The Outstater
The Pampered Civic Mind
Chesterton’s Fence: A principle advising against removing any law, institution or custom unless you first understand why it was put in place.
A HANDFUL OF STUDENTS at a local high school organized a protest this week against imagined activity of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (there hasn’t been much). The students carried signs quoting the absurdly ingenuous Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “No More Kids in Cages.”
Truly, youth is wasted on the young.
The superintendent fired off a sternly worded letter reiterating that school property during the school day is a nonpublic forum dedicated to education, not public demonstrations. Commendable, perhaps, but isn’t he missing an opportunity here? If the goal is education, there right in front of him was a dozen students in dire need of exactly that. Better, he didn’t have to sort them out by administering hours of testing. They had self-identified and were nicely lined up practically at his office door.
These young men and women, callow beyond measure, have matriculated to the higher grades without the ability to distinguish fact from bullshit, a failing that if not corrected would handicap them in real life. And the superintendent, with a salary of $190,000 a year, should not need the governor’s Civic Education Commission to tell him to begin the correction (he might have a few words with the parents as well).
When he has finished explaining that U.S. immigration policy cannot be historically confused with the Trail of Tears (we actually pay illegal aliens and their children to deport and encourage them to reapply), and that George Washington and Fidel Castro are not morally equivalent, he can track down the teachers who skip over such patriotically salient points in their classrooms.
But let’s not unduly single out our high school. A statistic that we bat around here is that only 41 percent of those born after 1997 are proud to be an American. The National Assessment of Educational Progress Civics Assessment has dropped 2 points, the first drop since the assessment began. Only 22 percent of eighth graders scored at or above the proficient level, with over one-third below the basic benchmark.
It is true that Western Civilization has flaws, as do all of man’s endeavors, and it is right that a new generation understands those flaws. Nonetheless, our 250-year experiment in self-government has been an extraordinary success. Socialism, Communism, Race Marxism, obligatory diversity, or whatever you want to call the envy-driven schemes that arose after monarchy have all ended in misery — repeatedly.
In contrast, the American equation — individual liberty as outlined in our Declaration of Independence, Adam Smith’s capitalism, property rights, Magna Carta and Common Law — has consistently resulted in human flourishing. And that has been the case everywhere it has been tried and to a degree once thought unattainable. It is no accident, no privilege, that the average Indiana high school student lives better than the royalty of only a few hundred years ago.
A superintendent should want his students to know how that came about. — tcl
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