How did America go from being a country where individual freedom and liberty was cherished and traditional values were prized to a place where radical liberalism runs rampant without being rebuked and threatens both freedom and our national heritage?
I would suggest that the biggest problem is not corrupt leadership. Don’t get me wrong—corrupt leaders are a huge problem in both parties. However, the Founding Fathers expected that leaders could become corrupt and attempt to gain power for themselves. They lived under such leaders before declaring independence. That’s why they wrote the Constitution, to protect the people by limiting the power of government.
Did the Founders foresee a day like today, in which the Constitution would be virtually ignored, or the President would teach that the Constitution is a moldable document we can interpret however we want, and incomplete because it doesn’t teach Marxist principals? Could the Founding Fathers have anticipated this? I would say, to slightly alter a famous phrase of our President, “Yes, they did.” America’s Founders trusted in two things to protect the people and defend their Constitutional freedoms: public education and the media. Yet, as we shall see, both of these trusted tools of liberty’s preservation have become weapons of assault on the very people they were established to protect.
Education: It’s not enough just to say that our public education system was established to teach kids how to read and write. The reason it was created was so that the principals of the Constitution could be preserved from one generation to another, which requires an informed and educated public. As James Madison said, “A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.”
George Washington put it this way: “A primary object…should be the education of our youth in the science of government. What duty [is] more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of liberties of the country?”
Not only was the public school system supposed to teach about the Constitution, it was also to teach how to interpret it. Public schools were always supposed to teach people how to interpret it according to the Founder’s intent. As Thomas Jefferson said, “On every question of construction, [let us] carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.”
Now, however, public schools have largely abandoned the principals of the Constitution, the spirit of the ratification, and have become liberalism’s primary vehicle of entrapment, handicapping our young folks and suppressing freedom’s expansion by abdicating its responsibility to teach our core American values and history. The effect has been that the treasure of our nation’s founding principals have been buried under a mountain of shameful neglect and produced a population that knows how to read and write but can’t discern between wrong and right. According to the Founding Fathers, a nation that doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong is no more suitable to govern itself than a nation that can’t read.
It’s no wonder America has deteriorated. Our public school system’s colossal failure of its primary objective has produced a nation that is largely ignorant and ill equipped to rebuke the flawed and dangerous liberal ideologies that they’ve been taught. Such a population, being unfit to govern itself, is ripe to be taken over. Instead of being ruled by the will of the people, we are ruled by a class of some people who are increasingly unsympathetic toward freedom, taking an entire nation captive without a fight, since we lack the knowledge to discern our fall into oppression.
If you don’t know what your rights are, you can’t complain when they’re taken from you. Our public education has intentionally withheld that vital knowledge of our rights, liberties and freedoms, and maliciously made us susceptible to the very types of leaders from which our Founders fled and eventually tried to spare us the trial of serving.
Public School Failure
Posted by C2C on 9/30/09 • Categorized as Commentary, Email Newsletter
Teach them the truth!
How did America go from being a country where individual freedom and liberty was cherished and traditional values were prized to a place where radical liberalism runs rampant without being rebuked and threatens both freedom and our national heritage?
I would suggest that the biggest problem is not corrupt leadership. Don’t get me wrong—corrupt leaders are a huge problem in both parties. However, the Founding Fathers expected that leaders could become corrupt and attempt to gain power for themselves. They lived under such leaders before declaring independence. That’s why they wrote the Constitution, to protect the people by limiting the power of government.
Did the Founders foresee a day like today, in which the Constitution would be virtually ignored, or the President would teach that the Constitution is a moldable document we can interpret however we want, and incomplete because it doesn’t teach Marxist principals? Could the Founding Fathers have anticipated this? I would say, to slightly alter a famous phrase of our President, “Yes, they did.” America’s Founders trusted in two things to protect the people and defend their Constitutional freedoms: public education and the media. Yet, as we shall see, both of these trusted tools of liberty’s preservation have become weapons of assault on the very people they were established to protect.
Education: It’s not enough just to say that our public education system was established to teach kids how to read and write. The reason it was created was so that the principals of the Constitution could be preserved from one generation to another, which requires an informed and educated public. As James Madison said, “A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.”
George Washington put it this way: “A primary object…should be the education of our youth in the science of government. What duty [is] more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of liberties of the country?”
Not only was the public school system supposed to teach about the Constitution, it was also to teach how to interpret it. Public schools were always supposed to teach people how to interpret it according to the Founder’s intent. As Thomas Jefferson said, “On every question of construction, [let us] carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.”
Now, however, public schools have largely abandoned the principals of the Constitution, the spirit of the ratification, and have become liberalism’s primary vehicle of entrapment, handicapping our young folks and suppressing freedom’s expansion by abdicating its responsibility to teach our core American values and history. The effect has been that the treasure of our nation’s founding principals have been buried under a mountain of shameful neglect and produced a population that knows how to read and write but can’t discern between wrong and right. According to the Founding Fathers, a nation that doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong is no more suitable to govern itself than a nation that can’t read.
It’s no wonder America has deteriorated. Our public school system’s colossal failure of its primary objective has produced a nation that is largely ignorant and ill equipped to rebuke the flawed and dangerous liberal ideologies that they’ve been taught. Such a population, being unfit to govern itself, is ripe to be taken over. Instead of being ruled by the will of the people, we are ruled by a class of some people who are increasingly unsympathetic toward freedom, taking an entire nation captive without a fight, since we lack the knowledge to discern our fall into oppression.
If you don’t know what your rights are, you can’t complain when they’re taken from you. Our public education has intentionally withheld that vital knowledge of our rights, liberties and freedoms, and maliciously made us susceptible to the very types of leaders from which our Founders fled and eventually tried to spare us the trial of serving.
(Next Time: The Failure of the Media)