THE NEW FINISHING SCHOOL.

—NOT Tattooed Shock-troops of Deracination, but Cultured Guardians of the Hearth and Soil.

By Mrs. Begonia Contretemp, [Why and the Wherefore Cohort, NVZ], also C-of-C-C European Correspondent

TO THE CHICKS OF A CIVILIZATION NOT YET HATCHED,

Once upon a not-so-distant age, finishing schools flourished. These genteel institutions, often Swiss in address and Anglo in affectation, were designed to sand down the rough edges of young ladies from good families. One did not emerge from a finishing school with a profession — heavens no — but rather with accomplishments: the correct angle of the wrist when pouring tea, the subtle geometry of a curtsey, a working fluency in French epistolary sighs, and a repertoire of Schubert lieder sufficient to suggest “culture” without straying into the vulgarity of genius.

In other words, finishing schools finished the work begun at home: they polished, refined, and presented. Women were launched into society with the sheen of pearls and the tacit understanding that their role was to keep civilization from unravelling over the soup course.

The Modern “Finishing School”

And what, my poppets, is the finishing school of today? It is called university. A four-year (or, God help us, six-year) excursion where girls are sent to acquire not deportment but debt; not polish but piercings; not Schubert but shrillness. Instead of learning to manage a household, they are trained to dismantle it. Instead of French sighs, they come back with American tattoos. Instead of epistolary refinement, they send “texts” — blunt little glyphs of complaint, half in emojis, half in grievance.

And then, of course, the nose rings. My ducklings, let us pause here, for this is a marvel worth our full attention. Once upon a pastoral time, the ring in the bull’s nose was a mark of subjugation, a means by which a powerful animal could be led with the mere tug of a chain. To see this emblem of control now voluntarily adopted by young women — not cattle, but proudly self-declared “liberated” — is a sight so ironic it makes the Continent itself wince.

They march about proclaiming independence, while wearing the very hardware of docility. Rage and rebellion proclaimed through an ornament of obedience: what could be more exquisitely absurd?

The so-called alma mater specializes in producing daughters who rage against their fathers, who denounce marriage as patriarchy, who exchange pearls for nose rings and recipes for slogans. They do not “finish” at all — they unravel. And society, in its infinite stupidity, applauds this as “empowerment.” Empowered to do what exactly? To become fragile, furious consumers of grievance? To brand themselves with causes that will discard them at menopause? My sweetlings, there are Wagnerian sopranos with more subtlety.

Our Proposal: A Council Finishing School

The Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists, having more wisdom in a single yellow neck gaiter than most faculties boast in an entire diversity office, proposes a true finishing school for young women — one aligned with the noble aims of continuity, culture, and conservation.

At our finishing school, girls will learn:

Preservation as Art — how to can peaches, but also how to preserve memory, lineage, and civilization itself.

The Etiquette of Continuity — how to treat men not as enemies but as co-laborers in the ark of survival.

Languages of the Past — not the jargon of critical theory, but Latin, Greek, and the dialects of their grandmothers.

Aesthetics of Order — music, embroidery, and the cultivation of beauty as resistance to entropy. The Philosophy of Hospitality — how to set a table, and by extension, a world.

When they emerge, these young women will not be tattooed shock-troops of deracination, but cultured guardians of the hearth and soil — torchbearers of civilization, crowned not with grievance but with grace.

The Raw Material of Refinement

And yes, my little heirs, one must not be entirely naïve. You will not arrive at our finishing school as unsullied maidens out of a Victorian watercolor. You will come, more often than not, already touched by the world: a tattoo here, a slogan there, perhaps even a weary little scar from the passing fads of “empowerment.” I do not deny it. But civilization is not restored by denial — it is restored by discipline. We shall accept you, inked wrists and all, with the understanding that such blemishes are starting points, not destinations. The roughness will be gradually polished away, the shrillness quieted, the nose ring put at last to pasture. My ducklings, even decadence may serve as raw material, provided the aim is refinement. One concedes the present in order to claim the future — and that is precisely what we shall do.

A Proper Reading List for Proper Girls

And now, my clever goslings, a final word — for no true finishing school is complete without its library. Ours will not stock the braying pamphlets of gender grievance, nor the disposable memoirs of celebrities who cannot spell the word “celebrity.” Instead, our shelves will hold the serious, demanding tomes of Europe’s intellectual aristocracy.

Here the young ladies will read de Benoist and the writings of GRECE, not because every line is gospel, but because every page insists that culture is a birthright, not a consumable. They will leaf through the essays of Guillaume Faye and Jean Raspail — prophetic in a regrettable way, lamenting like Cassandras in salons that refused to listen. And my little heirs, they will discover not shrillness but severity, not hysteria but heritage.

Yes, my chicks, these girls will graduate knowing not only how to enter a drawing room gracefully, but how to enter history with memory intact. They will carry not just lavender sachets in their handbags, but the weight of civilization in their minds.

And that, I assure you, is a proper finishing.

AND SO I REMAIN, AS EVER,

YOURS IN PEARLS AND PRUDENCE,

MRS. BEGONIA CONTRETEMP