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inventors and technicians without precedent, entrepreneurs unlocked from traditional controls,
dreamers, confidence men, flim-flam artists. There never was a social stew quite like it.
The practical difficulties these circumstances posed to utopian governing would have been
insuperable except for one seemingly strange source of enthusiasm for such an endeavor in the
business community. That puzzle can be solved by considering how the promise of democracy
was a frightening terra incognita to men of substance. To look to men like Sam Adams or Tom
Paine as directors of the future was like looking down the barrel of a loaded gun, at least to
people of means. So the men who had begun the Revolution were eased out by the men who
ended it.
As early as 1784, a concerted effort was made by the Boston business community to overthrow
town meetings, replacing them with a professionally managed corporation. Joseph Barrell, a
wealthy merchant, claimed that citizen safety could be enhanced this way—and besides, "a great
number of very respectable gentlemen" wished it. Timothy Dwight, longtime president of Yale
after 1795, and a pioneer in modern education (advocating science as the center of curriculum),
fought a mighty battle against advancing democracy. Democracy was hardly the sort of
experiment men of affairs would willingly submit their lives and fortunes to for very long.
This tension explains much about how our romance with forced schooling came about; it was a
way to stop democracy aborning as Germany had done. Much ingenuity was expended on this
problem in the early republic, particularly by so-called liberal Christian sects like Unitarians and
Universalists. If you read relics of their debates preserved from select lyceums, private meetings at
which minutes were kept, journals, recollections of drawing room conversations and club
discussions, you see that what was shaping up was an attempt to square the circle, to give the
appearance that the new society was true to its founding promise, while at the same time a sound
basis could be established for the meritorious to run things. Once again, the spirit of Sparta was
alive with its ephors and its reliance on forced instruction. In discussions, speeches, sermons,
editorials, experimental legislation, letters, diaries, and elsewhere, the ancient idea of mass forced
schooling was called forth and mused upon.
How Hindu Schooling Came To America (I)
By the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a form of school technology was up and
running in America’s larger cities, one in which children of lower-class customers were
psychologically conditioned to obedience under pretext that they were learning reading and
counting (which may also have happened). These were the Lancaster schools, sponsored by
Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York and prominent Quakers like Thomas Eddy, builder of the
Erie Canal. They soon spread to every corner of the nation where the problem of an incipient
proletariat existed. Lancaster schools are cousins of today’s school factories. What few knew then
or realize now is that they were also a Hindu invention, designed with the express purpose of
retarding intellectual development.
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