The Boy Who Could Change the World (36 page)

In short, schools don't really teach kids anything because they're not about really teaching kids anything. They're about teaching kids to stay quiet, do their work, and show up on time.

This isn't an accident. This was the plan all along.

It's difficult to even imagine what America was like before the industrial revolution. Their notion of freedom was far stronger than the one we have today. For many Americans, life wasn't about showing up at a job at a specified hour, following orders all day, and returning home for a couple hours of “free time”—that would be considered slavery. A free American was one who worked on their own or with their family, worked from home, worked whatever hours they liked, and got paid based on what they accomplished.

Under the putting-out system, for example, merchants would deliver raw materials like cotton to your house. When you felt like it, you'd card, spin, and weave the raw cotton into cloth. And then the next week the merchant would come by to buy from you whatever cloth you had produced. If you wanted to make more money, you simply did more work or figured out how to work more efficiently. If you wanted to take a vacation, there was no one stopping you—you just wouldn't get paid that week.

It was far from a perfect life. It could be difficult to make ends meet and there was no protection from falling prices or market
downturns. But you were
free
. You worked as your own boss, followed your own rules. And that was not something Americans were inclined to give up lightly.

At first the mills promised freedom too. For the daughters of these families, they provided a chance to break away from the rule of their fathers and strike out to work on their own—for their own wages, in their own lives. Instead of working under the thumb of their parents, New England girls went out to mill towns—whole new cities created along the river to staff the mills, the first real factories in the country. Instead of women spinning cotton into cloth at home, girls operated vast machines powered by water turbines to do the work in the city.

And these
were
girls. Harriet Robinson went to work in the mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, at the age of ten. “I worked first in the spinning-room as a ‘doffer,'” she recalled. “The doffers were the very youngest girls, whose work was to doff, or take off, the full bobbins, and replace them with the empty ones. I can see myself now, racing down the alley, between the spinning-frames, carrying in front of me a bobbin-box bigger than I was.”
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The law took no cognizance of woman as a money-spender. She was a ward, an appendage, a relict. . . . I can see them now, even after sixty years, just as they looked,—depressed, modest, mincing, hardly daring to look one in the face, so shy and sylvan had been their lives. But after the first pay-day came, and they felt the jingle of silver in their pockets, and had begun to feel its mercurial influence, their bowed heads were lifted, their necks seemed braced with steel, they looked you in the face, sang blithely among their looms or frames, and walked with elastic step to and from their work.
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From a condition approaching pauperism they were at once placed above want; they could earn money, and spend it as they pleased; and could gratify their tastes and desires without restraint, and without rendering an account to anybody. At last they had found a place in the universe; they were no longer obligated to finish out their faded lives mere burden to male relatives. Even the
time
of these women was their own, on Sundays and in the evening after the day's work was done. For the first time in this country woman's labor had a money value.
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But while the ability to earn one's own keep was liberating, the conditions under which it was possible were not. Long before the advent of the eight-hour day, these girls worked fourteen hours, from five in the morning until seven at night—with only a half hour off for breakfast and dinner. They lived in cramped quarters with the other girls, two to a bed, four to a room, hardly any space or privacy.

Their bosses, by contrast, “lived in large houses, not too near the boarding-houses, surrounded by beautiful gardens which seemed like Paradise to some of the home-sick girls, who, as they came from their work in the noisy mill, could look with longing eyes into the sometimes open gate in the high fence, and be reminded afresh of their pleasant country homes.”

The work was dull, but it allowed plenty of time to think, and despite their lack of formal education, these girls did plenty of it. And after work they read assiduously, passing books from hand to hand. And they eagerly attended the talks of visiting lecturers. “I used every winter to lecture for the Lowell Lyceum,” recalled a Harvard professor. “Not amusement, but instruction, was then the lecturer's aim. . . . The Lowell Hall was always crowded, and four-fifths of the audience were factory-girls. When the lecturer entered, almost every girl had a book in her hand, and was intent upon it. When he rose, the book was laid aside, and paper and pencil taken instead; and there were very few who did not carry home full notes
of what they had heard. I have never seen anywhere so assiduous note-taking. No, not even in a college class.”
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And through all that thinking and learning and discussing, they began to question the less pleasant aspects of their situation. When, in 1836, the Lowell mill owners decided to cut their employees' pay, the girls walked out. “My own recollection of this first strike (or ‘turn out' as it was called) is very vivid,” recalls Harriet Robinson.

            
I worked in a lower room, where I had heard the proposed strike fully, if not vehemently, discussed; I had been an ardent listener to what was said against this attempt at “oppression” on the part of the corporation, and naturally I took sides with the strikers. When the day came on which the girls were to turn out, those in the upper rooms started first, and so many of them left that our mill was at once shut down. Then, when the girls in my room stood irresolute, uncertain what to do, asking each other, “Would you?” or “Shall we turn out?” and not one of them having the courage to lead off, I, who began to think they would not go out, after all their talk, became impatient and started on ahead, saying, with childish bravado, “I don't care what you do, I am going to turn out, whether anyone else does or not”; and I marched out, and was followed by the others.

                 
As I looked back at the long line that followed me, I was more proud than I have ever been since at any success I may have achieved.
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She was eleven years old.

What these young girls accomplished is truly amazing. They organized their own newspaper, the
Voice of Industry
, which they wrote, edited, printed, and sold themselves. Through it they organized more protests and strikes, as well as organized their own slate of candidates in the state elections to fight for better working conditions
and a ten-hour day. Amazingly, their slate won. The owners, outraged, got their legislators to declare the election results invalid and hold a revote. Before the revote, large signs were posted threatening that anyone who voted for the ten-hour slate would be fired. And yet the slate won again.

Once seated, the legislators were able to pass a ten-hour bill through the state House, but as usually happens with progressive legislation, it was killed in the state Senate.

But their writing in the
Voice
shows that they wanted much more than simply better working conditions. They saw themselves as slaves—wage slaves—and concluded that the solution was not simply to demand that the bosses be nicer to them or pay them more, but to abolish the bosses entirely.

            
The laborer does not yet know what terrible odds he contends with. Concentrated skill in the form of machinery and accumulated labor in the shape of capital, both directed by superior intelligence, are arrayed against him. These powerful forces, which should be on his side, should be his servants, his tools, are crushing them. . . . In the true order of things, wherever is the most wealth would be the least poverty; but now it is otherwise; the more glittering the splendor of capital; the more squalor, wretchedness, degradation obtrude near it.
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The solution was clear:

            
Instead of quibbling, temporizing, and compromising with capitalists, we want to see the working classes getting daily into a position of independence through a system of cooperation and
mutual guarantees
. When they can obtain the means of
living
independent of capitalists, then and not till then, will “strikes” and “turn outs” mean something. They must consolidate and combine so as to become their own employers and do their trading
without the interference of the go-betweens and jobbers. Let them unite in themselves both the functions of laborer and capitalist. So long as we are dependent on cotton mills for employment, so long we shall be oppressed. They who work in the mills ought to own them.
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One is almost tempted to call this Marxist, but it was many years before Marx. “They who work in the mills ought to own them.” It was just plain common sense.

The mill owners were not happy about such agitation. They fired these troublemaking (sabotaging?) workers and added their names to the blacklist shared with all the other mills. They sought out more compliant replacements. And they used their control over housing and stores to try to force their workers back to work.

But their most striking plan was also their most far-reaching: they sent the girls to school. Lowell, the home of America's industrial revolution, the home of the girls who fought back against it and concluded that “they who work in the mills ought to own them,” was also the home of America's first schools.

The schools they built—the common schools—would be easily recognizable by any modern student. “The door [of each school] shall be closed precisely at the time fixed for the opening of the school, and in the morning religious exercises will be performed, for which purpose 10 minutes are allowed.” (Today we just say the pledge of allegiance.) “Each teacher shall call the roll call of his or her classes . . . in the morning and afternoon, and shall keep an accurate record of all absences.” The day was then divided into separate lessons, allowing “30 minutes for the study of each lesson and 10 minutes for each recitation.”
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Instead of corporal punishment, teachers were encouraged to secure order “by the mildest possible means” to instill “a regard for right, and thus a standard of self-government in the minds of the
children themselves.”
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Students were tested on how much they learned and, just like today, working coordinating other students was considered “cheating” and punished. (Perhaps they were worried that if students learned to coordinate they might be more likely to foment strikes once in the mills.)

In 1855, the Lowell School Committee noted that they had some trouble with one misguided parent who believed the schools “to be a republic, where the subject may call into question the power of the ruler; whereas a school government is and must be an absolute monarchy . . . where no subject can or ought to question an order or law of the supreme head.”
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So much for training kids for democracy!

The curriculum was also much like that of modern schools,

            
adding grammar, geography, history and physiology to the basic program of reading, writing and arithmetic. But what is striking about this extension of the curriculum is the intrinsic uselessness of the material treated . . . [these classes] were totally given over to the memorization of minute and generally trivial facts. Candidates for high school entrance in 1850, for example, were expected to know the names of the capital of Abussinia, of two lakes in the Sudan, of the river that “runs through the country of the Hottentots,” and of the desert lying between the Nile and the Red Sea, as well as to locate Bombetok Bay, the Gulf of Sidra, and the Lupata Mountains. [Other subjects had] a similar approach, with all the questions given over to very specific and in most cases minute pieces of information completely unrelated to the present or future lives of the pupils being taught.