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The College Of Zimmer And Hegel: The Underground History of American Education
by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The College Of Zimmer And Hegel
The most important studies I ever
engaged in weren't at Cornell or Columbia, but in the
windowless basement of the Zimmer
Printing Company, a block and a half from the
railroad tracks that ran alongside
the Monongahela. Some of my greatest lessons
winter, its iridescent dragonflies
in summer, and its always breathtaking sternwheelers
pounding the water up and down, BAM!
BAM! BAM! on the way to ports unknown. To
me, the river was without beginning
or end.
Before he went to Germany to beat up
the Nazis, my warrior Uncle Bud worked on a
riverboat that went down the
Mississippi to New Orleans, on what mission I can't say,
then on other boats that went up and
down smaller local rivers. When I was five, he once
threw an orange to me from a
riverboat galley while it passed through a lock. A right
fielder's strong throwing arm sent
that orange two hundred feet out of the watery trench
into my hands. I didn't even have to
move.
In the basement of the printing
office, Bud's father ("the General," as Moss called him
behind his back) moved strong hands
on and off of a printing press. Those presses are
gone, but my grandfather's hands
will never be gone. They remain on my shoulder as I
write this. I would sit on the steps
into his subterranean world, watching closely hour
after hour as those rough hands fed
sheets of paper into the steam-driven clamshell press.
It went BAM! (feed) BAM! (feed) BAM!
(feed) like the riverboats and bit by bit the job
piled up on the table next to the
press.
It was a classroom without bells or
tests. I never got bored, never got out of line. In
school I was thrown out of class
frequently for troublemaking, but Pappy wouldn't stand
for nonsense. Not a scrap of it. He
was all purpose. I never saw a man concentrate as he
did, as long as it took, whatever
was called for. I transferred that model unconsciously to
my teaching. While my colleagues
were ruled by start-up times, bell schedules, lunch
hour, loudspeaker announcements, and
dismissal, I was oblivious to these interruptions. I
was ruled by the job to be done, kid
by kid, until it was over, whatever that meant, kid by
kid.
No baseball or football, no fishing,
no shopping, no romantic adventure could have
possibly matched the fascination I
felt watching that tough old man in his tough old town
work his hand-fed press in a
naked-light-bulb lit cellar without any supervisor to tell him
what to do or how to feel about it.
He knew how to design and do layout, set type, buy
paper, ink presses and repair them,
clean up, negotiate with customers, price jobs, and
keep the whole ensemble running. How
did he learn this without school? Harry Taylor
Zimmer, Senior. I loved him. Still
do.
He worked as naturally as he
breathed, a perfect hero to me — I wonder if he understood
that. On some secret level it was
Pappy who held our family together, regardless of his
position as pariah to his wife and
his estranged brothers, regardless of an ambivalent
relationship of few words with his
daughter and son, granddaughter and grandson, and
with his remaining brother, Will,
the one who still spoke to him and worked alongside
him at the presses. I say
"spoke" when the best I can personally attest to is only
association. They worked side by
side but I never actually heard a single conversation
between them. Will never entered our
apartment above the shop. He slept on the press
table in the basement. Yet Pappy
kept the family faith. He knew his duty. When Bud
brought his elegant wife home from
the war, she would sit in Pappy' s room talking to
him hour after hour, the two
snorting and laughing thick as thieves. He had lost the key of
conversation only with his own
bloodline.
I realize today that if Pappy
couldn't count on himself, he was out of business and the rest
of us in the poorhouse. If he hadn't
liked himself, he would have gone crazy, alone with
those heavy metal rhythms in the
eternal gloom of the printing office basement. As I
watched him he never said a word,
didn't throw a glance in my direction. I had to supply
my own incentive, welcome to stay or
go, yet I sensed he appreciated my presence.
Perhaps he did understand how I
loved him. Sometimes when the job was finished he
would lecture me a little about
politics I didn't understand.
In the craft tradition, printers are
independent, even dangerous men. Ben Franklin was a
printer like my German grandfather,
himself preoccupied with things German at times.
Movable type itself is German. Pappy
was a serious student of the Prussian philosopher
Hegel. I would hear Hegel's name in
his conversations with Bud's wife, Helen. Late in
his own life he began to speak to my
father again. And sometimes even to me in my
middle teens. I remember references
to Hegel from those times, too.
Hegel was philosopher in residence
at the University of Berlin during the years when
Prussia was committing itself to
forced schooling. It's not farfetched to regard Hegel as
the most influential thinker in
modern history. Virtually everyone who made political
footprints in the past two centuries,
school people included, was Hegelian, or anti-
Hegelian. Even today many
knowledgeable people have no idea how important Hegel is
to the deliberations of important
men as they debate our common future.
Hegel was important wherever strict
social control was an issue. Ambitious states
couldn't let a single child escape,
said Hegel. Hegel believed nothing happened by
accident; he thought history was
headed somewhere and that its direction could be
controlled. "Men as gods"
was Hegel's theme before it was H.G. Wells'. Hegel believed
when battle cannon roared, it was
God talking to himself, working out his own nature
dialectically. It's a formidable
concept. No wonder it appealed to men who didn't labor,
like Mr. Morgan or Mr. Rockefeller
or Mr. Carnegie yet who still disdained easeful
luxury. It engaged a printer's
attention, and a little boy's, too.
When I began to teach, I took the
lessons of Monongahela and my two families to heart.
The harder I struggled to understand
myself, the better luck I had with other people's
kids. A person has to know where his
dead are buried and what his duty is before you can
trust him. Whatever I had to teach
children is locked up in the words you just read, as is
the genesis of my critique of forced
schooling.
Chapter Eleven
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