The Road to Freedom

Education is the road to freedom. It must be true, because Robespierre said so.

Well, I'm not actually sure that he did say that, but it was in a prominent meme I saw yesterday. Education certainly is the key to reshaping the world. So is propaganda. And whoever controls the teaching of history to today's young is bound to have a hand in tomorrow's outlook.

Here's what I found that Robespierre did actually say:

D’abord je remarque avec peine que jusqu’à 6 ans l’enfant échappe à la vigilance du législateur & que cette portion importante de la vie reste abandonnée aux préjugés subsistants & à la merci des vieilles erreurs. A 6 ans, la loi commence à exercer son influence : mais cette influence n’est que partielle, momentanée ; & par la nature même des choses elle ne peut agir que sur le moindre nombre des individus qui composent la nation.

La plus grave inégalité va s’établir à raison des diverses facultés des parents : & ici les personnes aisées, c’est-à-dire le plus petit nombre, ont tout l’avantage.      

Quiconque peut se passer du travail de son enfant pour le nourrir a la facilité de le tenir aux écoles tous les jours & plusieurs heures chaque jour. Mais quant à la classe indigente, comment fera-telle  ? Cet enfant pauvre, vous lui offrez bien l’instruction ; mais avant, il lui faut du pain. Son père laborieux s’en prive d’un morceau pour le lui donner ; mais il faut que l’enfant gagne l’autre. Son temps est enchaîné au travail, car au travail est enchaînée la subsistance.

Après avoir passé aux champs une journée pénible, voulez-vous que, pour repos, il s’en aille à l’école, éloignée peut-être d’une demi-lieue de son domicile ? Vainement vous établiriez une loi coercitive contre le père ; celui-ci ne saurait se passer journellement du travail d’un enfant qui, à 8, 9 & 10 ans, gagne déjà quelque chose. Un petit nombre d’heures par semaine, voilà tout ce qu’il peut sacrifier. Ainsi, l’établissement des écoles, telles qu’on les propose, ne sera, à proprement parler, bien profitable qu’au petit nombre de citoyens...

Clearly, in order to stamp out all inequality, you need to minimize the role of parents. How can the legislator deal with unequal home environments even before the child goes to school? Sound familiar? Who else says that? To translate just the very last part: "How can we establish a coercive law against the father? How can you deprive him of the work which a child of eight, nine or ten years old already earns from? So the establishment of schools will not, properly speaking, be profitable except for a small number of citizens."

Unless? Unless what?

Art. I. Tous les enfants seront élevés aux dépens de la République, depuis l’âge de cinq ans jusqu’à douze pour les garçons, & depuis cinq ans jusqu’à onze pour les filles.

II. L’éducation nationale sera égale pour tous ; tous recevront même nourriture, mêmes vêtements, même instruction, mêmes soins.

III. L’éducation nationale étant la dette de la République envers tous, tous les enfants ont droit de la recevoir, & les parents ne pourront se soustraire à l’obligation de les faire jouir de ses avantages. [...]

Well, we have such a coercive law in effect now establishing mandatory education, even beyond the ages that Robespierre envisioned. And I think we all know how parents are deprived of the right to decide whether their children work for their keep or go to school. Now the question is: what shall we teach in our schools?

What if you started teaching American history with Lincoln? And what if you taught, not what Lincoln did as a president, but instead began the whole story on the eve of his assassination? And suppose you focused on the details of everything that happened that day, but never explained any of the context?

This is education today in America. Students learn a lot of things, but they are not allowed to see the big picture.  And then later we get de-contextualized quotations from the likes of Robespierre, and it's okay, as long as you don't label anyone for what they did or what they believed in or what cause they espoused or served.

I made a new meme today.

I think this would make an excellent essay topic for a high school history class. Maybe someone should offer a prize for the best answer. But I don't think that could happen in the public schools. How would the public profit from such an endeavor? What would Robespierre think about that?

Property Rights, Education and Suffrage

Somebody said to me yesterday:

Every advance in our culture that you take for granted was protested and fought by conservatives. As a woman, can you vote? Own property in your own name? Attend higher education? Become a doctor or lawyer? Have bank accounts or investments in your name? Serve in the military? Serve in government? 

That person was a "progressive," and he would like to attribute any rights that anybody has to the agitation of people like himself. But he is wrong. Progress does not necessarily happen in a straight line progression. Sometimes as some rights are gained, other rights are lost. Trying to imagine what our life would be like in an earlier historical period depends very much on who we might have been, because different people during the same period find themselves in situations that are as different as night from day.

Of course, we could always imagine that we might have been wealthy and prosperous and have belonged to the ruling class, and a lot of historical fantasies are based on that. What would it have been like to be Queen Elizabeth the First? How would we have handled that kind of power? Even though most women of her day and age were uneducated, without property or a say in their government, this woman was not only highly educated but a successful ruler of men.

Marie Laveau
by Frank Schneider

Other fantasies are exercises in self-subjugation and humiliation. What would it be like to be a slave girl on a plantation with a very harsh and inhumane master? How could we maintain our human dignity while having so little control over our own persons? Would it be possible?

But most people's lives, during whatever period they happen to live in, do not fall into either extreme. They are not entirely helpless and without political and economic power. And they are also not rich or royalty or commanders of great armies and fleets. In Theodosia and the Pirates, I explored some of the in-between spaces. I described middle class people of different ethnic groups with varying degrees of education, property ownership and power.

Do you imagine that during a time when the insititution of slavery was intact every black woman was powerless, enslaved and not a property owner? Would it surprise you to know that there were many eminent free, property owning, business-running, influential women of color living in the 19th century prior to the emancipation proclamation? Do you think they waited helplessly for Abraham Lincoln to come and free them?

Take Marie Laveau, for instance:

http://www.voodoomuseum.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15&Itemid=18

She was not only free, she was born free! Both her parents were free, and her children were born free. She owned property. She ran businesses. She was wealthy and influential. Her power exceeded that of many white men and women of her time. But most importantly, she was an individual. Her life, like the life of any person during any period, was shaped by her own decisions, within the context of the society in which she lived. You or I placed into her shoes might not have fared as well.

I didn't write about Marie Laveau in Theodosia and the Pirates, but I did include Marie Villard as a supporting character. Marie Villard was not nearly as powerful or influential as Marie Laveau, but she, too, was a woman of color who was free, owned property and enjoyed a relationship of plaçage with a relatively important man: Pierre Laffite. Plaçage guaranteed Marie the ownership of a home of her own and the acknowledgement of her children. It was better than marriage. It left Marie free, while guaranteeing her financial and social security. And all because miscegenation laws did not allow for legal marriage between races.

This is one of the ironies of anarchy versus lawful living: oftentimes the contractual agreements arrived at by free people to get around a law that will not allow them to do something can be much more fair than the legal thing they weren't allowed to do. If Marie Villard had married Pierre, she might not have been able to own property and be financially independent. But because she could not marry him, she was able to negotiate what amounts to a very nice settlement that provided for herself and her children.

A white woman, either married to or having an affair with a white man, found herself under quite a different situation. Theodosia Burr did not own property. She did not run a business. She was highly educated, but in many ways helpless to determine her own fate.

But even the question of education is a complicated one. Before mandatory state-run education was instituted, just how much of an education anybody got was very much dependent on who was the head of the household and how highly that person valued education. Aaron Burr saw to it that his daughter, Theodosia, was better educated than many men of her day. He also educated his slaves.

But just in case you think this was a complete aberration on Burr's part, please consider that his own mother, Esther Edwards Burr, the daughter of the preacher Jonathan Edwards, was also highly educated. Her diary reveals a witty, fluent and expressive writer. If conservatism is to be equated with keeping women in the dark, why was Esther Edwards better educated than most young high school students today of either gender?

These are complex issues. Education, property ownership and  the right to vote do  not mean anything, unless they are seen in the context of the society in which they arise and the personal abilities of the individual who receives them. We are not all better off because of universal suffrage, universal education and the emancipation proclamation. Not all black people were slaves. Not all women were illiterate or lacking in property rights before women's lib. Not all gained by the change in society. Having free education available actually makes it harder for some to educate their children than it was before this "right" was granted to all.

There is an ebb and flow to all things in human affairs. We take two steps forward and three steps back. Things do not always get better, there is not just one side to every argument, and looking into the lives of many different people both in the past and the present will show you how much progress we really are making. That's why I think historical fiction is worth exploring.