Hope all are enjoying the start of the new week today. We continue with 'The Underground History Of American Education' by J.T.Gatto.This chapter is a look back at the author's young life growing up in Monongahela in western Pennsylvania.Interesting read given, that he grew up in a dysfunctional family.He has a very telling run in with a Jesuit Priest in the chapter that says everything about the Jesuits....

....As far as I can figure, any success I had as a schoolteacher came from what my mother, my father, my sister, my family, friends, and town taught, not from a single thing I remember about Cornell and Columbia, my two colleges, not from any findings of institutes of child study or directives from departments of education. If I’m correct, then this insight is more significant than it may appear. The immense edifice of teacher instruction and schooling in general rests on the shaky hypothesis that expert intervention in childhood produces better people than might otherwise occur. I’ve come to doubt that.

A gigantic social investment rides on this hypothesis, one that might otherwise be spent on reducing stress on family life which interferes with happiness and the growth of intelligence. Had the small fortune spent on my own schooling been invested instead in my people and my place directly, I have a hunch I would have turned out better. Whatever the truth of this complex proposition, as long as you’ve spent your money and time to hear what I have to say, you have a right to know something about the fountainhead of my school-teaching practice, my growing up time on the green river Monongahela.

I feel grateful for the luck to have been born in a tiny city with the character of a village on the river Monongahela in western Pennsylvania. People cared for each other there. Even the town wastrels had a history. But we minded our own business in Mon City, too. Both are important. Everyone seemed to understand that within broad limits there is no one best way to grow up. Rich or poor doesn’t matter much if you know what’s important. Poverty can’t make you miserable; only a bad character and a weak spirit can do that....

..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. https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/08/part-6-underground-history-of-american.html