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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
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
Civil Society
“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust
Hugo on Genius
“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up
rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois
Education
“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State
Faith & Purpose
“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
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
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Faith and Politics
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006
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
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
