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How Hindu schooling came to America, England, Germany, and France at just about the same
time is a story which has never been told. A full treatment is beyond the scope of this book, but
I’ll tell you enough to set you wondering how an Asiatic device specifically intended to preserve a
caste system came to reproduce itself in the early republic, protected by influentials of the
magnitude of Clinton and Eddy. Even a brief dusting off of schooling’s Hindu provenance should
warn you that what you know about American schooling isn’t much. First, a quick gloss on the
historical position of India at the time of the American Revolution—for Lancaster schools were in
New York two decades after its end.
India fell victim to Western dominance through nautical technology in the following fashion:
When medieval Europe broke up after its long struggle to reconcile emergent science with
religion, five great ocean powers appeared to compete for the wealth of the planet: Portugal,
Spain, France, the Netherlands, and England. Portugal was the first to sail for treasure, leaving
colonies in India, China, and South America, but its day in the sun was short. Spain emerged as
the next global superpower, but after 1600, her character decayed rapidly from the corrupting
effects of the gold of the Americas, which triggered a long national decline. The Netherlands, turn
followed because that nation had the advantage of a single-minded commercial class in control of
things with one aim in mind: wealth. The Dutch monopolized the carrying trade of Europe with
globe-trotting merchant ships and courageous military seamanship, yet as with Portugal before it,
the Dutch population was too small, its internal resources too anemic for its dominance to extend
very long.
Beginning in the seventeenth century, England and France gradually built business in the East,
both balked for a time by the Dutch who controlled the spice trade of the Indies. Three naval wars
with the Dutch made the Royal Navy master of the seas, in the process developing tactics of sea
warfare that made it dominant for the next two centuries. By 1700, only France and England
remained as global sea powers with impressive fighting capability, and during the last half of that
century these giants slugged it out directly in Canada, India, and in the territory which is today the
United States, with the result that France went permanently into eclipse.
In India, the two contended through their commercial pseudopodia, the British and French East
India Companies: each maintained a private army to war on the other for tea, indigo, turmeric,
ginger, quinine, oilseeds, silk, and that product which most captivated British merchants with its
portability and breakaway profit potential—opium. At Plassey, Chandernagor, Madras, and
Wandiwash, this long corporate rivalry ended. The French abandoned India to the British. The
drug monopoly was finally England’s.
Out of this experience and the observations of a wealthy young Anglican chaplain in India, the
formula for modern schooling was discovered. Perhaps it was no more than coincidence this
fellow held his first gainful employment as a schoolteacher in the United States; on the other hand,
perhaps his experience in a nation which successfully threw off British shackles sensitized him to
the danger an educated population poses to plutocracies.
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