How
Hindu Schooling Came To America (I)
By the end of the
first quarter of the nineteenth century, a form of school technology was up and running in America's larger
cities, one in which children of lower-class customers were psychologically conditioned to
obedience under pretext that they were learning reading and counting (which may also have happened). These
were the Lancaster schools, sponsored by Governor DeWitt
Clinton of New York and
prominent Quakers like Thomas
Eddy, builder of the Erie Canal. They soon spread to every corner of the nation where the problem of an
incipient proletariat existed. Lancaster schools are cousins of today's school factories. What few knew then or
realize now is that they were also a Hindu invention, designed with the
express purpose of retarding intellectual
development.
How Hindu schooling came to America,
England, Germany, and France at just about the same time is a story which has never been told. A full
treatment is beyond the scope of
this book, but I'll tell you enough to set you wondering how an Asiatic
device specifically intended to
preserve a caste system came to reproduce itself in the early republic, protected by influentials of
the magnitude of Clinton and Eddy. Even a brief dusting off of schooling's Hindu provenance should warn you
that what you know about American
schooling isn't much. First, a quick gloss on the historical position of India
at the time of the American
Revolution — for Lancaster schools were in New York two decades after its end.
India fell victim to Western dominance
through nautical technology in the following fashion: When medieval Europe broke up after its long
struggle to reconcile emergent
science with religion, five great ocean powers appeared to compete for
the wealth of the planet:
Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and England. Portugal was the first to sail for treasure, leaving colonies in
India, China, and South America, but its day in the sun was short. Spain emerged as the next global superpower,
but after 1600, her character
decayed rapidly from the corrupting effects of the gold of the Americas,
which triggered a long national
decline. The Netherlands turn followed because that nation had the advantage of a single-minded commercial
class in control of things with one aim in mind: wealth. The Dutch monopolized the carrying trade of Europe
with globe-trotting merchant ships
and courageous military seamanship, yet as with Portugal before it, the Dutch population was too small, its
internal resources too anemic for its dominance to extend very long.
Beginning in the seventeenth century,
England and France gradually built business in the East, both balked for a time by the Dutch who controlled the
spice trade of the Indies. Three
naval wars with the Dutch made the Royal Navy master of the seas, in the
process developing tactics of sea
warfare that made it dominant for the next two centuries. By 1700, only France and England remained
as global sea powers with impressive fighting capability, and during the last half of that century these
giants slugged it out directly in
Canada, India, and in the territory which is today the United States,
with the result that France went
permanently into eclipse.
In India, the two contended through
their commercial pseudopodia, the British and French East India Companies: each maintained a private army
to war on the other for tea,
indigo, turmeric, ginger, quinine, oilseeds, silk, and that product
which most captivated British
merchants with its portability and breakaway profit potential — opium. At
Plassey, Chandernagor, Madras, and
Wandiwash, this long corporate rivalry ended. The French abandoned India to the British. The
drug monopoly was finally England's.
Out of this
experience and the observations of a wealthy young Anglican chaplain in India, the formula for modern schooling
was discovered. Perhaps it was no more than coincidence this fellow held his first gainful employment as
a schoolteacher in the United States; on the other hand, perhaps his
experience in a nation which successfully threw off British shackles sensitized him to the danger an educated
population poses to
plutocracies.
How
Hindu Schooling Came To America (II)
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