The thoughtless slaves become the thoughtless slavers

by Greg Swann

A while ago I heard about the project initiated by a schoolteacher in Colorado to purchase and free slaves in the Sudan. Marshaling her students to the task, they raised enough money to free 1,000 slaves. What follows was my initial reaction:

This seems to me to be a poor strategy for freeing slaves. The particular people purchased might be manumitted, but the purchases would tend to increase rather than diminish the market demand for slaves, resulting in the enslavement of even more innocent people. A strategy like this only makes sense where the quantity of the value to be purchased is inelastic, as with the Sierra Club or Ducks Unlimited purchasing and preserving unimproved land.

In any case, the Denver school children would be wiser to send tractors to the Sudan. Slavery was eliminated from northern Africa and Europe with the advent of the wooden collar for draft animals. Before then, a horse did the work of five slaves but ate as much as five slaves. With wooden collars, a horse did the work of ten slaves but still only ate as much as five. Slavery became unprofitable, the outcome opposite to paying a premium price for slaves. The emotion-beclouded humanitarians are duly cautioned however: The slaves manumitted by tractors will be free to starve. In droves. With alacrity. It’s a cruel world when you look closely, but it’s usually crueler when you don’t.

All that’s beside the point, though. My primary objection to this is that it comes down to indoctrinating children on topics about which they can have no reasoned opinion. Anything a child says about slavery or liberty or theology or free will or any other discipline of adult belief amounts to nothing more than the undigested regurgitation of what some adult has force-fed that child. The natural concerns of childhood are play. The appropriate work of childhood is education, and I think education should be limited only to matters which are conceded to be true without controversy by all competent observers. I am opposed to inculcating children in anything that is, at bottom, a belief accepted on faith.

This was unresearched, mere email, informed only by experience and a knowledge of history and economics. The first paragraph has proved true, as witnessed by this extract from the Denver Post:

A former leader of Christian Solidarity in the United States who now disavows slave buybacks, Jim Jacobson told The Post he changed his approach after a slave purchase last summer in Bahr al Ghazal. Soon after, he received a letter from a man in Sudan offering him many more slaves. “I just felt everything was not as it appeared to be,” Jacobson said. “You don’t know if after several days these groups of people get reabducted.”

Jacobson also said real prices of slaves are falling, from around $100 a head in the mid-1990s to less than $50 today – which he sees as evidence Sudanese people are responding to money by producing more and more slaves.

Interestingly, the price for slaves is dropping, which argues that the supply is exceeding even the increased demand. This is an inference drawn from principles first taught by Adam Smith. Price Theory is relatively new though, originating only in 1776, so it’s probably unfair to expect schoolteachers to have heard of it.

The second paragraph of my reaction is underscored in a novel way in the same Denver Post article:

The buyback approach “is not eradicating slavery, it is enhancing it,” Manase Lomole Waya, director of Humanitarian Assistance for South Sudan, said from his base in Nairobi, Kenya.

“These good intentions are counterproductive,” Waya said. “The (slave) redemption exercise is not a solution to the slave trade in Sudan. Redemption is counterproductive. If somebody cares, the local people should be empowered to defend themselves against slave raiders.”

I would be stunned and delighted to see school children raising money not to buy slaves, not to buy tractors, but to buy guns. That would make news!

There’s more and more and endlessly more, but the salient facts are these:

• Primus: Barb Vogel, fifth-grade teacher at Highline Community School in Aurora, Colorado, got it into her head to do something about slavery.
• Secundus: She roped her students into doing it with her. She tells the story the other way—that they roped her. This seems unlikely, taking account of the organized-campaign-like web site Vogel runs to promote her tactics, but it remains that she was in charge of her classroom. If the children had suggested playing hooky or playing hockey or playing with a hookah, Ms. Vogel just might have shown better judgment.
• Tertius: She garnered publicity, lots of it, about which more later.
• Quartus: As the result of her efforts and the children’s, more people, not fewer, are enslaved in the Sudan.
• Quintus: Because Ms. Vogel was more interested in doing something than in doing her job, innocent children were unwittingly put into the slave trade. They not only made things worse, they provided the financial means for making things worse.
• Sextus: After all this, Ms. Vogel is unremorseful and is unwilling to desist in her slaver ways.

There is truly no end to this, and it’s not just because it entails slavery. It might be considered the kind thing to do to absolve Ms. Vogel because, even though she did evil—and vows to persist in it—she was not operating on an evil intent. If we mention that well-trod road to hell, people are apt to say something about it being a school project. The implication is that school is a place where even the purported ‘professionals’ are expected to make mud-pies and nothing of any sort should be taken seriously. This is not the position that anyone would take if the dry cleaner inadvertently bleached a gown; it is difficult for me to see why one would complain and demand redress for a small disaster and yet make excuses for an immense disaster.

This disaster would not have happened if Ms. Vogel had been doing her job. The work of students is study, not fund-raising. The taxpayers of Aurora paid Ms. Vogel to teach, not to oversee fund-raising. Whether the goal of her misdirected mercy was to buy wheelchairs for war veterans or pre-natal care for wayward cats, whatever end the funds had been put to would have been the wrong end. The only reason the students were entrusted to Ms. Vogel’s care was to obtain an education, and she cheated them and the taxpayers who pay her salary. That alone is sufficient grounds to hold her to a very stern accounting.

It is not an irony but a tragic kind of justice that had she done her actual job, her students could have learned why you cannot eliminate slavery by buying slaves. They could have read William Lloyd Garrison, for example, or Frederick Douglass, among many other astute authors on the subject. They could have read Smith or other economists to discover what could have been foreseen, that the buy-backs would result in more slavery, not less. They could have studied the history of human civilization, in the course of which they would have discovered that, as abhorrent as slavery is, there are fates still worse. In short, they could have had an education.

Instead they were used—not as slaves but as unwitting dupes. They were cheated of an education and their labor was usurped by fraudulent means. Worse still, they were used as the puppets in Ms. Vogel’s campaign of personal aggrandizement. This is a partial transcript from the NBC Nightly News, December 21, 1998:

Reporter Roger O’Neil: The children know their money helps, but they’ve also written more than 1,000 letters asking adults to raise their voices against slavery.

Unidentified Boy #2: Dear President and Mrs. Clinton...

Unidentified Girl #2: I want you to put a stop to slavery.

Unidentified Boy #3: You should be doing something about this.

Unidentified Girl #3: We are kids trying to make a difference.

Unidentified Boy #4: Sincerely, Ben.

This is a rehearsed performance. The children are being used as stick figures to make an argument they could not and would not have made on their own. They are in no significant way different from the children who are costumed as Death for televised protest marches. They are dehumanized and turned into walking placards for some adult’s emotional argument, not a thoughtful, reasoned position of their own.

And this is the unavoidable consequence of indoctrination. Putting innocent children into the slavery business was avoidable. Ms. Vogel’s preening before the press and the Congress was avoidable. But the dehumanization of the victims of indoctrination is not avoidable. It is precisely their humanity—their reason—that must be smothered by the indoctrinator. This is why dogmatists of all creeds so often prey upon children, because they haven’t yet developed the habits of thoughtful reason and can be swayed with ease by specious appeals.

And this is why Ms. Vogel and the many thousands of other dogmatists in the schools must be denounced. They don’t do what we pay them to do—educate our children—and they do the very thing we pay them not to do: By means of puerile suasion, they lead our children away from the habits of thoughtful reason.

Any thoughtful person could have foreseen the disaster in the Sudan wrought by the disaster in Aurora. Our children are born enslaved by ignorance. We send them to school so that they may be manumitted by learning to be thoughtful people. Not slavers, not dupes, not ignorant puppets of their masters—who may themselves be ignorant puppets of unseen others. We send our children to school to be educated, not indoctrinated. It’s a simple enough outcome to achieve, and it matters a hell of a lot more than a bleached gown...

Guarding the guardians of the guards

from “The Graves of Academe” by Richard Mitchell

We have been hearing both from and about groups of citizens who have organized themselves as guardians of education and monitors of texts and techniques. Those who have written to us have praised our efforts, claiming a common cause and expecting that we will praise, and promote, their efforts. We will not. They are decent and well-meaning people disturbed about the obvious disorders of education, no doubt, but their understanding of “education” is as thoughtless and self-serving as that of the self-styled professionals of education who brought those disorders upon us.

These guardians of education, while they differ in some ways, all seem proponents of the back-to-basics frenzy, in which we find no merit. We champion mastery, and we mean mastery, not minimum competence, in language and number not because it is the goal of education but because it is absurd to imagine an educated person who lacks it. Having that mastery, we can make of knowledge the raw material of thoughtfulness and judgment. Lacking it, we can make of knowledge nothing more than the substance of training and the content of indoctrination.

The back-to-basics enthusiasts, who never fail to note the paramount importance of being able to read want-ads and to write letters of application, treat the skills of number and language as subdivisions of vocational training to be imparted and done with, as though reading a micrometer and reading a paragraph were acts of the same nature. In one sense, literacy is a trivial skill, easily acquired and neither more nor less valuable than those darlings of the schools, the “life skills,” things like shoe-tying and crossing at the corner. In another sense, it is an endless and demanding enterprise that is also the ground of our knowledge and understanding, but an enterprise little likely to entice the minds of those taught literacy as a life skill.

All unwittingly, therefore, the guardians preach the same degradation of literacy that the educationists have so long practiced, and, strange as it might seem at first, for the same reason. The greatest mischief done in the schools is the attempt to inculcate certain presumed “values,” but the guardians understand that less than perfectly. They fancy that the mischief lies not in the inculcation of values but in the inculcation of the educationists’ values rather than the guardians’ values. All would be well, they imagine, if only the school would foster the “right” values. And that is why they must make of literacy a “basic” life skill rather than a way of life. If you want to foster in children certain values and preclude others, you must take care that they do not develop an appetite for knowledge and the skill to make of it the raw material of thoughtfulness and judgment. Jefferson’s words are an assertion of faith, not fact; fact may be “self-evident,” but “truth” is not. If it were, earth would be fair, and all men glad and wise.

There is a momentous difference between coming to believe what we have often been told and deciding, as Jefferson did, out of knowledge and thoughtful judgment, to “hold” something true. The former is a kind of slavery and easy to achieve; the latter is difficult, for it requires knowledge and governed intellect, in other words, an education, but it is freedom.

Freedom is, to be sure, frightening. There is no telling what values free people will choose to hold. Decent and well-meaning guardians of values were horrified by the monstrous principles of the Declaration of Independence. It is, of course, out of fear that the guardians preach the inculcation of values, fear of knowledge and thought.

Most of the guardians urge things like the study of history and economics “emphasizing the benefits of the free enterprise system.” We wholeheartedly share the guardians’ devotion to the free enterprise system, but they obviously don’t share our equal devotion to the study of history and economics, which will inevitably bring the knowledge of some facts, events, and ideas that are not at all conducive to our wholehearted devotion to the free enterprise system. When we study history from a certain point of view, we do not study history. If our students someday discover, as in fact they will, that we were sometimes mistaken in our knowledge of history, they will probably forgive us. But if they discover, as in fact they do, that we have misrepresented or omitted knowledge in the service of some values, they will learn to distrust both us and those values, as indeed they should-and apparently do.

If our values are grounded, as we usually imagine they are, in evidence and reason, then those who can see the evidence and who know the ways of reason are likely to adopt them. However, if we find ourselves tampering with the evidence and tempering the power of language, the medium of reason, then perhaps we ought to reevaluate our values. Should that prove unacceptable, we should at least be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others that we do not love.

The guardians do differ in one important way from the educationists. The guardians have lost their nerve, while the educationists still have plenty. The guardians, although they often wave the flag, do not truly hold the most basic value of a free society: the belief that, given the choice, knowing and thoughtful people will choose to continue in a free society. Those who do hold that value must guard against the guardians. But not in the classroom.

Reader mail (for the stout of heart): A real ’meric’n education

by Wayne Lutz (reprinted with permission; ©1999 by Wayne Lutz; do not republish without permission)

> Principles of pedagogical poisoning

Done snipped me a heap o’ dag-blasted anti-’meric’n hog-waller.

What in the sam-hill has you got aginst education, boy? I will has you know that I is a produce of one of the finest teachin’ folk what ever did grace the ivy-choked halls of ’merc’n academica.

Purdy little miss Thelma-Louise Pickle were the school-marm fer my en-tire schoolin’ days – danged near five years, that were. I might even of graduated the sixth grade if’n it waren’t fer the true fact that Miss Pickle had to up an’ leave Cornwall Junction all on a sudden-like on account of a little incident what involved me’n my sister Sally to some extent.

You see, this here was the way of it:

Miss Pickle growed up in Cornwall Junction but went away fer some fancy schoolin’. When she comed home she moved into the old Bingham place outside o’ town. Her pappy wasn’t gettin on too good (what with that glass eye of his what didn’t fit at all right, an’ it’s a wonder his liver was workin at all the way that man could put away the moon-shine) so he moved in with MIss Pickle so’s she could kinda keep an eye on the drunk old fart.

Miss Pickle were the finest school-marm that Cornwall Junction ever did see. Me’n Sally wasn’t exacly her favorite pupils, bein’ just a little rambunktious like we was, but Miss Pickle looked so sweet ’n’ fine in her school-teachin’ duds that I was head over heals in puppy love with her. Sally used to razz me over it all the time, till finally one day I got so fed up with her funnin’ that I set about to put a finish to it onct and for all.

Miss Pickle drived to the school-house in a big-ol’ black Packard, see, with amber winder rollers and a back seat big enough to play horse shoes in. Her pappy usually rode in with Miss Pickle on account of he couldn’t be trusted to stay off the moon-shine until she would get home and she were dealthly afeard he’d burn the house down or somethin’ equally lame-brained, so she’d drop him off an’ he’d wander about the town an’ snitch biscuits at the Hanson’s Bakery or shoot the shit with the good-ol’ boys down to the Hollywood Gas’n’Go an’ generally make a pest of himself till ’bout lunch time. That’s when he’d come back an’ Miss Pickle’d give him a samdwich an one bottle of home-brew, after of which pappy’d stretch hisself out in the back seat of that black Packard an snooze away the afternoon time ’till Miss Pickle were done.

Bein’ the smart and observant one o’ the family like I was, I had noticed that pappy auways’d take his glass eye out when he napped in the Packard and put it aside in the ash-tray. Havin’ done all planned out how I was a gonna git back at Sally, I sneaked into the Packard just afore Miss Pickle ringed the after-lunch bell and snatched up that big-ol’ glass eye. Whilst all the other kids was filin’ into the school-house, I went into the out-house an stuffed that there glass eye up my butt, snug in between my bottom-cheeks.

Now, my bench was right up front o’ the room where I could gaze upon the object o’ my pre-adolescent lust all the more closeup, an’ Sally were right behind me. First time Miss Pickle turned her back to write some siphers on the slate, I slid offn’ my bench, dropped my overalls, bended double-over and shined Sally a big-ol’ one-eyed moon.

Sally, she froze in shock fer just a hair’s breadth, then she bust out laughin’ so hard that she fell offn’ her bench an’ doubled up on the floor till I thought she’d bust a gut. I grabbed onto my overalls to yank ’em up just as Miss Pickle whirled around to see what the fuss was about, and don’t you know I was a-standin’ on the shoulder strap, the unavoidable result of which situation war that the yank on my trousers just warn’t quick enough.

Miss Pickle went white and all bug-eyed. An’ it was my sad fortune that just at this very same moment the can o’ beans I’d had for breakfast catched up with me. That, along with my doubled over condition, percipitated the more than less explosive release o’ some pent up tummy gasses.

Well.

Needs be not to say that ol’ glass eye shot out’n my butt like a musket ball. It hit Fat Willie Thompson square on between the eyeballs an he went down like a sack o’ manure. Then it rickoshee’d up into the air and came down splat square into the inkwell on Prissy Sissy Malloy’s desk and squshed blue ink ever which way. Sissy screamed and pushed away from her desk so hard that she knocked it over and that glass eye went rollin’ down the isle and stopped right at the dainty feet o’ Miss Pickle.

Miss Pickle stood stock-still fer just a moment, takin’ in the sight o’ my gassy butt stickin’ out, Sally rollin’ in the ink and laughin’ so hard she pissed herself, Fat Willie Thompson out cold, and about half a dozen girls screaming and runnin’ around the room like headless chickens on a hot grill, then she up an’ fainted dead away.

Miss Pickle never comed back to the school-house after that day, but I none-be the-less got durn near a full sixth grade education. So don’t be puttin’ down the ’meric’n education system like you done.

Find out more...

Richard Mitchell’s entire corpus is available on the internet. His books are free on-line, but nonetheless they demand a high payment: You must pay attention. You can find them at: http://members.aol.com/hu4wahz/ug/index.html. Much better news, Mitchell’s books are coming back into print. “The Gift of Fire”, his finest work, is available in a hand-bound collector’s edition from Bob Shubert. His “Less Than Words Can Say” and “The Graves of Academe” have been re-issued by The Akadine Press. They plan to publish more of Mitchell’s books in the coming months.