24.David Farragut: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
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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