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Let’s listen to John Adams — 18 Comments

  1. I agree with you about the quotes Neo. I also believe that it is no accident that these truths about our national roots have been omitted from public education. For that matter, history was replaced with Social Studies even when I was in school (mid 1960’s) It’s the Gramscian March you have posted about in the past. I add the following quote to this discussion:

    George Washington and Religious Liberty

    In his Farewell Address, George Washington said, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism who should labour to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens.”

  2. I was in Philadelphia with my family last month and we stopped by the Independence Visitor’s Center, where we caught part of a (well-made) short film on the establishment of the Constitution. The film ended with Benjamin Franklin directly addressing the audience with a quote that has often been attributed to him. “You have a republic, if you can keep it.”

    The story is that upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. He is said to have answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

    As corny as it sounds, it was actually a bit sobering and thought-provoking to hear the character of Ben Franklin address those words to the audience sitting in that theatre, just across the mall from Independence Hall. Particularly in light of the the administration we have endured for the past six years.

  3. CV:

    I think about that Ben Franklin quote all the time. ” Whether we can keep it” has become very much in doubt during my lifetime.

    When I was in grade 1-12 (during the mid 50’s to late 60’s) I was never taught much about the Founders either (lots about the Pilgrims and Paul Revere though!) In hindsight, I agree that the Gramscian tide had already seeped into the public school system by then.

  4. I went to a small rural school in south central Iowa. In 8th grade and again in 12th we had to attend civics class. We learned the purpose behind the articles and the amendments. Our teachers taught us, as did most of our parents, that the federal government had limited responsibilities in order to check its power over the people, and that the founders warned against government tyranny.

    I know that this is true, but to a lesser extent, in Iowa schools today. Now in most school systems civics is first taught in the 6th grade.

  5. One or more of the Founders also remarked that our Republic would only work and could only survive if our citizenry were an educated, religious, diligent, and moral citizenry, statements that I never recall being brought to my attention, much less discussed, in school.

  6. And from bernie sanders :
    “the American people voted for a very different agenda from what they want and need” !!!!!
    I am still trying to get my mind around an individual that can speak like that !!!!
    To borrow from his ethnic group “Ov vy”

  7. MollyNH,

    Its the What Is Wrong With Kansas meme. The left knows what is best for you, and only big goverment can provide you with what you do not know you need you big dummy. Btw, I would pay good money see Joni Ernst debate

  8. I went to a site that had a puff piece on Bernie Sanders,
    actually had to add comment after the article after like minded lefties posted how “wonderful” bernie is
    my comment # 12 (11 prior ones praised him)
    called him a “dangerous person to anyone that wants to be a FREE individual”
    One of the commenters actually posted a remark to the effect that the FOUNDING DOCUMENTS, promise everyone a Government Provided Fair Life because of the phrase, “with justice for all” !!!!!!
    yikes ! I learned in HS US history class that the phrase means LEGAL JUSTICE for all, this woman had no clue !!! ( I took the opportunity to post an explanation, she may not wander in there again but
    others may show up & nasty mistakes like that need to be corrected .)

  9. The 9th and 10th amendments must come front and center in any effort to put dc back in the small box where it belongs. Wishful thinking I know, but that is what it will take to make life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness a reality in our daily lives and the lives of our great grandchildren.

  10. A solid point, Neo.

    Individuals can change themselves, but a group of slaves will always rise to the same level of excellence.

  11. I’ve been trying to figure out why some director / producer couldn’t figure out a way to dramatize the conflict that went into the drafting of the Constitution into a movie; something even ignorant Social Studies teachers could use in their classes. After all, they managed to make a Broadway musical out of the struggle to produce the Declaration of Independence! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1776_(musical)

  12. Neo asks,

    ” Or had the educational system already been taken over by the left, even way back then (remember, I grew up in NYC, where the teachers’ unions were already leftist)?”

    The answer is “yes”. And educational philosophy had been tending that way in the upper reaches for decades by then, if not fully implemented.

    I remember as a child in 4th or 5th grade seeing what were already old books in the back of the classroom or on the teacher’s shelves by and about John Dewey.

    I think one was “John Dewey Prophet of Democracy” or some such stirring title. Knowing nothing of what it said or what he stood for I only remember an image I saw and the positive feelings I had toward what I imagined as a kindly old New England individualist of the type portrayed in 1950s movies, and shown on TV a decade or more later when I was watching.

    Thus it was a shock when I was in college wandering in the stacks, pausing before some some work by Grosseteste on education (“He wrote on education?” I wondered) and I spotted a book that was obviously critical of Dewey.

    I could hardly look at it. It must have been written by some Jesuit Nazi. Pragmatism was as American as apple pie; as were, ipso facto, all pragmatists. Our homegrown Jamesian ideology could not be bad nor could anyone associated with it.

    Later however, as I studied Marxism, I began to run across references to American Hegelians, and Dewey’s name came cropping up.

    Eventually I actually read some of his philosophical works, and began to see the connection between his processual philosophy and his emphasis on socialization as the primary job of “education”.

    “WTF?”

    Yeah … WTF

    Rorty waxing worshipful on Dewey

    Let me now put some of my own cards on the table. … I think that the conservatives are wrong in thinking that we have either a truth-tracking faculty called ‘reason’ or a true self that education brings to consciousness. I think that the radicals are right in saying that if you take care of political, economic, cultural and academic freedom, then truth will take care of itself. But I think the radicals are wrong in believing that there is a true self that will emerge once the repressive influence of society is removed. There is no such thing as human nature, in the deep sense in which Plato and Strauss used this term. Nor is there such a thing as alienation from one’s essential humanity due to societal repression, in the deep sense made familiar by Rousseau and the Marxists. There is only the shaping of an animal into a human being by a process of socialization, followed (with luck) by the self-individualization and self-creation of that human being through his or her own later revolt against that very process. …

    The ” … notion of a species of animals gradually taking control of its own evolution by changing its environmental conditions leads Dewey to say, in good Darwinian language, that ‘growth itself is the moral end’ and that to ‘protect, sustain and direct growth is the chief ideal of education’. Dewey’s conservative critics denounced him for fuzziness, for not giving us a criterion of growth. But Dewey rightly saw that any such criterion sould cut the future down to the size of the present. Asking for such a criterion is like asking a dinosaur to specify what would make for a good mammal or asking a fourth-century Athenian to propose forms of life for the citizens of a twentieth-century industrial democracy.

    Instead of criteria, Deweyans offer inspiring narratives and fuzzy utopias. …

    https://www.google.com/url?q=http://iwcenglish1.typepad.com/documents/education_as_socialization_and_as_individualization.doc&sa=U&ei=kfJcVKqHHIGtyATC34D4Cg&ved=0CDwQFjAH&sig2=FCx8ehtPd28Zmm_VKNUkTg&usg=AFQjCNGQEcm-oPHZBUxHC3l4LLFbK-naXg

    Dewey:

    “I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs. ….

    I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.

    I believe that all reforms which rest simply upon the enactment of law, or the threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile.

    I believe that education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.

    I believe that this conception has due regard for both the individualistic and socialistic ideals. It is duly individual because it recognizes the formation of a certain character as the only genuine basis of right living. It is socialistic because it recognizes that this right character is not to be formed by merely individual precept, example, or exhortation, but rather by the influence of a certain form of institutional or community life upon the individual, and that the social organism through the school, as its organ, may determine ethical results. …

    “My Pedagogic Creed
    John Dewey
    The School Journal, Vol. LIV, No. 3
    January 1897”
    http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/library/primary-sources/my-pedagogic-creed-0

    See also, the second paragraph of 2.4 of this for some insight into the development and spread of the theoretic standpoint of communal interpenetration, so popular with the left: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-aesthetics/

  13. cas–

    I take it that you’re assuming that grateful teachers would want to show such an informative, patriotic movie in their classrooms?

    My guess if that nowadays many, perhaps most of them, would pass on what for them would be a jingoistic propaganda piece.

    There is a reason why Bill Ayres quit his futile attempts at violent revolution and, instead, went into the “education” racket, spending the last few decades authoring textbooks and creating curriculums that are widely used in many teachers colleges, and creating similarly influential model K-12 curriculums and reading lists, and his effort at mass leftist indoctrination of our teachers–at undermining the system from within–has largely succeeded.

  14. By the way, and on the same topic of education, I have been unable to find Dewey’s 1928 New Republic published “Impressions of Russia and the revolutionary world” on university and dedicated to Dewey sites. Mostly dead links.

    On what is apparently a homeschooling oriented web site, which I used of necessity earlier, did find some of it, and I think this passage should be of interest:

    “I do not see how any honest educational reformer in western countries can deny that the greatest practical obstacle in the way of introducing into schools that connection with social life which he regards as desirable is the great part played by personal competition and desire for private profit in our economic life. This fact almost makes it necessary that in important respects school activities should be protected from social contacts and connections, instead of being organized to create them.

    The Russian educational situation is enough to convert one to the idea that only in a society based upon the co-perative principle can the ideals of educational reformers be adequately carried into operation. “

    John Dewey – architect of much of modern American education.

    Paragraphing introduced for clarity.

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