"Class is Now in Session": The brilliance and timeliness of Xavier’s radical school

Four years before the initial publication of X-Men, the legal system shuttered Black Mountain College. It’s advisory board boasted John Dewey (educational pioneer), Walter Gropius (Bauhaus founder), and Einstein (Einstein), a group of luminaries drawn to the school and entirely without power. It was, rather, governed by faculty and students, and implemented a radical and democratic curriculum whose freedom gave rise to more famous artists and writers in such a short time than can be named – but as sample included one summer where John Cage, Willem de Kooning, and Buckminster Fuller were all teaching classes in the same hallway to other names now recognized by history. These sorts of small, new, and radical educational institutions by the gifted for the purpose of creating a new power base for society were all the rage – Gerald Heard and Alfred Huxley’s Trabuco College, similarly, would seed the basis for much the 60s counterculture, the continuing influence of “New Age” thought, and the Human Potential Movement (itself something which draws obvious parallels to the X-Men’s idea of human mutants).

The first issue of the X-Men begins with a hard-bolded “class is now in session”, transmitted directly into the brains of students by Professor Charles Xavier. The first page opens on and is entirely dedicated to creating the world of Xavier’s manor school. Stan Lee had a legendary knack for reading the tea leaves of culture, and I argue more than anything else his creation of this “school for gifted” mutants was a stroke of genius that paved the way for the X-Men’s legendary cultural importance. Although it may strike us as alien now, pop-up educational institutions were cool in the early and mid-60s, and even seen as a necessity for social change and battling the dominant culture. The Port Huron Statement urged the youth to seize the modes of education, as schools were the key to “revealing new potentialities, [controlling] new levers for change”. As the X-Men were gaining fans, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was overwhelmed by the willingness of college students to set up Freedom Schools in racist areas – 40 being set up through Mississippi in 1964 as the critical backbone of the Freedom Summer. When faculty against the Vietnam War were being purged from universities, the Free University of New York was set-up to teach those who wanted to learn from the silenced (with free tuition for those who had grown up on or currently received welfare). Our own Kirkland College owed its existence to this burst of exuberance for radical education initiatives. What could be more radical than a mansion run by a professor who was teaching teens how to be superheroes, and help society by unlocking the gifts they were born with?

Much like Stan Lee’s Black Panther predated but then took influence from the Black Panther party, in a notable coincidence Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters is a few miles down the road from Millbrook Estate, the castle Dr. Timothy Leary took over in 1964 to school acolytes and “behaviorists” who left prestigious institutions to “unlock the god who inhabits each and every human”(cf: Michael Hollingshead's The Man Who Turned On the World) through meditation, scientific study, and far too much drug use. From that upstate NY manor -- led by a Professor who believed in teams of humans that he trained and deployed to save society -- was unleashed a tidal wave of theories, artistic practices and substances that came to define much of what people now consider the counterculture of the 60s and early 70s. Stan Lee was, as always, on to something. As a kid, the school for Gifted Youngsters aspect of the X-Men (as well as Hogwarts) always held a deep and resonant appeal for me. With even more cultural context, I can see why Stan Lee made the choice he did in the first issue, and am glad for it.