9. A Nation From The Bottom Up: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

CHAPTER ONE 



The Way It Used To Be 

Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future 
generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present 
determines how those same people will view the past. 

— George Orwell, 1984 (1949) 

Take at hazard one hundred children of several educated generations and one hundred 
uneducated children of the people and compare them in anything you please; in strength, 
in agility, in mind, in the ability to acquire knowledge, even in morality — and in all 
respects you are startled by the vast superiority on the side of the children of the 
uneducated. 

— Count Leo Tolstoy, "Education and Children" (1862) 

A Nation From The Bottom Up 

ESTABLISHING SHOT 

Fifty children of different ages are teaching each other while the schoolmaster hears 
lessons at his desk from older students. An air of quiet activity fills the room. A wood 
stove crackles in the corner. What drove the nineteenth-century school world celebrated 
in Edward Eggleston's classic, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, was a society rich with 
concepts like duty, hard work, responsibility, and self-reliance; a society overwhelmingly 
local in orientation although never so provincial it couldn't be fascinated by the foreign 
and exotic. But when tent Chautauqua with its fanfare about modern marvels left town, 
conversation readily returned to the text of local society. 

Eggleston's America was a special place in modern history, one where the society was 
more central than the national political state. Words can't adequately convey the 
stupendous radicalism hidden in our quiet villages, a belief that ordinary people have a 
right to govern themselves. A confidence that they can. 

Most revolutionary of all was the conviction that personal rights can only be honored 
when the political state is kept weak. In the classical dichotomy between liberty and 
subordination written into our imagination by Locke and Hobbes in the seventeenth 
century, America struggled down the libertarian road of Locke for awhile while her three 
godfather nations, England, Germany, and France, followed Hobbes and established 
leviathan states through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Toward the end, 
America began to follow the Old World's lead. 

For Hobbes, social order depended upon state control of the inner life, a degree of mental 
colonization unknown to the tyrants of history whose principal concern had been 



controlling the bodies of their subjects. But the sheer size of an America without national 
roads or electronic networks ensured that liberty would be nurtured outside the ring of 
government surveillance. Then, too, many Americans came out of the dissenting religious 
sects of England, independent congregations which rejected church-state partnerships. 
The bulk of our population was socially suspect anyway. Even our gentry was second and 
third string by English standards, gentlemen without inheritances, the rest a raggle-taggle 
band of wastrels, criminals, shanghaied boys, poor yeomanry, displaced peasants. 

Benet, the poet, describes our founding stock: 

The disavouched, hard-bitten pack 
Shipped overseas to steal a continent 
with neither shirts nor honor to their back. 

In Last Essays, George Bernanos observes that America, unlike other nations, was built 
from the bottom up. Francis Parkman made the same observation a century earlier. What 
America violently rejected in its early republic was the Anglican "Homily On Obedience" 
set down by English established-church doctrine in the Tudor state of 1562, a doctrine 
likening order in Heaven with the English social order on Earth — fixed and immutable: 

The sun, moon, stars, rainbows, thunder, lightning, clouds, and all the birds of the air do 
keep their order. The earth, trees, seeds, plants, herbs, corn, grass, and all manner of 
beasts keep themselves in order.... Every degree of people in their vocations, callings and 
office has appointed to them their duty and order. 

By 1776 the theocratic Utopia toward which such a principle moves, was well established 
in the Britain of the German Georges, as well as in the three North German states of 
Prussia, Saxony, and Hanover. Together with England, all three were to play an 
important role in twentieth- century forced schooling in America. The same divine clock, 
superficially secularized, was marking time in the interlude of Enlightenment France, the 
pre-revolutionary Utopia which would also have a potent effect on American school 
thought. Hobbes and his doctrine of mental colonization eclipsed Locke everywhere else, 
but not in America. 

You Had To Do It Yourself