Cyphers

Wikimedia Commons

Thinking they could order ourselves, early teachers mapped good and evil into textbook geographies, plotting America as God’s bounty, pre-colonial societies as a void. They curated a literary canon of honesty and virtue, diligence and patriotism, hard work: Washington Irving and Hamlet’s soliloquy and the Sermon on the Mount. Not to mention arithmetic, hefty word problems meditating on frugality, the benefits of saving for old age; and history, which told of the goodness…