Vin Suprynowicz

George Washington remains the greatest man of our age. But he was no genius.

That our children don’t really know of Washington’s greatness is a devastating indictment of our current schools. As little as a century ago, American children memorized the Farewell Address, with its stern warning against “entangling European alliances.” Why do you suppose that’s now gone? Too many big words?

Washington’s officers wanted to march on the capital for their back pay and install him as king. He pulled on his eyeglasses and declined. I have met a few modern politicians who might have had the decency and humility to turn down such a serious offer: George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Mo Udall. But I have trouble visualizing any of them also winning the action at Trenton, let alone Monmouth.

Monmouth receives little attention in the history books, since it was “indecisive.” The Brits were withdrawing from Philadelphia to New York. Washington was determined to make his presence felt. But he arrived on the scene to find General Charles Lee — we will be kind and call the man who requested the honor of command merely incompetent and confused — withdrawing in disarray. Witnesses report Washington halted the retreat by mere strength of personality but then sat his horse for some seconds, dumbstruck, as his men waited to see what he would do. This was not some desperate raid, like Trenton. A major battle was in the offing; Washington’s troops had just been found running the wrong way; he was suddenly in personal command, and he had not even surveyed the ground.

Then, that indomitable spirit took command. As Teddy Roosevelt Jr. was to do when he found himself on the wrong beach in Normandy 166 years later, the general decided to start the battle right where he was. For no better reason than because no one would dare disappoint Washington himself, an army that had been on the verge of rout lined up as directed, stood their ground, and killed the advancing infantry of the greatest army in the world all day in the hundred-degree heat.

When it was finally dark enough the Brits withdrew — leaving the much-ridiculed “Yankee Doodles” in possession of the field, and the whole of New Jersey.

Washington didn’t need any French fleet that day.

Yet to many of his contemporaries Washington was a mere hick, and not a particularly bright one. John Adams called him “too illiterate, too unlearned, too unread for his station and reputation.”

Washington’s father died when he was 11. His older brother got everything. Determined to make it on his own, George started with nothing.

“Washington had no schooling until he was 11, no classroom confinement, no blackboards,” notes John Taylor Gatto in the first chapter of “The Underground History of American Education.”

“He arrived at school already knowing how to read, write, and calculate about as well as the average college student today. … Full literacy wasn’t unusual in the colonies or early republic; many schools wouldn’t admit students who didn’t know reading and counting because few schoolmasters were willing to waste time teaching what was so easy to learn. It was deemed a mark of depraved character if literacy hadn’t been attained by the matriculating student. Even the many charity schools operated by churches, towns, and philanthropic associations for the poor would have been flabbergasted at the great hue and cry raised today about difficulties teaching literacy. American experience proved the contrary. …”

Why? Phonics. How did the educrat conspiracy make literacy seem hard, slowing down the schooling process so it would last more than a decade? The “whole word” method. “Killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in this country,” said Theodor Geisel — Dr. Seuss — in 1981.

There were no “school projects” gluing together pictures clipped out of magazines when Washington was 11. He immediately took up geometry, trigonometry, and surveying. Before he turned 18, Washington had been hired as the official surveyor for Culpepper County.

“For the next three years, Washington earned the equivalent of about $100,000 a year in today’s purchasing power,” Mr. Gatto, the former New York state Teacher of the Year, reports.

How much government-run schooling would a youth of today be told he needs before he could contemplate making $100,000 a year as a surveyor — a job which has not changed except to get substantially easier, what with hand-held computers, GPS scanners and laser range-finders? Sixteen years, at least — 18, more likely.

George Washington attended school for two years.

“We know he was no genius, yet he learned geometry, trigonometry, and surveying when he would have been a fifth or sixth grader in our era,” Gatto reminds us.

“Washington attended school for exactly two years. Besides the subjects mentioned, at 12 and 13 (and later) he studied frequently used legal forms like bills of exchange, tobacco receipts, leases, and patents. From these forms, he was asked to deduce the theory, philosophy, and custom which produced them. By all accounts, this steeping in grown-up reality didn’t bore him at all. I had the same experience with Harlem kids 250 years later, following a similar procedure in teaching them how to struggle with complex income tax forms. Young people yearn for this kind of guided introduction to serious things, I think. When that yearning is denied, schooling destroys their belief that justice governs human affairs.

“In light of the casual judgment of his contemporaries that his intellect was of normal proportions, you might be surprised to hear that by 18 (Washington) had devoured all the writings of Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Daniel Defoe. … He also read Seneca’s Morals, Julius Caesar’s Commentaries, and the major writing of other Roman generals like the historian Tacitus. …

“Years later he became his own architect for the magnificent estate of Mt. Vernon. While still in his twenties, he began to experiment with domestic industry where he might avoid the vagaries of international finance in things like cotton or tobacco.”

Hemp and flax didn’t work out. “At the age of thirty-one, he hit on wheat. In seven years he had a little wheat business with his own flour mills and hired agents to market his own brand of flour; a little later he built fishing boats: four years before the Declaration was written he was pulling in 9 million herring a year.”

In the meantime, as a sideline, he had marched to war with Braddock at Fort Duquesne, survived a campaign that killed many men of lesser constitutions, and become the best-known soldier on the continent.

Today, in comparison, “No public school in the United States is set up to allow a George Washington to happen,” Gatto points out. “Washingtons in the bud stage are screened, browbeaten, or bribed to conform to a narrow outlook on social truth” — basically, locked away in sterile isolation for 18 years.

“Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of 13 would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.

“Anyone who reads can compare what the American present does in isolating children from their natural sources of education, modeling them on a niggardly last, to what the American past proved about human capabilities. The effect of the forced schooling institution’s strange accomplishment has been monumental. No wonder history has been outlawed.”