How do they think that America, in just 200 years or so, came from using the crude tools of their ancestors to putting a man on the moon?
Teach children that they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable potential and rights, arouse their enthusiasm for learning, their curiosity and thirst for knowledge, teach them to read, write, and do basic arithmetic, then stand back and watch them achieve!!
That's what teachers did across the wilderness of America for its first 100 years.
For children, the true "common core" of their educational experience should be focused on teaching them of their value as individuals and the principles for preserving their Creator-endowed rights to "pursue happiness."
The following is excerpted from an essay entitled, Will the Great American Experiment Succeed?":
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people...said John Adams. And Thomas Jefferson declared: "Whenever the people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government...The boys of the rising generation are to be the men of the next, and the sole guardians of the principles we deliver over to them."
Early generations of Americans were taught the principles upon which their nation had developed its Constitution. The Founders believed that the real security for liberty would be a people who could understand those ideas which are necessary to preserve liberty and who could perceive approaching threats to their freedom. For that reason, a primary purpose of the schools was to teach boys and girls to read and write so that they could study the ideas of freedom. A popular textbook for children was entitled "Catechism on the Constitution." Written by Arthur J. Stansbury and published in 1828, it contained questions and answers on the principles of the American political system.
Tocqueville's Democracy In America , written in the 1830's, described America's aggressive process of universal education on the Constitution and the political process:
"It cannot be doubted that in the United States the instruction of the people powerfully contributes to the support of the democratic republic; and such must always be the case, I believe, where the in struction which enlightens the understanding is not separated from the moral education ...." The American citizen, he said, "..will inform you what his rights are and by what means he exercises them .. In the United States, politics are the end and aim of education ... every citizen receives the elementary notions of human knowledge; he is taught, moreover, the doctrines and the evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of its Constitution .... it is extremely rare to find a man imperfectly acquainted with all these things, and a person wholly ignorant of them is a sort of phenomenon .... It is difficult to imagine the incredible rapidity with which thought cir culates in the midst of these deserts [wilderness]. I do not think that so much intellectual activity exists in the most enlightened and populous districts of France."
If you were to examine him in English and French poetry, I know not where you would find anybody his superior... He has translated Virgil's Aeneid... the whole of Sallust and Tacitus' Agricola... a great part of Horace, some of Ovid, and some of Caesar's Commentaries... besides Tully's [Cicero's] Orations...In Greek his progress has not been equal; yet has he studied morsels of Aristotle's Politics, in Plutarch's Lives, and Lucian's Dialogues, The Choice of Hercules in Xenophon, and lately he has gone through several books in Homer's Iliad.
In mathematics I hope he will pass muster. In the course of the last year... I have spent my evenings with him. We went with some accuracy through the geometry of the Preceptor, the eight books of Simpson's Euclid in Latin,.. We went through plane geometry... algebra, and the decimal fractions, arithmetical and geometrical proportions... I then attempted a sublime flight and endeavored to give him some idea of the differential method of calculations...[and] Sir Isaac Newton; but alas, it is thirty years since I thought of mathematics.
Letter from John Adams to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, former tutor to John Quincy Adams, pp. 324-325
-PJ
So well said.
The concept of free public education has really not been good for us. It might seem on it’s face to offer so much more than when you actually had to work for it, and oft times the work on the farm or work to support a family or elders, got in the way of further education.
Now education is mandated until a certain age, and the incentive has been removed to really apply oneself, unless one is especially motivated. Everyone (taxpayers) has to pay for everyone else’s education through taxation. So very few are truly motivated to grab what in the old days was there but you had to want to get it or you could have faced a life of destitution or menial labor.
The ride today is protected from the reality our forefathers faced. EBT cards, Welfare for all, the social safety net all designed to soften reality and provided even for the unmotivated the lazy the unfortunate, the downtrodden, the bums, baby factories, the fatherless, the parentless, the social experimenters, fill in the blank.