“But, I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing … for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both.”
—Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia from 1642-1652 and 1660-1677
From 1998 to 2015, I worked as a writer, editor, and technologist for Write Source, a family-owned publisher of student writing handbooks. By the time I arrived, its success had raised it to design-house status for Houghton Mifflin.
My assigned position largely involved writing example research papers for K-12 to college students. I got to pick my own subjects for those papers, and it was while researching the origins of newspapers in America that I came across this quotation.
It was a sentiment we saw growing in education during those years, as Texas and Florida in particular pushed back against Critical Thinking skills, because those would lead students to question their parents. We watched as Houghton Mifflin slowly caved to market pressure from those states, changing textbook contents to suit. The ramifications affected the rest of the US, because the same textbooks were sold elsewhere. California was something of an exception, turning increasingly to online materials as books grew continually more expensive. And without California, the effects of Texas and Florida Boards of Education only grew.
Now here we are, with a new US Administration bent upon dismantling the Department of Education and defaulting to States’ rights.
I’m of two minds about this. States’ rights was the excuse used nearly two centuries ago to resist a national ban on slavery. On the other hand, Congress has spent the past three decades ramping up standardized testing, which has been crippling an actual education, rewarding rote memorization over critical thinking.
In either case, Sir William Berkely seems to be getting his wish at last. Our nation seems hell-bent on tradition over progress. On authoritarianism over individual responsibility. On the freedom to fall into line.
I’ve heard “tradition” defined as “peer pressure from the dead.”
Me? I don’t even agree with kowtowing to the living.