Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Boston makes history... again


Ok, so maybe Boston didn't play as big of role is this revolution as it did for the one back in 1776, but there is definitely something beautiful and appropriate about seeing the state of Massachusetts be the first state to send an overwhelming message to those leaders who would fundamentally change the country that was born in Boston, Massachusetts.

Socially and culturally America has been steadily leaving its intellectual and philosophical roots since Woodrow Wilson's presidency. But this evolution got fasttracked in the sixties and has culminated in the presidency of the first post-American president, Barack Obama. By post-American I mean a president whose rejection of the Founding Fathers beliefs is conscious and deliberate. All of Obama's influences and favorite books listed in both his autobiographies are writers and thinkers who have rejected the Founder's ideas for a more progressive, socialist notion of human governance and society. Fair enough. They may be right.

Unfortunately, the dissolution of these ideas has been subversive and dishonest, rather than forthright and open. Leftists and radicals began the slow process of commandeering our educational institutions for their own purposes back in the mid-twentieth century. Instead of pursuing the classical liberal approach of western thought their approach the education was solidly Marxist and totalitarian. Progressive education reformer John Dewey noted, " Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society where everyone is interdependent." Dewey and the rest of the progressive left envision a society of good distinctly and in many foundational ways, antithetical to the society of independence and liberty the Founders wanted.

But rather than carry this debate openly and honestly, they followed a policy that subverted the values of the Founders slowly and in such a way that the average American was never given the chance for independent thought. Simply think of the average college leftist radical to understand how the counter American revolution worked its way into the minds and hearts of the average American. In the college leftist we see plainly what we don't see as plainly in the every day American who has been conditioned to think of "health care" as a right by the establishment institutions around them.

It would be wonderful if the left has actually jumped the gun and awakened enough Americans who remember an education that was classical and can actually begin telling younger Americans that there are other ways of thinking about themselves and their society than just standard leftist orthodoxy. Unfortunately, all of the energy and excitement surrounding the Scott Brown election shows no sign of being transferred to the longer and more arduous battle of reforming our educational institutions. But that is ground zero in the battle for America's soul.

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