Free Republic

There is a constant stream of books and articles telling us, often strenuously and at great length, that the American Founders got the ideas they used for the Founding from the British philosopher John Locke. The Founders would be puzzled by this ongoing effort. They knew different. Locke's Two Treatises of Government appeared in 1690. The articles by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay that became The Federalist began appearing in American newspapers in 1787. Quite a lot had happened during that intervening century. The greatest development of all during that time was the onset of the American Enlightenment, that explosion of...

Petrus Paulus Vergerius, (1370-1444) educator, doctor of medicine and canon law wrote what has become known as the preeminent Renaissance treatise on education wherein he asserted that "what can we do better than gather our books around us... to see unfolded before us vast stores of knowledge, for our delight, it may be, or for our inspiration." Every educator has bemoaned the struggle to fill heads with knowledge and to that end, in my English composition class this term, the students worked on deciphering the rhetorical devices of John F. Kennedy's Inaugural speech. Most had never been taught about communism...