10. You Had To Do It Yourself: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

You Had To Do It Yourself

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      Abe Lincoln, by the fireplace in a log house. "An American," Francis Grund  remarked in 1837, "is almost from his cradle brought up to reflect on his condition, and  from the time he is able to act, employed with the means of improving it."  

      Lincoln, hardly a slouch as writer, speaker, or thinker, packed fifty weeks of formal  schooling into his entire life over the twelve-year period between 1814 and 1826. Even  that little seemed a waste of time to his relatives. Unless you want to argue that those few  weeks made a decisive difference to Abe, we need to look elsewhere for his education.  Clifton Johnson thinks it happened this way:  

       He acquired much of his early education at home. In the evening he would pile sticks of  dry wood into the brick fireplace. These would blaze up brightly and shed a strong light  over the room, and the boy would lie down flat on the floor before the hearth with his  book in front of him. He used to write his arithmetic sums on a large wooden shovel with  a piece of charcoal. After covering it all over with examples, he would take his jack-knife  and whittle and scrape the surface clean, ready for more ciphering. Paper was expensive  and he could not afford a slate. Sometimes when the shovel was not at hand he did his  figuring on the logs of the house walls and on the doorposts, and other woodwork that  afforded a surface he could mark on with his charcoal.  

     In Lincoln's Illinois and Kentucky, only reading, writing, and ciphering "to the Rule of  Three" were required of teachers, but in New England the business often attracted  ambitious young men like Noah Webster, confident and energetic, merely pausing on  their way to greater things. Adam Gurowski, mid-nineteenth-century traveler in our land,  took special notice of the superiority of American teachers. Their European brethren  were, he said, "withered drifters" or "narrowed martinets." 

      Young people in America were expected to make something of themselves, not to  prepare themselves to fit into a pre-established hierarchy. Every foreign commentator  notes the early training in independence, the remarkable precocity of American youth,  their assumption of adult responsibility. In his memoir, Tom Nichols, a New Hampshire  schoolboy in the 1820s, recalls the electrifying air of expectation in early American  schools: 

      Our teachers constantly stimulated us by the glittering prizes of wealth, honors, offices,  and distinctions, which were certainly within our reach — there were a hundred avenues to  wealth and fame opening fair before us if we only chose to learn our lessons.  

     Overproduction, overcapacity, would have been an alien concept to that America,  something redolent of British mercantilism. Our virgin soil and forests undermined the  stern doctrine of Calvinism by paying dividends to anyone willing to work. As Calvinism  waned, contrarian attitudes emerged which represented a new American religion. First,  the conviction that opportunity was available to all; second, that failure was the result of  deficient character, not predestination or bad placement on a biological bell curve. 

      Character flaws could be remedied, but only from the inside. You had to do it yourself  through courage, determination, honesty, and hard work. Don't discount this as hot air; it  marks a critical difference between Americans and everyone else. Teachers had a place in  this process of self-creation, but it was an ambiguous one: anyone could teach, it was  thought, just as anyone could self-teach. Secular schools, always a peripheral institution,  were viewed with ambivalence, although teachers were granted some value — if only  gratitude for giving mother a break. In the southern and middle colonies, teachers were  often convicts serving out their sentences, their place in the social order caught in this  advertisement of Washington's day:    

     RAN AWAY. A servant man who followed the occupation of Schoolmaster. Much given  to drinking and gambling.  

     Washington's own schoolmaster, "Hobby," was just such a bondsman. Traditional lore  has it that he laid the foundation for national greatness by whipping the devil out of  Washington. Whipping and humiliation seem to have always been an eternal staple of  schooling. Evidence survives from ancient Rome, Montaigne's France, Washington's  Virginia — or my own high school in western Pennsylvania in the 1950s, where the  teacher's personalized paddle hung prominently at the entrance to many a classroom, not  for decoration but for use. The football coach and, if I recall correctly, the algebra teacher  customized their paddles, using a dry cell battery to fashion devices similar to electrified  cattle prods. 

      Something in the structure of schooling calls forth violence. While latter-day schools  don't allow energetic physical discipline, certainly they are state-of-the-art laboratories in  humiliation, as your own experience should remind you. In my first years of teaching I  was told over and over that humiliation was my best friend, more effective than  whipping. I witnessed this theory in practice through my time as a teacher. If you were to  ask me now whether physical or psychological violence does more damage, I would reply  that slurs, aspersion, formal ranking, insult, and inference are far and away the more  deadly. Nor does law protect the tongue-lashed. 

      Early schools in America were quick with cuff or cane, but local standards demanded  fairness. Despotic teachers were often quarry themselves, as Washington Irving's  "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" warns us. Listen to the fate of schoolmaster Thomas  Beveridge at the hands of the upper-class Latin School in Philadelphia, eleven years  before the Revolution: 

      He arrives, enters the school, and is permitted to proceed until he is supposed to have  nearly reached his chair at the upper end of the room, when instantly the door, and every  window shutter is closed. Now shrouded in utter darkness the most hideous yells that can  be conceived are sent forth from three score of throats; and Ovids and Virgils and  Horaces, together with the more heavy metal of dictionaries, are hurled without remorse  at the astonished preceptor, who, groping and crawling under cover of the forms, makes  the best of his way to the door. When attained, a light is restored and a death-like silence  ensues.   Every boy is at his lesson: No one has had a hand or a voice in the recent atrocity.  

     In the humbler setting of rural Indiana recreated by Eggleston for Hoosier Schoolmaster  (1871), we can easily see that passage of more than a century (and the replacement of  rich kids by farmer's sons and daughters) hasn't altered classroom dynamics: 

      When Ralph looked round on the faces of the scholars — the little faces full of mischief  and curiosity, the big faces full of an expression which was not further removed than  second-cousin from contempt — when young Hartsook looked into these faces, his heart     palpitated with stage fright. There is no audience so hard to face as one of schoolchildren,  as many a man has found to his cost. 

      While Ralph was applying to a trustee of the school committee for this job, a large ugly  bulldog sniffed at his heels, causing a young girl to "nearly giggle her head off at the  delightful prospect of seeing a new schoolteacher eaten up by the ferocious brute."  Weary, discouraged, "shivering with fear," he is lectured:  

     You see, we a'n't none of your soft sort in these diggin's. It takes a man to boss this  deestrick...if you git licked, don't come to us. Flat Crick don't pay no 'nsurance, you bet!  ...it takes grit to apply for this school. The last master had a black eye for a month.