Learning about America’s foundations used to be an important part of the education of young people. Unfortunately, their education today consists far more of wailing about what leftists think is wrong with those foundations than what purposes they served. That starts in grade school and continues on through college. This is integral to the Left’s “long march” through our institutions.
A counterattack has at last begun, and the University of North Carolina Board of Governors has taken a good step with a proposal to require that students take a course on the foundations of democracy. In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Michael Behrent of Appalachian State discusses the proposal and, although he is not a conservative, he approves.
He writes:
Carried out well, such a policy will be a significant educational achievement and a major public service. Democracy was once something that American higher education took for granted. Now, it has become yet another point of contention in our never-ending culture wars. Indeed, the conflicts in contemporary American society — often magnified by controversies surrounding college campuses — would hardly have shocked early theorists of democracy or even the Founders. In Federalist 10, James Madison reflected on the “propensity” of “popular government” to the “violence of faction.” He defined “faction” as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest” that is contrary to the desire or interests of the rest of the population. Madison would have had little difficulty recognizing our current state of political polarization as a textbook case of that unfortunate propensity. Liberals and conservatives, woke progressives and MAGA Republicans, see one another as menacing factions driven by a wild and nefarious desire to impose their will on the entire country.
Well put. Very few young Americans understand anything about the Constitution. They’re most likely to have been told that it was drafted by slave owners and therefore is a racist document.
Read the whole thing.