john-taylor-gatto-weapons-of-mass-instruction

Weapons of Mass Instruction 139
foot boat if she would sail it around the world alone. As a way to spite
him, she accepted the challenge, dropped out, and did it.
Thirty years ago, a poor young man from England conceived the
idea of making the longest walk in human history. George Meeghan
had no college degree, no specialized training, no state of the art equipment,
no money, and no schooling beyond the third grade - he was a
lowly deckhand on a nondescript steamer headed for the tip of South
America. Leaving the ship there he made his way to Tierra del Fuego,
faced north, and started to walk. His entire kit was towed behind him
in one of those flimsy shopping carts people take to the market to roll .
their purchases home. The wheels kept coming off. It was like a joke.
It took George Meeghan seven years to cross the Andes, negotiate
dangerous mountain nations, cross the trackless Darien Gap, and
enter the United States. Once in Texas he decided to make a side trip
to see Washington, D.C.-on foot of course - then turned northwest
to Point Barrow, Alaska, to complete the longest walk in human
history. The bare outlineI've given you doesn't do George's saga
(or Tania's) justice. I urge you to read his book, The Longest Walk,
to discover what unschooled human beings are capable of. Recently,
George's young daughter, Ayumi, walked the entire length of Japan
from south to north.
Two dropouts, two triumphs of the human spirit. No school
on earth would dream of teaching what they learned, to write their
own scripts, to be self-sufficient and purposeful. The longest walk in
human history (check the Guinness Book for George), the longest
solo sail (check the Guinness Book for Tania)-if two young people
without much help or special equipment could do this in the 1970S
and 1980s on sheer will power, can you ever believe again the hypothetical
academic hypotheses of human migration If Tania and
George did it with nothing, then anonymous others have done it before,
too. "Academic" once referred to Akademos, the garden where
Plato taught; it was a term of great respect for nearly two millennia,
but by the late 19th century, it had come to mean "of slight human
interest"; irrelevant.