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.
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