Preserving Liberty Through Education

"Educate & inform the whole mass of the people. . . . They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty."  - Thomas Jefferson

  Click on graphic to enlarge

The above graphic prepared by Catrin Wigfall, Education Policy Fellow @ Center of the American Experiment, shows a majority of government schooled students in Minnesota can't proficiently read or do math - it is the latest example of what Jefferson warned us about over two centuries ago.  The graphic shows per pupil spending increasing with student achievement in reading & math decreasing meaning Minnesota taxpayers are not getting their money's worth.  Sixty-four percent of high school juniors can't do math & 48.5 % of sophomores can't read @ grade level in Minnesota.

Click here for a thorough analysis of the data written by Ms. Wigfall, & here to hear an American Experiment podcast including easily debunked excuses for why the test results were so dismal & proposed solutions for improving the poor test results with John Hinderaker & Ms. Wigfall.

Progressives all over the country have been very successful in replacing the teaching of reading, writing, & arithmetic in our schools with indoctrination of little more than kindergarten aged children learning about drag queen shows & gender identification - & it shows with terrible results like those on the above graphic.  This indoctrination has expanded, using critical race theory & the 1619 Project, from very young children to all of K-12 schools, colleges, businesses, every level of government, & even the U.S. military.

Closely related to wanting to improve America's failing academic record is parents' determination to remove sexually explicit books from school libraries.  On September 12 the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing examining what progressives call book bans, claiming that to not make the objectionable books available discriminates against homosexual, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning people.  Click here to hear Louisiana Senator John Kennedy read out loud excerpts from pornographic books "All Boys Aren't Blue" & "Gender Queer"  followed by a discussion with witnesses representing the LGBTQ community.  Removing these types of books is not a case of replacing indoctrination parents don't like with indoctrination they do like, but rather is a common sense response for having their children taught this filth instead of math, reading, science, & civics.

Now banning books in a school library where a significant percentage of the students can't read seems pointless except the illiterates could still look @ the pictures or have literate students read the books to them.

Many progressives ask what harm it does to give their points of view to students so that the students can hear all sides & decide for themselves what to believe.

But we never taught that the moon is made of green cheese so why would we want to teach something equally as fallacious as the historical inaccuracies & deliberate lies of the 1619 Project.

We hear AOC's claims about climate change ending the world twelve years after she presented this theory in 2019 & yet she is not @ all concerned about the trust funds of Social Security or Medicare running out of money about the same time as her forecast for the world ending.  It won't be long before we find out if the progressives pushed the wrong problem because the trust funds shortages will have more of a negative impact on the lives of tens of millions of senior citizens than the so-called climate change emergencies ever will.

Why did BO buy a multimillion dollar ocean front property with forecasts of threats of flooding from every weatherman?  Is somebody pulling our leg?

These are not debates like the Federalists & Anti-Federalists had about ratifying the Constitution that resulted in the Bill of Rights.  The progressives' ideas more resemble the arguments made & accepted by the characters, other than the little child, in the fairy tale "The Emperor's New Clothes."

Thank heaven for educational organizations like 1) Center of the American Experiment whose mission is to build a culture of prosperity for Minnesota & the nation by championing the values of liberty & economic opportunity through unparalleled research & grassroots activism, 2) Hillsdale College who remains independent, not accepting a single penny of state or federal taxpayer funding, while presenting marvelous online courses given by their campus professors, distributing millions of copies each month of their Imprimis publications written by renowned scholars to households & businesses, & supporting K-12 schools across the country, both public charter & private, by providing an American classical curriculum free of charge of American history & civics lessons to a growing network of educators & homeschoolers through The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum, 3) Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) whose mission is to inspire college students to discover, embrace, & advance the principles & virtues that make America free & prosperous through their network of mentoring professors throughout the country that provides an education & tight community of lasting influence over & above what is expected from any particular university so that ISI's graduates become defenders of the principles of liberty & an effective advocate for timeless principles - graduates include Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, Reason magazine editor Katherine Mangu-Ward, Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn, and Heritage Foundation founder Ed Feulner, & 4) American Council Of Trustees & Alumni (ACTA) whose independent work is committed to academic freedom, excellence, & accountability @ American colleges & universitities - like their annual assessment of the core academic requirements of over 1,100 of our nation's colleges & universities entitled What Will They Learn?, an indispensable guide for starting to select a college that grades each school from A to F.

Now it's wonderful that K-12 schools have the above organizations to call on for help - but there is more.  Thanks to my friend & colleague in liberty Lawson Bader for letting me know that the state of Florida has made the decision to use the curriculum of the Prager University Foundation (known as PragerU) across all state run schools.  Like the four organizations above PragerU is an educational organization that promotes American values through creative free online videos promoting conservative viewpoints on various political, economic, & sociological topics.  Most readers of this blog are familiar with PragerU's online videos that I present from time to time, most recently featuring Candace Owens' video regarding the history of slavery.  PragerU is working on similar arrangements with other states.  Click here to hear Dennis Prager & Marissa Streit's fireside chat to discuss their new venture in Florida schools. 

All of the above educational organizations would make Jefferson very pleased because they each do their part to ensure the preservation of our liberty.  Jefferson believed that only educated citizens could make the American experiment in self-government succeed.  He placed education as the foundation of the self-government of the American republic & really every household's prosperity.  Sound self-government & prosperity will not exist very long in a poorly educated Society.  A tyrannical government, that can come into power only if the citizenry is uneducated, ignorant, & unsophisticated, will restrain & deprive the "whole mass of the people '' their liberties - the goal of the progressives.  The above five organizations contribute to the real education of Americans by sustaining, supporting, & defending our principles of freedom.

America was founded on the principles of limited government, personal responsibility, & free enterprise.  Progressives are transforming these principles by instituting unlimited government with no personal responsibility for anything - like releasing people of commitments such as repaying student loans or paying people not to work.  The resulting lethargy destroys free enterprise because we have less & less people making or providing services for anything of value - a sure instigator of crippling hyperinflation.  Lenin knew that debauchery of the currency was the surest way to overturn the existing basis of a stable Society when he said that "the process engages all of the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, & does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."

This is where education & knowing a little something comes in.