All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind;
for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.
—Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

Grandmother was from a little Tennessee town with two general stores, one schoolhouse, and no post office. The general stores are gone, but the schoolhouse is still there and operating. This kind of country charm attracts city people who are seeking out “better” schools for their children. Grandmother would laugh at that last notion, because she hated her school. There was nothing wrong with the building itself; it’s red brick and quaint and surrounded by cotton fields just as it was in Grandmother’s day. (The scenery just screams to be put on a bank calendar.) The inside, however, has changed quite a bit. The classrooms are now about a third black, with the lower grades the darkest. But that was not a problem in Grandmother’s day. The colored schoolhouse, a tidy whitewashed building with beautiful polished wood floors, was just down the road. Grandmother hated her school because of how the system worked to distill each child into a clear, odorless product of the State-- a citizen bottled in bond.

The schools back then were themselves learning about modern education, which included the rudiments of hygiene, civics, and music appreciation. As there was no money for musical equipment, except for a second-hand church piano, music appreciation consisted of sing-alongs.  Once a week, all the students were gathered together in the gymnasium where they screeched out many of the same songs they sang in church. No matter, there were other songs more appropriate for State education. Because of a sing-along Grandmother learned to hate school.

There was nothing unusual the day Grandmother hated school. The children were herded noisily into the gym, where they fidgeted until the music sheets were handed around and they took a moment to ponder whether or not to appreciate the selections. Grandmother didn’t like one of the songs at all. She told the girl standing next to her that she would not sing that song, no matter what.  Her protest must have caught the attention of a teacher, or maybe the principal, because she was jerked out of line and positioned next to the piano where she would be obliged to sing THAT song in front of the whole school. What song? Marching Through Georgia With Sherman. 

What Grandmother was obliged to do was to celebrate the torment of her own people. She grasped the crisis if her schoolmates did not. Most likely they wiped their noses on their sleeves and shouted out the music in tuneless, lopsided harmony. What remains of these children is now called “The Greatest Generation.” The unripe Greatest Gens-- the immediate progenitors of the Beat Generation, which opened the Generation Gap, into which fell Generation X--perhaps humming Sherman’s march, walked home from school over paths that crossed Confederate veterans and Confederate widows going about their daily business. Did any of these children realize, upon encountering the familiar face of an old Rebel soldier, that their school was beguiling them? No. Like the thin, polished needle of a lobotomy probe, the damage schools do to children’s minds enters painlessly through the eye into the brain.

The Greatest Generation grew up beguiled and becalmed. School made them believe they were educated and worthy citizens, whether their education was useful or not. They were worthy because they recited The Pledge of Allegiance to The Flag. Whatever textbook lessons are forgotten, no one forgets the Pledge of Allegiance. Ever. So later, they voted in droves for Franklin Roosevelt and soon after enlisted in droves to fight the Japs and Nazis. The patriotism that once meant loyalty to folk and homeland was disfigured into an obsequious trust in the government.

Grandmother’s schoolhouse is now tuned to other songs about other marches. And sometimes, when the deracinated, colorblind children walk home from school, maybe they cross the path of a Great Generator or the widow of one, and they march past them like Sherman through Georgia.