How Hindu Schooling Came To America (I)
By the end of the first quarter of the
nineteenth century, a form of school technology was up and running in
America’s larger cities, one in which children of lower-class customers
were psychologically conditioned to obedience under pretext that they
were learning reading and counting (which may also have happened). These
were the Lancaster schools, sponsored by Governor DeWitt Clinton of New
York and prominent Quakers like Thomas Eddy, builder of the Erie Canal.
They soon spread to every corner of the nation where the problem of an
incipient proletariat existed. Lancaster schools are cousins of today’s
school factories. What few knew then or realize now is that they were
also a Hindu invention, designed with the express purpose of retarding
intellectual development.
How Hindu schooling came to America, England,
Germany, and France at just about the same time is a story which has
never been told. A full treatment is beyond the scope of this book, but
I’ll tell you enough to set you wondering how an Asiatic device
specifically intended to preserve a caste system came to reproduce
itself in the early republic, protected by influentials of the magnitude
of Clinton and Eddy. Even a brief dusting off of schooling’s Hindu
provenance should warn you that what you know about American schooling
isn’t much. First, a quick gloss on the historical position of India at
the time of the American Revolution—for Lancaster schools were in New
York two decades after its end.
India fell victim to Western dominance
through nautical technology in the following fashion: When medieval
Europe broke up after its long struggle to reconcile emergent science
with religion, five great ocean powers appeared to compete for the
wealth of the planet: Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and
England. Portugal was the first to sail for treasure, leaving colonies
in India, China, and South America, but its day in the sun was short.
Spain emerged as the next global superpower, but after 1600, her
character decayed rapidly from the corrupting effects of the gold of the
Americas, which triggered a long national decline. The Netherlands,
turn followed because that nation had the advantage of a single-minded
commercial class in control of things with one aim in mind: wealth. The
Dutch monopolized the carrying trade of Europe with globe-trotting
merchant ships and courageous military seamanship, yet as with Portugal
before it, the Dutch population was too small, its internal resources
too anemic for its dominance to extend very long.
Beginning in the seventeenth century, England
and France gradually built business in the East, both balked for a time
by the Dutch who controlled the spice trade of the Indies. Three naval
wars with the Dutch made the Royal Navy master of the seas, in the
process developing tactics of sea warfare that made it dominant for the
next two centuries. By 1700, only France and England remained as global
sea powers with impressive fighting capability, and during the last half
of that century these giants slugged it out directly in Canada, India,
and in the territory which is today the United States, with the result
that France went permanently into eclipse.
In India, the two contended through their
commercial pseudopodia, the British and French East India Companies:
each maintained a private army to war on the other for tea, indigo,
turmeric, ginger, quinine, oilseeds, silk, and that product which most
captivated British merchants with its portability and breakaway profit
potential—opium. At Plassey, Chandernagor, Madras, and Wandiwash, this
long corporate rivalry ended. The French abandoned India to the British.
The drug monopoly was finally England’s.
Out of this experience and the observations
of a wealthy young Anglican chaplain in India, the formula for modern
schooling was discovered. Perhaps it was no more than coincidence this
fellow held his first gainful employment as a schoolteacher in the
United States; on the other hand, perhaps his experience in a nation
which successfully threw off British shackles sensitized him to the
danger an educated population poses to plutocracies.
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