For decades there has been a vital battle over education raging in our nation. And if we lose this battle, we may ultimately lose our beloved country.
This in part from Jerry Newcombe on wndnewscenter.org.
Those of us from a Conservative upbringing believe the left views the idea of teaching children about love of country as an undesirable goal.
In the Federalist, Joy Pullman recently called attention to a critique from the left of classics-oriented charter schools. The Washington Post wrote the critique, and it implies that teaching patriotism is suspect.
‘Suspect of what?’ I ask. Suspect of showing respect when respect is due, suspect of understanding the value of prayer, suspect of knowing the difference between right and wrong, and suspect of feeling gratitude for the abundance with which America and Americans have been blessed?
According to the Washington Post, schools that focused on personal responsibility, love of God and country, America’s founders, and the like, are:
[D]esigned to attract Christian nationalists with specific imagery and curriculum.
The newspaper cites one example:
‘Back to basic schools’ use red, white, and blue school colors, patriotic logos, and pictures of the Founding Fathers, and use terms such as virtue, patriotism and, sometimes, outright references to religion.
To paraphrase the author Jerry Newcombe:
“According to the left, if we talk positively about America’s founders,
we are sending a bad message—especially to our youth.”
An untold number of books have been written and documentaries produced—some are listed in the added links—on the settling and the founding eras of American history and the American experiment. The sacrifices of so many of those who created this great country are amazing. We should be grateful for the freedoms they have bestowed upon us.
Our forefathers famously wrote in the preamble to the Constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution.
George Washington led a ragtag army of farmers and merchants who were determined—with God’s help—to defend their God-given rights. And they were determined to teach the next generation, and the next, and the next of their many sacrifices so that these rights and freedom will not one day be easily relinquished.
During the American War for Independence, George Washington and his army had to flee from Philadelphia. They spent the winter of 1777-1778 in Valley Forge, about 25 miles away. Many of them had no shoes or boots in the freezing cold. Some of them left bloody footprints in the snow. George Washington led them and prayed for them. And his prayers were ultimately answered.
But to tell future children about these sacrifices of our nation’s founders are essentially, according to the Washington Post:
[P]art of a strategy by right-wing Christians
to undermine secular public education.
And why do so many elites hate America?
Is it because our forefathers practiced slavery at the time our nation was formed? The concept of one man owning another was indeed a great evil. However, that was an evil that existed virtually everywhere in the known world at that point in time and for millennia prior. What is truly astounding is not that America practiced slavery like all other nations, but that our beloved country rid itself of that evil.
Even now—in this the twenty-first century—there are an estimated 50 million people living in slavery around the world. But in America, slavery is long gone. The founders enshrined the principles of God-given rights that ultimately overthrew slavery. And it was those principles to which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. appealed during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
America’s founders declared that our rights come from the Creator. In 1955, President Eisenhower said:
Without God, there could be no American form of Government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first—the most basic—expression of Americanism.
Even when America fails to live up to its creed—that our Creator has endowed us with certain unalienable rights—it is still a good creed. As Dr. King said in his classic speech:
I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.’
Surely, we had made great advances since Dr. King uttered those words in 1963. However, the globalist agenda throughout the course of the last two decades—perhaps longer—has served to turn us away from our path of what is right and true. We have become a nation that is terribly out of balance. If ever we were approaching a more even distribution of goodness, that state of existence has become further lost to us.
In a different context, the great British Christian writer C.S. Lewis observed:
In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
Again, our beloved country now appears to be more out of balance than perhaps ever before.
To paraphrase the author Jerry Newcombe:
“Those who mock love of country, must not be surprised
they have created young Americans who intrinsically hate America.”
Those who would discourage teaching patriotism to present and future generations are ultimately sowing bad seeds, the fruits of which we now see in many burned out cities overrun by crime, homelessness, and chaos.
