147. Divinely Appointed Intelligence: The Underground HIstory of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Divinely Appointed Intelligence 

All through the British colonial history of America, the managerial class of these colonies 
was drawn from Church of England gentry and aristocrats. As you might expect, this 
leadership shared the British state church's creative distaste toward education — for the 
underclasses. And underclass then was a term for which the customary narrow modern 
usage is quite unsuitable. Every class not included in the leadership cadre was an 
underclass. The eye-topped pyramid on the back of our one-dollar bill catches the idea of 
such an episcopate beautifully: divinely appointed intelligence ruling the blind stones 
beneath. 



The episcopal rule of British America is well enough documented, yet it remains largely 
unremarked how many revolutionary leaders were still communicants of the Church of 
England — Russell Kirk estimated twenty-nine of the fifty- five delegates attending the 
Constitutional Convention of 1787. They may have been willing to push the mother 
country away, but their own attitude toward popular sovereignty was ambivalent. Little- 
known even today is the long private effort of Ben Franklin to induce British royal 
government to displace the Quaker Penns of Pennsylvania and take command of the state. 
Between 1755 and 1768, Franklin labored mightily at this, reluctantly abandoning his 
dream and jumping ship to the revolutionary conspirators just in time to save his own 
position. 1 After Braddock's defeat, Franklin joined forces with the influential Anglican 
priest William Smith in a venture they called "The Society for Propagating Christian 
Knowledge among Germans settled in Pennsylvania." This association, a harbinger of 
government schools to come, had nothing much to do with reading and counting, but 
everything to do with socializing German children as English. 

Braddock's defeat on the Monongahela was the straw that tipped America's influential 
Quakers into the Anglican camp; it joined two influential, socially exclusionary sects in 
bonds of mutual assistance. When the great explosion of elite private boarding academies 
took place in the late-nineteenth-century period when hereditarian societies were also 
forming (and for the same purpose), Episcopalian schools made up half the total of such 
schools, a fraction many times greater than their denominational share of population 
would have warranted. They still do. And Quakers, at present just 1/2,600 of the 
American population (.04 percent), control 5 percent of the inner circle of elite private 
boarding schools (many elite day schools, as well). This constitutes 125 times more 
participation than bare Quaker numbers would seem to warrant! A managerial class was 
circling the wagons, protecting its own children from the epic social conditioning yet to 
come, and perhaps from the biological menace Darwin and Galton had warned about. 



1 As little known as Ben's skullduggery is the fact that his only son was the Royal Governor of New Jersey, 
a loyal Church of England man who fled to England during the war and never spoke to his father again 
(until Franklin's life was nearly over) because of gentle Ben's treachery. Even then the breach between 
father and son could not be healed. 

The Paxton Boys