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.
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.
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