Farragut
When I was a schoolboy at the Waverly School in
Monongahela, Peg Hill told us that
David Farragut, the U.S. Navy's very first admiral, had been
commissioned midshipman at the
ripe old age often for service on the warship Essex. Had Farragut been a
schoolboy like me, he would have
been in fifth grade when he sailed for the Argentine, rounding the Horn into action against British
warships operating along the Pacific coast of South America.
Farragut left a
description of what he encountered in his first sea fight: I shall never forget the horrid
impression made upon me at the sight of the first man I had ever seen killed. It staggered me at
first, but they soon began to fall so fast that it appeared like a dream and produced no effect on my
nerves.
The poise a young boy
is capable of was tested when a gun captain on the port side ordered him to the wardroom for primers.
As he started down the ladder, a gun captain on the starboard side opposite the ladder was "struck full
in the face by an eighteen-pound
shot," his headless corpse falling on Farragut:
We tumbled down the hatch together. I
lay for some moments stunned by the blow, but soon recovered consciousness enough to rush up on deck. The
captain, seeing me covered with
blood, asked if I were wounded; to which I replied, "I believe not,
sir." "Then," said
he, "where are the primers?" This brought me to my senses and
I ran below again and brought up
the primers.
The Essex had success; it took prizes.
Officers were dispatched with skeleton crews to sail them back to the United States, and at the age of
twelve, Farragut got his first
command when he was picked to head a prize crew. I was in fifth grade
when I read about that. Had
Farragut gone to my school he would have been in seventh. You might remember that as a rough index how far
our maturity had been retarded even fifty years ago. Once at sea, the deposed British captain rebelled at
being ordered about by a boy and
announced he was going below for his pistols (which as a token of
respect he had been allowed to
keep). Farragut sent word down that if the captain appeared on deck armed
he would be summarily shot and
dumped overboard. He stayed below.
So ended David Farragut's first great
test of sound judgment. At fifteen, this unschooled young man went hunting pirates in the Mediterranean.
Anchored off Naples, he witnessed an
eruption of Vesuvius and studied the mechanics of volcanic action. On a long
layover in Tunis, the American
consul, troubled by Farragut's ignorance, tutored him in French, Italian, mathematics, and literature.
Consider our admiral in embryo. I'd be surprised if you thought his education was deficient in anything a man
needs to be reckoned with.
When I was a
schoolboy in Monongahela, I learned how Thomas Edison left school early because the school thought him
feeble-minded. He spent his early years peddling newspapers. Just before the age of twelve he talked his
mother into letting him work on
trains as a train-boy, a permission she gave which would put her in jail
right now. A train-boy was
apprentice of all work. Shortly afterwards a printer gave Edison some old type he was about to discard and the
boy, successfully begging a corner for himself in the baggage car to set type, began printing a four-page
newspaper the size of a handkerchief
about the lives of the passengers on the train and the things that could
be seen from its window.
Several months later,
twelve-year-old Edison had 500 subscribers, earning a net profit monthly about 25 percent more than an
average schoolteacher of the day made. When the Civil War broke out, the newspaper became a goldmine.
Railroads had telegraph facilities
so war news was available to Edison as quickly as to professional
journalists, but he could move it
into print sooner than they could. He sold the war to crowds at the
various stops. "The Grand
Trunk Herald" sold as many as 1,000 extra copies after a battle at prices per issue from a dime to a
quarter, amassing for Edison a handsome stake. Unfortunately, at the same time he had been experimenting
with phosphorus in the baggage
car. One thing led to another and Edison set the train on fire; otherwise
there might never have been a
light bulb.
When I was a
schoolboy in Monongahela, I learned with a shock that the men who won our Revolution were barely out of high
school by the standards of my time: Hamilton was twenty in the retreat from New York; Burr, twenty-one; Light
Horse Harry Lee, twenty- one;
Lafayette, 19. What amounted to a college class rose up and struck down the
British empire, afterwards helping
to write the most sophisticated governing documents in modern history.
When I was a schoolboy in Monongahela, I
learned the famous Samuel Pepys, whose
Diary is a classic, wasn't just an old gossip but president of the Royal
Society, the most prominent association
of scientists in existence in the seventeenth century. He was also Secretary of the Admiralty. Why that's
important to our investigation of modern
schooling is this: Pepys could only add and subtract right up to the
time of his appointment to the
Admiralty, but then quickly learned to multiply and divide to spare himself embarrassment. I took a
different lesson from that class than the teacher intended, I think.
At the age of five,
when I entered the first grade, I could add, subtract, and multiply because Dad used to play numbers games
with my sister and me in the car. He taught me the mastery of those skills within a matter of a few hours,
not years and years as it took in
school. We did all calculations in our heads with such gusto I seldom
use a pencil today even for much
more intricate computation. Pepys verified my father's unstated premise: You can learn what you need, even the
technical stuff, at the moment you need it or shortly before. Sam Pepys wasn't put in charge of Britain's
sea defense because he knew how to
multiply or divide but because he had good judgment, or at least it was
thought so.
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