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)
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.
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