I bought my son a copy of his own (never mind that that probably put me on some sort of Amazon.com blacklist).
The story begins with a spoiled young brat, scion of a railroad magnate (and about the age of my son), out on the fantail of a luxury liner puffing on an illicit cigar. He gets dizzy and sick, falls overboard, and is rescued by a fishing boat.
The fishermen could care less who the brat’s father is. They’ve got fishing to do. And they won’t be back to port for months. If the brat wants a bunk and three meals a day he’d better learn how to fish.
Capitalism is a coin with two sides. The brat knew about “heads”—capital. Now he learns about “tails”—labor.
In the end, the wealthy dad rewards the fishing boat crew for saving his son. And the son is rewarded with an education in the kind of hard work that made his dad wealthy.
I’m not saying my son is a spoiled brat. But after he reads Captains Courageous, if he acts like a spoiled brat, I can tell him, “Go Fish.”
Or I can recite a nursery rhyme to him. I said there was pro-capitalist poetry, and I can prove it by quoting Ogden Nash (1902–71), perhaps the greatest author of light verse in the English language. Nash wrote the poem “One From One Leaves Two” in response to the New Deal.
Abracadabra, thus we learn
The more you create, the less you earn.
The less you earn, the more you’re given,
The less you lead, the more you’re driven,
. . .
The more you earn, the less you keep,
And now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to take
If the tax-collector hasn’t got it before I wake.
Educating My Kids
I want my kids to believe in getting a good education. This, as distinct from getting an education. You can get that anywhere. In the gutter where I did. At home. Maybe even in the classroom.
A good education is another matter. And possessing faith in the value of a good education is another matter yet. I want my children to have facts, facility for critical thinking, and analytical capabilities. And I also want them to be convinced that putting these things to work is a worthwhile activity.
That is a lot to ask in a world where, seemingly, facts are fads, criticism is cancel culture, and analysis has returned to its Greek root, lysis, “a loosing,” mostly of the verbal bowels.
I have a friend who sends his kids to Catholic school, partly because he’s Catholic, but mostly because he lives in a big American city where—as in all big American cities—the public schools suck.
I asked my friend, “Are the Catholic schools any good?”
“No,” he said. “But the kids aren’t taught anything that I have to unteach them when they come home.”
And that’s pretty much all I’ve asked from the schools where I’ve sent my three children. I’ve been lucky. They haven’t come home needing to dis-learn much.
There was one occasion, at the kids’ sort-of-but-not-too-Montessori-ish grade school, when a teacher answered a second-grader’s question about the difference between Democrats and Republicans by saying, “Democrats care about people.”
Fortunately for my police blotter record, another parent blew her top before I had a chance to blow mine. Called to the principal’s office, the teacher’s ears were pinned back and her hair was scorched off by an angry mom yelling, “Democrats care about ‘The People’! Democrats hate people! Republicans care about people and hate ‘The People’! Especially you!”
And last year the prep school where my daughter went had “Unconscious Bias Day”—all classes were excused in favor of required attendance at six hours of lectures, assemblies, and discussion groups devoted to the above-named topic.
This is a traditional New England prep school. Which is to say it is resolutely multicultural in curriculum, painstakingly inclusivity-insistent, and so diversity-sensitive that it grapples with whether the use of chopsticks is cultural appropriation when international students from China use them. Meanwhile, of course, the school preserves the age-old customs and mores of rich WASPs. A young man can appear in the classroom dressed like Princess Di and no one will say a word, but he will be sent back to his dorm if he wears jeans and a collarless shirt.
I said to my daughter, “Is there bias at your school?”
She said, “Oh, gosh no. Nobody’s prejudiced or bigoted or anything like that.”
“In that case,” I said, “why not just have ‘Unconscious Day’?”
Schools haven’t taught my kids many bad things. On the other hand, there are many good things schools haven’t taught my kids either.
Today’s students can list every injustice in America but can’t name a justice of the Supreme Court. I exaggerate. There’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but I’m willing to bet that none of RBG’s student fans can explain what she does for a living.
They think John Calvin had a talking toy tiger named Hobbes. Of Thomas Hobbes they’ve never heard at all. They know about Martin Luther King but have no idea who Martin Luther was. They believe Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers rhymed.
Today’s students are fully conversant with Title IX of the Higher Education Act of 1968 but are fuzzy on the details of Articles I through VII of the U.S. Constitution, not to mention Amendments I through X—in particular II.
Furthermore, Title IX aside, they don’t know their Roman numerals, and they can’t write—or read—longhand.
They are cognizant of the origins of poverty but ignorant of the origins of wealth. Their instruction has been in “dark Satanic Mills” not John Stuart Mill. They wouldn’t know Adam Smith from Adam.
And even knowing Adam from Eve is a pedagogical conundrum these days. Or so I gather. I haven’t heard any direct reports. While I enjoy embarrassing my kids as much as the next dad, I’ve never gone so far as to ask them, “What did you learn in sex ed class today?”
The students
