237 Prince Charles Visits Steel Valley High: The Underground History of Amercian Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

237 Prince Charles Visits Steel Valley High: The Underground History of Amercian Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Prince Charles Visits Steel Valley High

    An important counter-revolutionary event with a bearing on the changes going on in our  schools happened quietly not so long ago, just a stone's throw from where Braddock fell.  Bill Serrin tells of it in his book Homestead. By 1988 the Monongahela Valley had been     stripped bare of its mines and mills by Pittsburgh financial interests and their hired  experts who had no place in profit/loss equations for people and communities, whatever  rhetoric said to the contrary. 

      As a consequence, Monongahela, Charleroi, Donora, Homestead, Monessen, all were  dying, places that had "been on fire once, had possessed vibrancy and life." Now they  were falling into the aimless emptiness of the unemployed after a century as the world's  steelmakers. Not idle of their own choice, not even unproductive — the mills still made a  profit — yet not a profit large enough to please important financial interests.  

     In the bleak winter of 1988 Charles of the blood royal came to visit Steel Valley High in  Homestead nominally to talk about turning dead steel mills into arboretums. Why  Charles? He was "the world's leading architecture buff," so why not? His Highness' fleet  of two dozen Chinese red Jaguars crossed the Homestead High Bridge only minutes from  the spot where Braddock died on the Monongahela. Perhaps the prince had been  informed of this, perhaps he was making a statement for history. 

      In a motorcade of scarlet he roared over the bridge. Residents who had gathered to wave  at the prince and his entourage "saw only a whir of scarlet as he whizzed into  Homestead." Charles was too preoccupied with his own agenda to wave back at the  offspring of Europe's industrial proletariat, thrice removed. Victory as always comes to  those who abide. We had only one Washington, only one Jackson, only one Lincoln to  lead us against the Imperial Mind. After they were gone, only the people remembered  what America was about.  

     Serrin writes, "A handful of activist ministers gathered along Charles' way holding  tomatoes, and Police Chief Kelley assumed, not without reason, they were going to throw  them at the prince. Or in Monongahela vernacular, 'tomato him.' " The motive for this  bad hospitality was a growing anger at the text of the prince's speech to a group of  architects assembled in Pittsburgh for a "Remaking Cities Conference." The conference  had been co-sponsored by the Royal Institute of British Architects. Andrew Carnegie's  dream of reuniting with the mother country was coming true in the very town most  associated with Carnegie's name. The British have a grand sense of history, they do. 

      The assembled architects had been studying the settlements of my valley and  recommending replacement uses for its mills. They proposed conversion of empty steel  plants into exhibition halls for flower shows. At the public hearing, valley residents  shouted, "We don 't want flowers, we want jobs. We want the valley back. This was the  steel center of the world." Prince Charles spoke to the crowd as one might speak to  children, just as he might have spoken had Braddock won and the Revolution never taken  place. The upshot was a grand coalition of elites formed to revitalize the valley. I see a  parallel in the formation of the New American Schools Committee — whose eighteen  members counted fifteen corporate CEOs, including the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco  Company's descendant form, RJR Nabisco — announcing revitalization of our schools.    

     The effort to save Homestead looked like this through the eyes of New York Times labor  reporter Bill Serrin:

       In its tragedy Homestead became fashionable.... Homestead was the rage. There were  study groups and committees, historical exhibits, film proposals, lectures, brown-bag  lunches, dinners, economic analyses, historical surveys, oral histories, a case study of  disinvestment and redevelopment plans in the Monongahela Valley done by the Harvard  Business School, architects, city planners, historians, economists, anthropologists,  sociologists, social workers, foundation experts — all these and others became involved. 

      An echo of the great transformational days when we got factory schooling, the same buzz  and hubbub, fashionable people with their shirt sleeves metaphorically rolled up. Then  suddenly the attention was over. All the paraphernalia of concern resulted in: 

      Little effort on Homestead or the other steel towns. There never was a plan to redevelop  Homestead. The goal had been to ensure there were no more protests like the ones earlier  in the decade. If there was a master plan it was death and highways. Homestead would be  gone. A highway through the valley would eliminate even the houses, perhaps obliterate  Homestead and the other steel towns. One more thing.. .the training programs. They were  bullshit. 

      So here we are. In order to clean the social canvas, a reduction in the maximum levels of  maturity to be allowed grown men and women has been ordered from somewhere. We  are to be made and kept as nervous, whining adolescents. This is a job best begun and  ended while we are little children, hence the kind of schools we have — a governor put on  our growth through which we are denied the understandings needed to escape childhood.  Don't blame schools. Schools only follow orders. Schoolmen are as grateful as grenadiers  to wear a pretty paycheck and be part of Braddock's invincible army. Theirs not to reason  why.. .if they know what's good for them.