Prince Charles Visits Steel Valley High An important counter-revolutionary event with a bearing on the changes going on in our schools happened quietly not so long ago, just a stone's throw from where Braddock fell. Bill Serrin tells of it in his book Homestead. By 1988 the Monongahela Valley had been stripped bare of its mines and mills by Pittsburgh financial interests and their hired experts who had no place in profit/loss equations for people and communities, whatever rhetoric said to the contrary. As a consequence, Monongahela, Charleroi, Donora, Homestead, Monessen, all were dying, places that had "been on fire once, had possessed vibrancy and life." Now they were falling into the aimless emptiness of the unemployed after a century as the world's steelmakers. Not idle of their own choice, not even unproductive — the mills still made a profit — yet not a profit large enough to please important financial interests. In the bleak winter of 1988 Charles of the blood royal came to visit Steel Valley High in Homestead nominally to talk about turning dead steel mills into arboretums. Why Charles? He was "the world's leading architecture buff," so why not? His Highness' fleet of two dozen Chinese red Jaguars crossed the Homestead High Bridge only minutes from the spot where Braddock died on the Monongahela. Perhaps the prince had been informed of this, perhaps he was making a statement for history. In a motorcade of scarlet he roared over the bridge. Residents who had gathered to wave at the prince and his entourage "saw only a whir of scarlet as he whizzed into Homestead." Charles was too preoccupied with his own agenda to wave back at the offspring of Europe's industrial proletariat, thrice removed. Victory as always comes to those who abide. We had only one Washington, only one Jackson, only one Lincoln to lead us against the Imperial Mind. After they were gone, only the people remembered what America was about. Serrin writes, "A handful of activist ministers gathered along Charles' way holding tomatoes, and Police Chief Kelley assumed, not without reason, they were going to throw them at the prince. Or in Monongahela vernacular, 'tomato him.' " The motive for this bad hospitality was a growing anger at the text of the prince's speech to a group of architects assembled in Pittsburgh for a "Remaking Cities Conference." The conference had been co-sponsored by the Royal Institute of British Architects. Andrew Carnegie's dream of reuniting with the mother country was coming true in the very town most associated with Carnegie's name. The British have a grand sense of history, they do. The assembled architects had been studying the settlements of my valley and recommending replacement uses for its mills. They proposed conversion of empty steel plants into exhibition halls for flower shows. At the public hearing, valley residents shouted, "We don 't want flowers, we want jobs. We want the valley back. This was the steel center of the world." Prince Charles spoke to the crowd as one might speak to children, just as he might have spoken had Braddock won and the Revolution never taken place. The upshot was a grand coalition of elites formed to revitalize the valley. I see a parallel in the formation of the New American Schools Committee — whose eighteen members counted fifteen corporate CEOs, including the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company's descendant form, RJR Nabisco — announcing revitalization of our schools. The effort to save Homestead looked like this through the eyes of New York Times labor reporter Bill Serrin: In its tragedy Homestead became fashionable.... Homestead was the rage. There were study groups and committees, historical exhibits, film proposals, lectures, brown-bag lunches, dinners, economic analyses, historical surveys, oral histories, a case study of disinvestment and redevelopment plans in the Monongahela Valley done by the Harvard Business School, architects, city planners, historians, economists, anthropologists, sociologists, social workers, foundation experts — all these and others became involved. An echo of the great transformational days when we got factory schooling, the same buzz and hubbub, fashionable people with their shirt sleeves metaphorically rolled up. Then suddenly the attention was over. All the paraphernalia of concern resulted in: Little effort on Homestead or the other steel towns. There never was a plan to redevelop Homestead. The goal had been to ensure there were no more protests like the ones earlier in the decade. If there was a master plan it was death and highways. Homestead would be gone. A highway through the valley would eliminate even the houses, perhaps obliterate Homestead and the other steel towns. One more thing.. .the training programs. They were bullshit. So here we are. In order to clean the social canvas, a reduction in the maximum levels of maturity to be allowed grown men and women has been ordered from somewhere. We are to be made and kept as nervous, whining adolescents. This is a job best begun and ended while we are little children, hence the kind of schools we have — a governor put on our growth through which we are denied the understandings needed to escape childhood. Don't blame schools. Schools only follow orders. Schoolmen are as grateful as grenadiers to wear a pretty paycheck and be part of Braddock's invincible army. Theirs not to reason why.. .if they know what's good for them. Empty Children
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