147. Divinely Appointed Intelligence: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Divinely
Appointed Intelligence
All through the
British colonial history of America, the managerial class of these colonies was drawn from Church of England gentry
and aristocrats. As you might expect, this leadership shared the British state church's creative
distaste toward education — for the
underclasses. And underclass then was a term for which the customary
narrow modern usage is quite
unsuitable. Every class not included in the leadership cadre was an underclass. The eye-topped pyramid on
the back of our one-dollar bill catches the idea of such an episcopate beautifully: divinely appointed
intelligence ruling the blind stones
beneath.
The episcopal rule of British America is
well enough documented, yet it remains largely unremarked how many revolutionary leaders were still
communicants of the Church of
England — Russell Kirk estimated twenty-nine of the fifty- five
delegates attending the
Constitutional Convention of 1787. They may have been willing to push
the mother country away, but their
own attitude toward popular sovereignty was ambivalent. Little- known even today is the long private
effort of Ben Franklin to induce British royal government to displace the Quaker Penns of Pennsylvania and
take command of the state. Between
1755 and 1768, Franklin labored mightily at this, reluctantly abandoning
his dream and jumping ship to the
revolutionary conspirators just in time to save his own position. 1 After Braddock's defeat,
Franklin joined forces with the influential Anglican priest William Smith in a venture they called "The
Society for Propagating Christian
Knowledge among Germans settled in Pennsylvania." This association,
a harbinger of government schools
to come, had nothing much to do with reading and counting, but everything to do with socializing
German children as English.
Braddock's defeat on the Monongahela was
the straw that tipped America's influential Quakers into the Anglican camp; it joined two influential,
socially exclusionary sects in
bonds of mutual assistance. When the great explosion of elite private
boarding academies took place in
the late-nineteenth-century period when hereditarian societies were also forming (and for the same purpose),
Episcopalian schools made up half the total of such schools, a fraction many times greater than their
denominational share of population
would have warranted. They still do. And Quakers, at present just
1/2,600 of the American population
(.04 percent), control 5 percent of the inner circle of elite private boarding schools (many elite day
schools, as well). This constitutes 125 times more participation than bare Quaker numbers would seem to
warrant! A managerial class was
circling the wagons, protecting its own children from the epic social
conditioning yet to come, and
perhaps from the biological menace Darwin and Galton had warned about.
1 As little known as Ben's skullduggery
is the fact that his only son was the Royal Governor of New Jersey, a loyal Church of England man who fled
to England during the war and never spoke to his father again (until Franklin's life was nearly over)
because of gentle Ben's treachery. Even then the breach between father and son could not be
healed.
The Paxton Boys
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