant to Williams’s sense of Nietzsche’s historical significance.