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Chapter 7:
The Best Schools
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The problem is that the centralized education principle runs against the most basic idea of the United States, that the American people are, or ought to be, capable of self-government. That means that they must be presumed to be competent to run their lives unless they demonstrate otherwise. Surely there is no more central right of self-government than for parents to educate their children according to their lights in their own way.
Living in the striver suburb of Rock Hill, Hanna Rosin’s Christian Right voter Mary Johnston stands half way between Chester, South Carolina, and Charlotte, North Carolina, half way between the redneck fecklessness of Chester and the shining city of Charlotte where the professional classes go for education and careers. She lives half way between the redneck world she has left behind and the educated future she is building for her children. She lives with the shame of her humble roots down the road in Chester, South Carolina, and the hope vested in her children’s education. She is determined that her children will get the best education, first grade through college. She understands that education gives her children the keys to the city, and she feels a flush of shame at her own educational inadequacy. But the question is: will Mary Johnston be allowed to obtain “the best education” for her children according to her lights? Or will she just have to put up with the education that has been selected by the nation’s elite as suitable for the education of “other peoples’ children?”
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Click for Chapter 8: Mutual Aid
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©2005 Christopher Chantrill
Action
The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness...
But to make a man act [he must have]
the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove
or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Chappies
“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”
—Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
China and Christianity
At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Class War
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”
Conservatism
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Conversion
“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh
Democratic Capitalism
Three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets
and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
