The Psyche Papers make up the last series of essays Richard Mitchell published in The Underground Grammarian. They're long, but well worth reading. They appeared in four consecutive issues in 1991, and came with a homework assignment:

"The assigned reading is The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius as translated by Robert Graves. It can be had in a cheap paperback edition. The Psyche Papers will be given mostly to a consideration of the tale of Psyche and Eros which appears within the novel, but it will not be enough to read only that passage. There are connections and echoes.

"We seem to have spent our first seven years [at The Underground Grammarian] trying to figure out why so few of those who call themselves 'educators' can make sense, and our second looking at the institutional and individual calamities brought on by senseless people who operate our schooling. It looks as though our third seven years ought to be given to a question that readers have often, and often very urgently, asked: Well, then, if that's the way it is, what can we do? Let us try to discover or devise some answers.

"This is not, however, to say that we want to suggest some hitherto unimagined 'reform.' Our 'education' is not sick; it is dead. There is no undertaker skillful enough to bring its putrid corpse to life. It was never truly an education anyway, only another thing using the name. It was never intended as a release from the captivity in which we are all born. We would like to rediscover, if that can be done, the real thing."

 

The Underground Grammarian

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