Evidently, the Chinese are actually not the source of the curse “May you live in interesting times.” But whatever its source, that curse seems to have landed on us in double strength. Our time is more than interesting—it is revolutionary. The revolution you and I are living through is a counter-revolution; it is un-doing the America which was made at the founding.
A serious scholar has presented the un-making of America with startling clarity in a Frontpage article, and another serious scholar has told the story of the making of America with unprecedented precision and in astonishing detail. Together, they tell the tale of where we are, where we came from, and, unless we manage to change America’s direction, where America is headed.
If you missed Bruce Thornton’s recent posting here at Frontpage about what has happened to education in America, I encourage you to read it.
“Today our educational institutions are grubby, rent-seeking businesses, and propaganda organs for illiberal, incoherent ideologies based on the “higher nonsense” that has captured “higher education,” and from there trickled down into K-12 schools.”
That was not the case when Thornton’s university teaching career began in 1977. Today, a serious scholar like Bruce Thornton is no longer welcome. Real scholars have been replaced by propagandists, as America’s universities abandoned their reason for existing.
What is astonishing about this transformation is how quickly it happened. In the span of a single career, America’s educational institutions were transformed. The “higher nonsense” replaced the best that has been known and thought so rapidly that it was fully accomplished before most people noticed. Americans continued donating to their alma mater without realizing it was no longer even the same kind of place it had been when they were there.
The consequences of this revolution are grim, terrible, horrific: the un-making of America. As Thornton writes,
“No wonder the majority of the products of those failed institutions, like Generation Z, support letting murderers go free, censoring speech that challenges their ‘stock notions and habits,; joining the anti-carbon ‘green’ cult, and subjecting children to drag-queen shows and inappropriate sexual curricula.”
These young people have been conditioned to reject America and, beyond that, even to reject simple common sense. The American republic it has been our privilege to know cannot survive a population mis-educated in this way.
We should have known that to allow our schools to be captured as they have been would be fatal to the Republic. After all, Abraham Lincoln warned us: “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” And Lincoln’s warning aside, it’s just common sense. Americans abandoned common sense when we abandoned our schools to people who hate America.
Amazingly, America’s original design was also the result of a revolution in education.
Andrew Browning’s magnificent new book, Schools for Statesmen: The Divergent Educations of the Constitution’s Framers makes that clear. From the book’s jacket:
“Schools for Statesmen explores the fifty-five individual Framers of the Constitution and argues that their different educations help explain their divergent positions at the 1787 Constitutional Convention…The more traditional schools that focused on Greek and Latin classics (Oxford, Harvard, Yale, William and Mary) were deeply conservative institutions resistant to change. But the Scottish colleges and the newer American schools (Princeton, Philadelphia, King’s College) introduced students to a Scottish Enlightenment curriculum that fostered more radical, forward-thinking leaders…Nearly all the delegates who took the lead at the convention had been educated at the newer, innovative colleges…”
A revolution in education profoundly shaped America. And that revolution happened so rapidly that those at the Constitutional Convention who benefited from it got an education that had only recently become available, just as Generation Z got a mis-education that has only recently become available.
Scots—especially John Witherspoon, the President of Princeton and James Madison’s mentor—brought the ideas to America that defined the America we know. Educators trained in Scotland transformed the content and the manner of higher education in America. That transformation made America and changed the world.
The Scottish common sense thinkers had a decisive influence on the Declaration, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers. It was from them that the Founders got the idea of unalienable rights and it was from them they learned to think in terms of self-evident truths.
The impact of the Scottish common sense thinkers on the American founding, once known to virtually every American, has been largely forgotten. The tragedy of that forgetting inspired me to write my book, Common Sense Nation. I made every effort to tell the whole story as briefly as possible, to provide you, as I wrote in the preface, “the maximum of understanding in the minimum of pages.” I examined the Declaration, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers. Professor Browning takes a different approach. He keeps his focus on the Constitutional Convention. Instead of striving for brevity, he tells that story in 278 pages of close text and 45 pages of notes of astonishing detail.
Books that make the case for the importance of the Scottish common sense thinkers to the American founding, books like my brief book Common Sense Nation and Browning’s extraordinarily thorough Schools For Statesmen, are rare but very important. They are important because the American system, once so robust, is now evidently breaking down around us. That breakdown is rooted in a counter-revolution in American education. Our political elite and our educational elite have been taught to reject the American idea, and for much longer than many of us are ready to admit, young Americans have been taught in schools and colleges to reject America. We have one political party dedicated to getting rid of the Constitution as fast as they can, and an opposition party that does not seem to know how to restore or even defend the Constitution. Consequently, if we the people are going to rise to the challenge of getting America back on track, we must take it on ourselves to reclaim the American idea.
Robert Curry serves on the board of directors of the Claremont Institute and is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea and Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World, both from Encounter Books.
Kasandra says
Two words: Paulo Freire. Look him up (but not on Wikipedia).
Jason P says
I started reading Browning’s book as you know I love this stuff. While you and I have some disagreements on the Declaration (the 2nd paragraph is a summary of Locke’s “Second Treatise”) I appreciate the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment that you yourself have brought to our attention over the years.
The younger generation at the Constitutional Convention were influenced by the newer colleges bringing the Scottish influence while the older generation present at the Declaration shows the traditional natural rights philosophy and Classical Latin college education. Let’s remember that Adams and Jefferson, who were on the committee to draft the Declaration, weren’t at the Constitutional Convention. The youngsters Hamilton & Madison took the lead defending it.
This makes me wonder about a shift in thought and emphasis from the Declaration to the Constitution. Indeed, the anti-Federalists “smelt a rat” to quote Patrick Henry. It was the anti-Federalists, the older “natural rights” faction, that worried about centralized power and pushed for the Bill of Rights, which many of us see as the crowning achievement of the Constitution. Madison at first opposed the Bill of Rights but later became its champion.
I’ll have to research this to see if my hypothesis holds water. Keep the good books and articles coming.
robert curry says
Dear Jason P.,
Thank you for your friendly, intelligent, and thoughtful comment !
I am delighted to learn that you are reading Browning’s brilliant book. It is a rich source of the sort of information which, I reckon, gets you thinking. Just enjoy !
And then please let me know the outcome of your thinking about these matters.
With best wishes
Dr2xFour says
2+2=5
Dat cloes enuff
Yu past goe tu de nex clast
We are well and truly screwed!
THX 1138 says
“In the history of mankind it is EARLIER than we think.” – Ayn Rand
In a free society as the Founding Fathers intended America to be there would be no government schools or government funded tuition, scholarships, or vouchers. Thomas Jefferson made a fatal error there.
The Constitution itself had and has fatal errors just waiting for powerlusters to exploit. The fact is that the Founding Fathers only began a radical, philosophical, experiment in freedom and liberty but the full and complete philosophical and moral foundation for freedom and liberty had not yet been discovered or formulated even by the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Hence, the reason why the Founding Fathers could not resolve the philosophical and fatal contradiction between the Christian moral code of altruism and the secular moral code of rational selfishness.
The moral code of rational selfishness was not only not formulated by 1776 it wasn’t even conceivable that selfishness, properly defined and rationally formulated, was the foundational virtue of freedom, liberty, and capitalism. For the vast majority (99%) of philosophers today it still is not conceivable. When it comes to morality the West is still living in the Christian Dark Ages.
THX 1138 says
“The Americans were political revolutionaries but not ethical revolutionaries. Whatever their partial (and largely implicit) acceptance of the principle of ethical egoism, they remained explicitly within the standard European tradition, avowing their primary allegiance to a moral code stressing philanthropic service and social duty. Such was the American conflict: an impassioned politics presupposing one kind of ethics, within a cultural atmosphere professing the sublimity of an opposite kind of ethics.” – Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels: The End Of Freedom In America”
“America’s inner contradiction was the altruist-collectivist ethics. Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal.” – Ayn Rand
THX 1138 says
Mr. Curry, I strongly suggest, no I INSIST, that you read Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff’s book ““The Ominous Parallels: The End Of Freedom In America”, if you haven’t already.
It will explain why the abandoning of reason for unreason by the German philosophers following Kant and his attack on reason, “The Critique Of Pure Reason” in 1781, led to Nazi Germany. Kantian-Hegelian philosophy began to invade America universities in the 19th century. Kantian-Hegelian philosophy has been the dominant philosophy of the West and America since the late 19th century. Dr. Peikoff will show you the uncanny parallels between Weimar Germany and America today.
We are living in the Kantian-Hegelian Age of the Counter-Renaissance, the Counter Age of Enlightenment. The Kantian Age of Unreason.
“I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” – Immanuel Kant
THX 1138 says
“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The Rights of Man are NOT self-evident. The virtues of freedom, liberty, individualism, equal rights, and capitalism are NOT self-evident. To discover them requires a long and complex philosophical journey.
Is God self-evident? Does he even exist? He has never been proven to exist. God is not self-evident.
“Nothing is self-evident except the material of sensory perception…. When we speak of “direct perception” or “direct awareness,” we mean the perceptual level. Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident. The knowledge of sensations as components of percepts is not direct, it is acquired by man much later: it is a scientific, CONCEPTUAL discovery.” – Ayn Rand
Spurwing Plover says
Less like Education and more like Brainwashing by the NEA and the Globalists with their leftists ideas we were warned about this by Senator McCarthy time to seed his warnings