Farragut
When I was a schoolboy at the Waverly School in Monongahela, Peg Hill told us that
David Farragut, the U.S. Navy's very first admiral, had been commissioned midshipman
at the ripe old age often for service on the warship Essex. Had Farragut been a schoolboy
like me, he would have been in fifth grade when he sailed for the Argentine, rounding the
Horn into action against British warships operating along the Pacific coast of South
America.
Farragut left a description of what he encountered in his first sea fight:
I shall never forget the horrid impression made upon me at the sight of the first man I had
ever seen killed. It staggered me at first, but they soon began to fall so fast that it
appeared like a dream and produced no effect on my nerves.
The poise a young boy is capable of was tested when a gun captain on the port side
ordered him to the wardroom for primers. As he started down the ladder, a gun captain on
the starboard side opposite the ladder was "struck full in the face by an eighteen-pound
shot," his headless corpse falling on Farragut:
We tumbled down the hatch together. I lay for some moments stunned by the blow, but
soon recovered consciousness enough to rush up on deck. The captain, seeing me covered
with blood, asked if I were wounded; to which I replied, "I believe not, sir." "Then," said
he, "where are the primers?" This brought me to my senses and I ran below again and
brought up the primers.
The Essex had success; it took prizes. Officers were dispatched with skeleton crews to
sail them back to the United States, and at the age of twelve, Farragut got his first
command when he was picked to head a prize crew. I was in fifth grade when I read
about that. Had Farragut gone to my school he would have been in seventh. You might
remember that as a rough index how far our maturity had been retarded even fifty years
ago. Once at sea, the deposed British captain rebelled at being ordered about by a boy and
announced he was going below for his pistols (which as a token of respect he had been
allowed to keep). Farragut sent word down that if the captain appeared on deck armed he
would be summarily shot and dumped overboard. He stayed below.
So ended David Farragut's first great test of sound judgment. At fifteen, this unschooled
young man went hunting pirates in the Mediterranean. Anchored off Naples, he witnessed
an eruption of Vesuvius and studied the mechanics of volcanic action. On a long layover
in Tunis, the American consul, troubled by Farragut's ignorance, tutored him in French,
Italian, mathematics, and literature. Consider our admiral in embryo. I'd be surprised if
you thought his education was deficient in anything a man needs to be reckoned with.
When I was a schoolboy in Monongahela, I learned how Thomas Edison left school early
because the school thought him feeble-minded. He spent his early years peddling
newspapers. Just before the age of twelve he talked his mother into letting him work on
trains as a train-boy, a permission she gave which would put her in jail right now. A
train-boy was apprentice of all work. Shortly afterwards a printer gave Edison some old
type he was about to discard and the boy, successfully begging a corner for himself in the
baggage car to set type, began printing a four-page newspaper the size of a handkerchief
about the lives of the passengers on the train and the things that could be seen from its
window.
Several months later, twelve-year-old Edison had 500 subscribers, earning a net profit
monthly about 25 percent more than an average schoolteacher of the day made. When the
Civil War broke out, the newspaper became a goldmine. Railroads had telegraph facilities
so war news was available to Edison as quickly as to professional journalists, but he
could move it into print sooner than they could. He sold the war to crowds at the various
stops. "The Grand Trunk Herald" sold as many as 1,000 extra copies after a battle at
prices per issue from a dime to a quarter, amassing for Edison a handsome stake.
Unfortunately, at the same time he had been experimenting with phosphorus in the
baggage car. One thing led to another and Edison set the train on fire; otherwise there
might never have been a light bulb.
When I was a schoolboy in Monongahela, I learned with a shock that the men who won
our Revolution were barely out of high school by the standards of my time: Hamilton was
twenty in the retreat from New York; Burr, twenty-one; Light Horse Harry Lee, twenty-
one; Lafayette, 19. What amounted to a college class rose up and struck down the British
empire, afterwards helping to write the most sophisticated governing documents in
modern history.
When I was a schoolboy in Monongahela, I learned the famous Samuel Pepys, whose
Diary is a classic, wasn't just an old gossip but president of the Royal Society, the most
prominent association of scientists in existence in the seventeenth century. He was also
Secretary of the Admiralty. Why that's important to our investigation of modern
schooling is this: Pepys could only add and subtract right up to the time of his
appointment to the Admiralty, but then quickly learned to multiply and divide to spare
himself embarrassment. I took a different lesson from that class than the teacher intended,
I think.
At the age of five, when I entered the first grade, I could add, subtract, and multiply
because Dad used to play numbers games with my sister and me in the car. He taught me
the mastery of those skills within a matter of a few hours, not years and years as it took in
school. We did all calculations in our heads with such gusto I seldom use a pencil today
even for much more intricate computation. Pepys verified my father's unstated premise:
You can learn what you need, even the technical stuff, at the moment you need it or
shortly before. Sam Pepys wasn't put in charge of Britain's sea defense because he knew
how to multiply or divide but because he had good judgment, or at least it was thought
so.
Ben Franklin
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