Growing Up 1870s: A Young Colonel House

You may be familiar with Colonel Edward M. House as the power behind the throne in the Wilson administration. Or you may know him from his collectivist novel, Philip Dru, Administrator. But before all that he was a child who grew up in post Civil War Texas. From The Underground History of American Education, comes the following excerpts:

In his memoirs, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, we get a glimpse of elite American schooling in the 1870s. House’s early years were school-free. He grew up after the Civil War, near Houston, Texas:

My brother James, six years older than I, was the leader....We all had guns and pistols... there were no childish games excepting those connected with war. [House was nine at the time.] In the evening around the fireside there were told tales of daring deeds that we strove to emulate.... I cannot remember the time when I began to ride and to shoot.... I had many narrow escapes. Twice I came near killing one of my playmates in the reckless use of firearms. They were our toys and death our playmate.

And today the authorities freak out when a kid brings GI Joe's rifle to school with him.

At the age of fourteen House was sent to school in Virginia. The cruelty of the other boys made an indelible impression on his character, as you can sift from this account:

I made up my mind at the second attempt to haze me that I would not permit it. I not only had a pistol but a large knife, and with these I held the larger, rougher boys at bay. There was no limit to the lengths they would go in hazing those who would allow it. One form I recall was that of going through the pretense of hanging. They would tie a boy’s hands behind him and string him up by the neck over a limb until he grew purple in the face. None of it, however, fell to me. What was done to those who permitted it is almost beyond belief.

You think bullying is rough today? It just goes to show what happens when kids are segregated from their families, the worst in human traits are cultivated. 

At the Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven at the age of seventeen, during the Hayes-Tilden campaign of 1876, House began to "hang around" political offices instead of "attending to studies." He came to be recognized and was given small privileges. When the election had to be ultimately settled by an Electoral Commission he was allowed to "slip in and out of hearings at will." House again:

All this was educational in its way, though not the education I was placed in Hopkins Grammar School to get, and it is no wonder that I lagged at the end of my class. I had no interest in desk tasks, but I read much and was learning in a larger and more interesting school.

House’s story was written over and over in the short, glorious history of American education before schooling took over. Young Americans were allowed close to the mechanism of things. This rough and tumble practice kept social class elastic and American achievement in every practical field superb.

 True education is one instigated by the individual, not by an outside influence. When your child, or yourself, really become interested in something you don't need to be spoonfed to acquire the information you desire- you seek it out. The people at the very top of designing our education system know this as well as anyone; they're not stupid, as Charlotte Iserbyt has pointed out in her book, Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, isolating children from their families and communities has been by design. I highly suggest everyone check out her latest column found here.

A highlight :

Important and revealing excerpts from Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies (a study funded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1934 on how to socialize the United States through central planning. Remember that the next time some "conservative" tells you what great entrepreneurs the Rockefellers were.)

“The Commission was also driven to this broader conception of its task by the obvious fact that American civilization, in common with Western civilization, is passing through one of the great critical ages of history, is modifying its traditional faith in economic individualism [free enterprise], and is embarking upon vast experiments in social planning and control which call for large-scale cooperation on the part of the people…” (pp. 1-2)

“. . . Cumulative evidence supports the conclusion that in the United States and in other countries the age of ‘laissez faire’ in economy and government is closing and that a new age of collectivism is emerging.” (p. 16)

According to Charlotte, the central planners have made the public schools so awful that parents will clamor for school choice, which will be the Trojan Horse to implement a total Federalized curriculum that will administer attitudinal tests that will see if your kid has their "mind right'. They're going to use charter schools through corporate management to get these goals implemented. So if you're thinking yay! charter schools, investigate a little deeper. As always, homeschoolers should never, ever take any money or free computers/curriculum from the feds, as that's how they subvert a good thing.

This massive shift in education  is going under the name Reinventing Schools Coalition and will feature Outcome Based Education that conservatives claim to despise, yet no opposition from the mainline conservative groups. This is a doing away completely of academics and using Skinnerian techniques, from the man who bragged he could make a pigeon an honor roll student using nothing but conditioning aka Pavlov's dog, to get people's minds right. Check out her essay, The Death of Free Will which says it better than I could.

So we go from Colonel House who had all the benefits of America as free as she'd ever been, who decided to become a collectivist along the way, bringing us to a point where an unsupervised child is tantamount to child abuse. I wonder how he'd feel seeing what his legacy of central planning has wrought on the young people of America? Progressives such as he did not have the same heart as the Founders who always seemed to have their "posterity" on the mind. Even more disturbing is what a large percentage of parents don't care enough about their own kids living in their home currently to pass on values, much less thinking of their great-grandchildren. If more Christians would read and apply Pastor Baucham's book Family Driven Faith to their lives, we'd have a different country in short order.

CFR Founder House hangin' with Roosevelt