Alexander the Great

Thurgood Marshall has at least two of them in New York City. Roberto Clemente, six. Leon Goldstein, the Kingsborough Community College president who died five years ago, has one. So do Garrett Morgan, African-American businessman and inventor; George Meany, builder of the modern AFLCIO; George Bristow, an opera composer; Basheer Qusim, a saxophonist; Carlos Tapia, a painter; and people you may never have heard of named James Kieran, Hector Fontanez, Kathryn Phelan, Isaac Chauncey, Silas Dutcher, and Mamie Fay.But Alexander Hamilton, the man most historians would call the most influential New Yorker ever, the most accomplished immigrant in American history – no apologies to Arnold and Theresa – and, with Jefferson, the most powerful intellectual force in the early days of the republic, doesn’t have a single city public school named after him.Sure, there are a couple of schools named after Fort Hamilton, but that’s honor once removed. The man himself has no public educational legacy in this city.The New York Historical Society’s big exhibit on Hamilton, 200 years after his death, presents us with the opportunity – the obligation, really – to ask why not, and correct the oversight swiftly.Here was an illegitimate child from the West Indies who came to New York as a teenager and soon stood in the eye of the Revolution’s hurricane. If Hamilton had served as General Washington’s chief aide during the war – and won hero status in the heat of battle – and nothing more, he would have earned a place in New York history.But that was just the start of a brilliant life and career. This is the man who, at the age of 20, before he fought for Washington, wrote “The Farmer Refuted,” which contained the immortal words, “The sacred rights of mankind…are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”He was, by most accounts, the first American leader to call for the abolition of slavery.As the first secretary of the treasury, Hamilton consolidated America’s debts and paid them fairly, established a modern financial system, and argued for an economy that included manufacturing as well as farming. This was heresy to many in the nation at the time.And he was, of course, co-author – most say lead author – of “The Federalist Papers,” not only a powerful historical document but a masterwork of political argument and, to this day, the best case on paper for our form of government.Nobody has ever better embodied the self motivated, hard-nosed, business core of New York than Hamilton. No wonder his enemies used to deride the city – which Hamilton wanted to make the nation’s capital – by calling it Hamiltonopolis.So why have the public schools ignored him for so long? Is it because, unlike many of those other names, he’s a dead white male? Or because he’s been adopted as the favorite revolutionary of free-market conservatives? Or is it some more innocuous form of neglect?Whatever your theory, something is wrong when predominantly black or Latino schools search far and wide for role models who look like their students to help “inspire” them – a predominantly Dominican school at which I used to tutor had pictures Sammy Sosa and J Lo in the hallways – and too often put giants like Hamilton in parentheses.This, sad to say, is the progressive educational philosophy taken to one of its least helpful conclusions. If a subject can’t be related to a student on a personal (read: racial or ethnic or socioeconomic) level, too often it’s deemed not worth trying to teach. Three or four spoonfuls of sugar help the medicine of knowledge go down.The irony here is that in addition to being objectively the most significant New Yorker in our history – approximately 1,000 times more important than Leon Goldstein – Hamilton happens to have been blessed with a colorful and compelling personal biography – remember the duel – that would play pretty well, even in the most pandering classrooms.So what would they teach at this Alexander Hamilton High School or Elementary? The ideas that shaped his life, his city, and his nation: entrepreneurship, innovation, and a strong, constitutional, central government. And, of course, the curriculum would have to pile on a heavy helping of old-fashioned American history.Juan Pablo Duarte, the father of the Dominican Republic, has a school named after him – P.S. 132 in Washington Heights. Shouldn’t one of the fathers of our own country get the same honor?

Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great

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