Aristotle spoke of people who, by their natures, are slaves. American educators are doing their best to make slavery part of their students’ natures.
Ironically, Jean Jacques Rousseau, a liberal-progressive of the 1789 French Revolutionary era, spoke of freeing men from the chains of social custom and morality, forged, in his view, by Judeo-Christianity. Yet it is today’s liberal-progressive educators who have assumed the role of blacksmith to hammer anew the chains of ignorance and slavery onto our children.
When the British North American colonists fought for their independence in 1776 and when they wrote the Constitution in 1787, equality meant equal economic opportunity, unfettered by government, to improve their lives and to pass along the fruit of their labors to their children and grandchildren.
The focus was upon political and economic freedom. Today the focus is upon imagined and undeserved rights to enjoy the fruits of others’ labors.
Those rights exist only to the extent that government arbitrarily confiscates the property and freedoms of others and redistributes them in the name of social justice. In short, rights, as opposed to liberties, cannot exist outside government that is to some degree tyrannical.
Today’s doctrine - liberal-progressive-socialism - is what Hilaire Belloc called The Servile State. Today’s educational focus is what Friedrich Hayek called The Road to Serfdom.
Jane S. Shaw, Executive Vice President at the J.W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, North Carolina, alerted me to an article titled Ignoring the Ideological Elephant in the Room.
It describes one aspect of the process by which today’s college professors, the bomb-throwing student radicals of the late 1960s and early 70s and their acolytes and progeny, fasten the chains of political and philosophical ignorance upon callow youth.
It also highlights the mischief arising from the ahistorical view that college education is little more than preparation for a high-paying job. Unthinking voters are led to believe that the essential need in education is spending more money, without regard for the purposes to which the spending is put.
Key quotations from the article:
The state university system recently invested considerable time and money in the UNC Tomorrow Commission to see how North Carolina’s public colleges can “best meet the needs of the state and its people over the next 20 years.” The commission placed particular emphasis on how to provide for the future prosperity of North Carolina.
They traveled the state and spoke to hundreds of people from all walks of life. Yet one of the most important questions was not asked: is what we are teaching our students in the classroom going to produce a prosperous and free North Carolina?
...It wasn’t that long ago when most people understood that there was a real threat to freedom posed by the collectivist philosophy. The tendency for countries ruled by collective regimes to condemn many of their citizens to forced labor camps was well documented in books like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” an expose of the former Soviet Union’s treatment of political prisoners, and films like “The Killing Fields,” which chronicled how half of Cambodia’s population was either killed or driven into exile through a brutal system of “permanent revolution.”
Today, many people seem to feel that any danger from collectivist ideologies ended when the Berlin Wall was dismantled in 1989. Yet Russia is returning to the more authoritarian ways of the old Soviet Union. The educational systems in the supposedly benevolent welfare-state countries of France and Germany now teach elementary and high school students “that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral”...
When children indoctrinated to such beliefs from an early age reach their majority, they are likely to produce a society where the factors that determine prosperity, such as innovation and the accumulation of capital, will be eyed with suspicion or punished.
In the United States, these ideas have found long refuge in our universities, and their adherents are thriving. Of what value is an education, when the best that can be hoped is that the students sitting in their classrooms will ignore their lessons?
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