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Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future
generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how
those same people will view the
– e Orwell, 1984 (1949)
Take at hazard one hundred children of several educated generations and one hundred uneducated
children of the people pare them in anything you please; in strength, in agility, in mind, in
the ability to acquire knowledge, even in morality–and in all respects you are startled by the vast
superiority on the side of the children of the uneducated.
– Count Leo Tolstoy, "Education and Children" (1862)
A Nation From The Bottom Up
ESTABLISHING SHOT
Fifty children of different ages are teaching each other while the schoolmaster hears lessons at his desk from older
students. An air of quiet activity fills the room. A wood stove crackles in the corner. What drove the
eenth-century school world celebrated in Edward Eggleston's classic, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, was a
society rich with concepts like duty, hard work, responsibility, and self-reliance; a society overwhelmingly local in
orientation although never so provincial it couldn't be fascinated by the foreign and exotic. But when tent
Chautauqua with its fanfare about modern marvels left town, conversation readily returned to the text of local
society.
Eggleston's America was a special place in modern history, one where the society was more central than the
national political state. Words can't adequately convey the stupendous radicalism hidden in our quiet villages, a
belief that ordinary people have a right to govern themselves. A confidence that they can.
Most revolutionary of all was the conviction that personal rights can only be honored when the political state is kept
weak. In the classical dichot