Locking Our Children Away From the Real Worldby
Vin Suprynowicz Last week, we again delved into John Taylor Gatto's invaluable text The Underground History of American Education, citing his summary of the career of George Washington. The point of Mr. Gatto – a former New York city and state (government) Teacher of the Year – when he summarizes the careers of men like Washington, Franklin, David Farragut, Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie, is twofold. First, the careers of these men – by no means all child geniuses, by no means all the offspring of wealthy aristocrats – demonstrate that literacy, fame and high character have often been achieved in America without the benefit of more than a few years' formal schooling. That is to say, the insistence of today's educrats that anyone deprived of a full 12 years locked up in their compulsory propaganda camps is doomed to a lifetime as an illiterate loser is self-promoting nonsense from those anxious to perpetuate the largest make-work "jobs" program in history. But Mr. Gatto then goes much further. He argues careers such as those of Washington and Edison and Carnegie would not have been possible – those great Americans would never have gained the life skills necessary – had they been locked away in a government school for a dozen years. In response,
we heard last week from one of our local government schoolmarms.
"First, let it be said I too feel George Washington was the
greatest president the country ever had," the schoolmarm asserts,
apparently seeking commonality. "Most notable were his leadership
and negotiating skills." Rather, I said Washington "remains the greatest man of our age," the strategist who won the Revolution by avoiding the one pitched battle we probably would have lost, the man who resigned when he could have been king. Meantime, what's this about Washington's most notable attribute being his "negotiating skill"? I've read many scholarly biographies; I can't recall any biographer listing this as the greatest of Washington's attributes. Yes, he showed forbearance with a Congress that played disastrous games with the vital supply system. But the most important "negotiating" was conducted by Franklin, who cemented the vital French alliance. Next to whose statue should we place Washington in the Great Negotiator's Hall of Fame – that of Neville Chamberlain? Did Washington "negotiate" the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781? Sure he did. The way he "negotiated" it was to line up his cannon on the ridge and start blowing the houses occupied by the British officers and troops to smithereens. How did he "negotiate" an end to the Whiskey Rebellion? By calling out the militia and marching on western Pennsylvania with an army of 12,000 men. (Since this led to the stronger central government preferred by the Hamiltonians, I will reserve my praise. At least Washington let the tax protesters off with a stern warning, when others called for mass hangings.) Showing up with 12,000 armed men may be my kind of "negotiation," but I somehow doubt it's the kind our friend the schoolmarm fantasizes about to her young charges. I believe we are seeing revisionism in progress here, right before our eyes. Heaven forfend the children should be told Washington's greatest skill was in gathering together a large group of men who believed the best way to "negotiate" our freedom was to take up unregistered firearms and use them to kill people, most especially the duly delegated officers of the established government. One of the points Mr. Gatto makes about the skills George Washington managed to acquire without benefit of much formal schooling (he somehow fails to list "negotiator") is that, "Years later he became his own architect for the magnificent estate of Mount Vernon." The schoolmarm replies – you knew this was coming, right? – "Let us not forget that George Washington did not do the work at Mount Vernon by himself. He had at least 100 employees also known as slaves." Mr. Gatto was speaking of Washington's abilities as an amateur architect. (He rebuilt Mount Vernon twice beginning in 1757.) Do we dismiss the skills and talents of Frank Lloyd Wright or I.M. Pei because others do the actual excavation and carpentry? One of Mr. Pei's most famous hotels was built in Red China in 1982. While the laborers on the project were not "slaves," I have no idea what would have happened to them if they'd refused to work. Does this devalue Mr. Pei's work? Mr. Gatto was citing Washington's skills not as a day laborer, but as an architect. Did any of the slaves at Mount Vernon actually help design the new building? We await the schoolmarm's documentation. Failing that, what we have here is a classic argument from non sequitur – bringing in the old familiar argument that no example of American accomplishment from before 1863 can be relevant to a modern debate, "since they all owned slaves," when it has nothing to do with the topic under discussion.
February 22, 2008 Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow. Copyright © 2008 Vin Suprynowicz |
