“The teaching of history, for instance, which begins in the sixth
or seventh grade, is a shoddy performance and all educators
now alive should, in fairness, be given the noose and faggot for it.
I don’t mean such rubbish as George Washington-couldn’t- tell-
a- lie, but the whole subject. Ancient history, dehumanized and
fumigated, is proffered as a rote exercise in place and ruin identification,
simplified battle plan, and old law. One long look at the murals of
Pompeii would teach more ancient history than fifty years
in such a classroom.
American history of the school brand is a disgrace to the human
cerebrum. It is taught as if America, an infallible nation, rose
through heroism from dire persecution, with a shining and
untarnished escutcheon. This is not the stuff to give drips,
because it compounds drippery. In the first place , its inhuman
excess of virtue makes it unreal and thus very dull. In the second,
it in no way educates. To the mind of a future voter, the contents
of a school history book are about as valuable as a knowledge
of all the formulas for all the emetics in Christendom.
Think for a moment of a few of the facts.
America was founded by a multitude of discontented colonists
and a handful of well-intentioned men and women who took
advantage of a European war to free themselves of taxation.
It was partly a godly land, but in larger part, a slave trading,
rum-tippling, whoring melee of lawless opportunists who couldn’t
get along in a more conventionally organized society. It stuck together
because a few men with a few ideals, wily compromisers who failed
to compromise, were backed in a civil war by the industrial half
of the union against the agricultural South. In the American Revolution,
our book-vaunted militia broke and ran a dozen times from Hessian
mercenaries and British regulars. In the civil war, our record of graft
and bad generalship, of draft rioting and governmental mismanagement
was unparalleled.
The conquest of the West was, again, the most brutal, brawling
page of exploitatious and irresponsible rapine yet written by
any nation upon its own population. Just in the process, a whole
cross section of ethnology was pushed off the map: the Indians.
Our part in The First World War might have been considerable-
and costly in human lives. It was not, many though our
monuments may be, and the multitudes of men who came back
brought from the whole of Europe one idea that topped all others
in spread and repetition: that the French were sexually perverse.
We, who high-hat the British for their empire, have already
taken the empire of a hundred whole nations of red men,
together with assorted chunks of sod we lifted from Spain,
Canada, France and Mexico.
Such are a few of the nonglorious pages of history.
Taught truthfully, they might startle the moppets into an
effort to improve a society plainly in bad shape. They would
give no smug sense of national grandeur and security.
We need leaders to reform our world- but reform begins with
evil seen- and not where the teacher and the book
point only with perfect pride.” Philip Wylie.
Excerpted from “Generation of Vipers”,
published by Rinehart and Company, New York-Toronto.
Islander.