Worth examining what aristocratic means. Most people have a kind of critical cartoon anti-idea of it, but aristocracy and nobility essentially mean rule by the best and being actuated by principle. There is some kind of rhyming crossover to Aristotelian virtue as well, which is a pretty sound foundation for personal growth, and for the process of education as "drawing out," instead of "putting in."

When you read the works of geniuses, it becomes clear that they haven't climbed an intellectual hill so much as related to the world in a particular way that allowed them to surmount them. To explore at all, you need confidence, which comes from exercising skills and ideas, making mistakes, and handling them with the aplomb of someone whose basic relationship to the world is that where it is there to be discovered, and there is a some force that wishes for you to thrive. Everything I have read on excecptional people involved this drawing out of brilliance and the liberating of a mind to explore. This is the opposite of the industrial cog education we have now.

The aphorism that all things are shaped by the forces they oppose is a useful metaphor, where to develop fully, you can't be kept in a small intellectual tank, like a fish that only grows to the size of its bowl. This freedom from constraints is the necessary condition to grow brilliance, and coincidentally, that freedom happens to come with nobility and aristocratic ideals. Another simile I use is from working with animals, where without free committed forward motion, instructing or guiding them is meaningless and even harmful, because you aren't teaching them anything unless they are already committed to a direction that you augment. The way we educate kids today is like cornering an animal and then rewarding it only as it submits and compromises itself to avoid punishment, and then recognizing it as educated when it is finally so spiritually broken it no longer tries to escape.

Without a kind of liberty, a mind will only be shaped by its constraints. Nobility and elevation in this sense can absolutely be acquired, but it has to originate from within, and it is not symbolic, it's the effect of techne and the exercise of freedom and competence, and not an artifact of the reflected approval of mediocre others. There is even a spiritual element to it, where belief in a divine intent provides that foundation for relating to your environment and the world with principle, and which deflects the constraints that would limit and mis-shape your development. This is why religious education is still considered valuable even by atheists, as it provides this foundation.

Adapting these ideas to life in a modern city, which is essentially a closed tank of mental constraints that emphasizes navigating relationships with people without any sense of exploring something greater - would be a really interesting question. How do you liberate the mind of a kid who lives in a box, whose existence is moving from box to box, watching glowing boxes, with the only differences being symbolic in the context of relationships with other box people, and which is not rooted to any physical principle or objective notion of good or hope? It makes genius almost impossible.

Thank you to the author for such an important essay. I hope it gets more traction.