154. The
Lost Tribes: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto
from archive.org
The
Lost Tribes
As the exciting
intelligence from Germany traveled through America, it encountered resistance, for America was a region where
class lines were still elastic, based on
accomplishment and worldly success, not upon guarantees
cemented in
blood. Yet the tide was running
toward a different form of reckoning. Horace Bushnell, famous Congregationalist pastor of Hartford
(where the city park is named for him) thundered from his pulpit in 1837 that noble Anglo-Saxon blood must be
preserved against pollution. By 1843, the big book in Unitarian Boston was The
Goths in New- England. German
schooling seemed right for us because we were Germans! Germany held
answers for the grandchildren of
Englishmen, who had been Germans long ago.
In 1848, at the height of the Irish
Catholic menace, The American Whig Review published "The Anglo-Saxon Race." That same year The North
American Review responded with
"The Anglo-Saxon Race." Now the Whig Review stirred the pot
with its own spoon, "The
Anglo-Saxons and the Americans." Interest in the topic wouldn't
quit, perhaps because The Origin
of Species finally placed consideration of racial matters in public
attention. Racial fervor was still
at white heat in 1875 when a popular book, The Anglo-Saxon Race: Its History, Character and
Destiny, traveled with Chautauqua to every corner of the nation.
The writings of William Henry Poole
showed the Saxon race to be the lost tribes of Israeli To this day, most American Jews are unaware that a
number of old-family Anglo- Saxons
still consider themselves to be the real Jews — and the nominal Jews
impostors! Between 1833 and 1852
Franz Bopp published book after book of his spectacular multivolume work Comparative Grammar,
which drove any lingering skeptics to cover. The Aryans were real. Case closed.
Whatever guardian spirit watches over
such things assigned to Sir Henry James Sumner Maine, English comparative jurist and historian, the task of
presenting Aryan tribal character
and tying it to contemporary Anglo-Saxons. Maine graduated from Cambridge in 1844 with the reputation of being
the most brilliant classical scholar of all time — Michael Jordan of legal history. His Ancient Law (1861)
earned him a world-class
reputation in one stroke. In a series of magnificent literary studies
which followed, he brought to life
the ancient world of Germania with singular felicity and power. Anglo- Saxons and Aryans lived again as one
people.
In the crucial year
which saw Darwin's Descent of Man published, Maine's spectacular Village Communities in the East and
West showed the world the rough-hewn genius of the primitive Anglo-Saxon world. Maine reiterated his
contention that stranger-adoption
was among the critical discoveries which led to Anglo-Saxon greatness.
This message
fell on particularly fertile ground in a New England whose soil had been
prepared for this exact message by
centuries of reading The New England Primer, with its grim warning that children are only loaned to their
parents.
And what a message Maine carried —
society thrived when children were detached from their own parents and cultures! It was a potent foundation
on which to set the institution of
forced schooling. Appearing shortly after the radical Massachusetts adoption
law intended to disassemble Irish
immigrant families, Maine silenced the new institution's critics, paving the way for eventual
resignation to long-term school incarceration, too:
The part played by
the legal fiction of adoption in the constitution of primitive society and the civilization of the race is so
important that Sir Henry Sumner Maine, in his Ancient Law, expresses the opinion that, had it never
existed, the primitive groups of
mankind could not have coalesced except on terms of absolute superiority
on the one side, and absolute
subjection on the other. With the institution of adoption, however, one people might feign itself as descended
from the same stock as the people to whose sacra gentilica it was admitted.... (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1 1th ed.,
"Adoption")
In a grand stroke, Sir Henry provided
enlightened justification for every form of synthetic parenting social engineers could concoct, including the most
important, mass forced
schooling.
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