Knowledge Is Neither King Nor Priest
The Founders' resistance was not to book learning, but to the unearned authority of priestly dogma.
Again from American Ethnicity.
Dogma was out for our founders. Logic and reason were in. And that lending of ultimate authority to logic and evidence and practicality and to thinking for oneself, and to rejecting the taking of orders from a king or a priest, was how our nation began. . . .
In the latter nineteenth century, our schools had begun to be influenced by . . . the religion of natural development and the superiority of hands-on experience. On this doctrine, the major general [General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance] could only be truly educated in his craft by direct personal experience, not by book-learning. That new developmental idea was taking America by storm. It formed the basis of the unstoppable, still flourishing "project method."
So, in General Stanley’s description of his education, W. S. Gilbert was exploiting two American critiques of bookish authority that were very different from one another. One was our 18th century attack on priestly dogma; the other was our attack on allowing bookishness to take the place of direct experience and natural instinct and independent insight. Behind the major general's conversion to real-world knowledge at the end of his song was the widespread conviction among Gilbert's American audience that their own experiences had greater weight than mere "book learning."
That conviction had been helped along in the 1840s by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1841, thirty-odd years before the debut of The Pirates of Penzance, he published a key essay that helped to form America's later 19th century pro Dewey thinking, in an essay entitled "Self-Reliance." Emerson’s view was similar to that of the founders in that it rejected mere authority in bookish writings. But the founders had been lovers of learning and of books and they trusted rationality.
Their Enlightenment resistance was not to book learning, but to the unearned, empirically untested authority of priestly dogma.
