George Washington on America Now
Last updated: Sunday - June 22, 2008
I have argued in "Fertilizers, Pills & Magnetic Strips" that underlying so many major policy debates in public education today are two powerful influences: racial prejudice and personal avarice. Recently I discovered in the writings of George Washington an observation on the American prospect at the beginnings of the Union that--reinterpreted perhaps--seems an apt comment on contemporary circumstances.

George Washington in a letter to John Hancock, written on 11 June 1783:

"There are four things, which I humbly conceive are essential to the well being, I may even venture to say, to the existence of the United States, as an Independent Power: ... 4thly The prevalence of that pacific and friendly disposition among the People of the United States, which will induce them to forgit their local prejudices and policies, to make those mutual concessions which are requisite to the general prosperity, and in some instances, to sacrafice their individual advantages to the interest of the Community."

A. G. Rud comments:

The enormous resources that Americans exploited in the early Republic later led to a Jacksonian individualism that overcame this Washingtonian communitarianism. We are living the results now as you document in "Fertilizers, Pills & Magnetic Strips." How can we move toward putting aside for or even aiming individual advantage to the common good? That is the question of the century, much as the problem of the color line was of the last century.

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