Apprentices to SuperNature by Taylor Henry
From Provocations V1: Educating for Peace in an Age of Artificial Intelligence
Written by Taylor Henry
The Luddites
The night of April 11, 1812, was cloaked in moonless darkness as George Mellor, dubbed “King Ludd,” gathered his men at the Dumb Steeple near Rawfolds Mill.
Anxious breaths clouded in the frosty air as they prepared their tools—heavy iron-headed sledges known as “Enochs.” Inside, William Cartwright fortified the mill, readying muskets and bracing for an attack. At midnight, a sudden volley of musket fire erupted, marking the beginning of a fierce twenty-minute struggle. Dawn revealed 291 panes shattered, the main door hacked to splinters, yet the frames inside still intact. Rawfolds had held. But the cost of protest had been set in gunpowder and glass: within weeks 12,000 troops flooded the district; within months fourteen Luddites were hanged at York Castle.
This violence was rooted deeply in economic desperation. Britain’s textile exports had plummeted due to Napoleon’s Continental System and retaliatory British trade restrictions. Rising taxes and wartime inflation exacerbated hardships, driving skilled textile workers to destitution. New wide-frame machines displaced skilled croppers and framework-knitters, replacing them with cheaper, untrained child labor, undermining traditional apprenticeship practices and destroying livelihoods.
Three times in thirty-four years the knitters had petitioned Westminster, including 311 pages of testimony in 1808 alone, pleading for a licensed frame count and a wage floor. Committees expressed sympathy, then adjourned. “Collective bargaining by riot,” the historian Eric Hobsbawm would one day write, but for Mellor and his mates the riot was collective bargaining by necessity. When Parliament prices human hands at zero and muskets at whatever it takes, oak doors become negotiating tables. The story begins not with hatred of machines, but with a plea that the people who profit from them remember whose fingers thread the cloth and whose children need the loaf.
Montessori’s Education and Peace in Copenhagen
In May of 1937, clouds drift above the new copper roof of Copenhagen’s parliament house. Two hundred delegates from twenty-nine nations arrive. Noticeably absent are delegates from Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union.
Inside the vaulted hall, a woman stands at the rostrum in a black shawl, hair pinned with the economy of wartime travel. Three summers earlier, Mussolini shuttered most Montessori classrooms; the previous July she and her son slipped out of Barcelona hours before Franco’s artillery reached the city limits. Now, Maria Montessori steadies her notes, waits for the congress bell, and addresses the hushed semicircle of diplomats, teachers, and reporters.
Her mezzo-soprano settles over marble and microphones. “Education is the best weapon for peace,” (28) she encourages the hall to imagine disarmament forged in classrooms rather than 1 arsenals. Pens scratch. A Danish cabinet minister shifts uneasily, mindful of the re-armament bill moving through the Folketing next door.
Montessori knows every note of the discord she is naming. Since 1934 she has watched authoritarian regimes appropriate schools for propaganda, and in Copenhagen she warns that education under dictatorship imprisons both teacher and child. The week’s newspapers, sold on the plaza outside, show new photographs of Guernica’s charred marketplace and headlines of Japanese bombers descending on Shanghai.
The keynote is more blueprint than lament. Cities, factories, radios, and airplanes represent the “conquests of man on to a level beyond its surface” (22). Unless guided by a yet-to-be-developed morality, this third dimension will collapse upon the species that built it. Her proposal is audacious: every government should establish a Ministry of the Child and join the “Social Party of the Child,” pledging budgets, research, and legislative authority equal to any war office.
Where the Luddites once petitioned their government for a living wage, Montessori petitions the world for a science not of conquest but of cooperation.
“An education capable of saving humanity is no small undertaking; it involves the spiritual development of man, the enhancement of his value as an individual, and the preparation of young people to understand the times in which they live. The secret is this: making it possible for man to become the master of the mechanical environment that oppresses him today. Man the producer must become the master of production.” (30)