I do agree with the idea that we have made a mess of the education system.  The question to me is really what do I do about it for myself, my family, and my community?

According to Sowell what of the biggest problems is that American children are missing thinking skills because of the institutions and the attitudes within the institutions.   So the system is broken.  Institutions are not going to educate children in order to help them think because they have a different agenda.   "All across this country, the school curriculum has been invaded by physiological-conditioning programs which not only take up time sorely needed for intellectual development, but also promote an emotionalized and anti-intellectual way of responding to the challenges facing every individual and every society" (p. ix). 

I think this leads back to the reason we have created schools.  Why did and do we think children going to school is important?  What value should schools provide to the individual?  There are many books out there that try to answer these questions.  

I believe the biggest problem of the school is that it "undermines the parent-child relationship and the shared values which make a society possible" (p. ix).  

The family is the foundation of a society.  If we destroy the family, we destroy society.   The best way to create a great society is to have great families.  Therefore the parent-parent relationship and the parent-child relationship is the most important within any society.    Building a principled, moral home culture is something we should take great time and effort to create and maintain.  

Families however can't do everything in a society alone.  That is why we work to create communities.  So that we can create a community where our family thrives.  In Freedom Matters by Oliver DeMille, the author talks about the state of balance needed between seven kinds of leaders to maintain freedom.  One of the seven leaders is educational leaders.  When any of the seven leaders combine their power with another's power imbalance is created and then their purpose in the community is skewed creating problems for the society.  We have definitely seen this happen.  In this case it seems that the government (one of the type of leaders) and teamed with several kinds of leaders to expand their power.  In the process we have weakened the power of the family hugely.  In this particular case the government leaders has combined with the educational leaders to expand their influence, changing the purposes of the education system.  The education systems' purpose is not to teaching thinking but to promote their personal agendas.    

Many people have pointed out the problems in the education system but nothing really has been done to restore its original purposes?  The original purposes are rarely even discussed.   Today's system is set up to hold and contain students for as long as possible.  Very little effort is spent on teaching reading and thinking skills.  If you don't believe me spend a couple of days in the classrooms and count up the minutes spent on teaching students to read especially those that struggle.   Then compare that with how many minutes they are away from home.   Of course that is Thomas Sowell's opinion that education programs should teach thinking.  Is there something more or better that we should be focused on?  I think so. 

Do we have clear guiding principles to lead us?  Are they the correct principles we should focus on or are they distractions from the best principles?  Do we know what success looks like for each of those guiding principles?  Did you know that education systems have worldviews also?  Which purpose do you think is the most important to support and why?

The education system has not failed because of lack of money!  The education system is a huge business with a lot of money flowing through it.   Any person who believes more money should be given to the system has not looked into how much money is being spent and measuring it with the results that are given.   

My belief at this point in time is that public (and charter) school is the last place you want to send your children.  It creates so much harm and so little good.     

For our book discussions we decided these definitions: 

​*Virtue was doing the right thing for the right reason or the habit of choosing to do the right things.  An internal state that may or may not be recognized by others as it is hard to measure well.   

*The vices are either an excess of the virtue or a deficiency. 

*Anti -virtue is defined as doing the wrong thing purposely but knowing the right thing. 

*A monster is a person that deviates from acceptable behavior.  Virtue>Vice>Anti-Virtue>Monster

This as been a very helpful way to look at decisions as we read and discuss.  What would you add?

As we are starting to wind down our discussion year it will be interesting to see how we incorporate these ideas further.  Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, and Dracula are famous monster stories.   Now I have a whole new level of understanding about how these books influenced me and why there are valuable books to consider reading. 

​In his book ‘Dumbing us Down’ John Taylor Gatto shows how networks “drain the vitality from community and family” (p. 52).   In pondering his writings, I have come to believe that schools and networks are counterfeits of family and community.   Building strong families and communities is the most important work we can ever do. 
So much good occurs when families and communities are strong. People have purpose and belong.  Work serves people we know and love.  People have names, not numbers. In a strong family and community, every person matters and the whole person matters.  
The United States was established based on family and community.  We have since moved away from that home-centered focus. We have largely replaced families and community with networks.   
The results are devastating.  Isolation, loneliness, and depression have become more common than not.   We are fragmented, divided and often desperate.   Why is this so?
It is because Institutions and networks do not truly care about healthy, strong families and communities, but on what they can get from us. Their purpose is to ‘survive and grow’ (p. 65).  Their intention may not be destruction of the family and the community but that is what has happened. 
We are so focused on being part of the right networks and institutions that we have neglected the places where we find real worth and belonging.  We isolate ourselves in these networks. And we require our young children to isolate themselves! 
Starting with pre-school children are often isolated from their families and trained to stay with their group. They are regulated to compete with each other, to follow the rules and to receive their validation from their school networks.
If they “succeed” in school, they are promoted and sent to institutions of “higher education” whose primary purpose is to survive and grow.  If they do well in these institutions, they are promoted again. Their reward is to get to buy more stuff than those people who don’t perform as well.  Finally, once these superior achievers are worn out, they are isolated again in retirement “communities”. These are mostly pseudo communities composed of transients. 
A defining characteristic of these networks and institutions is this: we may believe we are part of a community but when we move out of those “communities” the people we know rarely continue to socialize with us. 
As a nation, we have tried to socially engineer “better families and communities” through school, networks and institutions. But those efforts have failed.  People are not better off; they are not happy or better educated.  They have not become their best selves.  Instead, we encounter many wounded and lonely people. 
It is time to return to family and community; time to read those books that show us how to build family and community; time to replace social counterfeits with the real thing. 

​“Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for a future that only He can see.”
To me, it is so much harder to practice this belief than state it.  I have wondered often how people have the courage to do such hard things.  Even through all Corrie’s story she shows this is a fundamental belief that she holds. 
Near the end of the book, Corrie shares a story of how a story in which ad bandage from a gangrenous foot was put on her face: “I ran sobbing down the corridor and washed and washed beneath the wall spigot in the latrine.  I would never step into that aisle again!  What did I care about the wretched bedpans!  I couldn’t bear…But of course I did go back.  I had learned much in the pat year, about what I could and count bear.”
What an amazing story of courage and trust in God.  This is a book that I just keep rereading.  There is so much wholeness of soul and healing of souls within a very broken world.  It does my heart good every time I reread this classic.

​I found this book a very helpful and challenging read.   I started this on Audible but there were so many things that I wanted to go back and re-listen to that I bought the book.  The format of the book made it very challenging to keep ideas straight.  It was challenging to keep the ideas straight in my head as the author moved back and forth between the two major visions he addressed.  So many ideas. I needed to summarize the main points at the end of each chapter.  Then I could reflect on those ideas and see where I personally fell.    Unfortunately, I don’t think that we can categorize the political struggles into just two categories.  We are too complex.  Experience and education change our thinking and beliefs.  It also changes how we view the world.  I think I can straddle both lines (the constrained and the unconstrained) in some situations, especially in areas where I don’t have a deep understanding of the factors and influences involved.   For the constrained vision the big idea is that human beings are flawed.  So, to best help society we need to understand the fundamental laws of nature, government, and economy and then constrain man in order to maintain a healthy society.   This is very different from the unconstrained vision that believes that we can perfect society if we have the right conditions.   I guess we all want to live in a utopia.  However, by definition utopia is an “imagined place of state were everything is perfect” (Oxford Languages).   
So, what if you believe that man is flawed but is perfectible through Christ?   It makes it hard to completely land in one group or another.  The book does not address this idea.  The focus is how man believes that he can perfect society if the conditions and teaching are right.  For me that is a flawed belief since I believe that man in his current condition is not omniscient enough to make decisions that will lead to a perfect society.  We just don’t understand ourselves, our world, or others well enough to begin to believe that we have the right to determine how everyone should live.  

Interesting that I have two books on my self where the main character is a pig.  Charlotte's Web and Animal Farm.  They have very opposite ideas and purposes.   Charlotte's Web has a very heartwarming and optimistic feel.  There is friendship and descriptions about how beautiful life is.  The farm is painted as an ideal place to learn and grow.  In Animal Farm the setting is about human oppression and then animal oppression.  The farm is a place for the fittest and smartest to rule the weaker.  

I wonder what E.B. White wanted us to learn from this book? 

I read from one posting how this story can be used to talk about the carbon footprint of raising a pig or that pigs should not die to satisfy a human's appetite.  I guess when I visit my memories of this story and re-read the story, I don't see that message.   I think I prefer to see the power of friendship and mentoring in this story.  Charlotte mentors Wilbur.  Charlotte offers to Wilbur friendship and through that friendship Wilbur grows and becomes a "better pig".  By better I mean he begins to think and act differently.  He then learns to be a friend and mentor to others (Charlotte's children).  Its a small little farm utopia.  

This is a book that I have read with my children several times before.  Reading this book while looking for the principles listed in Oliver DeMille's book "We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident" adds more power to the story in my opinion.   In this speculative fiction story is a post WWIII story where a leader finds a way to eliminate all crime through a behavior modification system implanted in a people.  However there is a problem in that the community is struggling so they capture others to bring them into their system, implant them, and then let them know they are not part of a organization where they will be given the gift of better education, health, food, clothing, and technology.   The other groups that have been captured should be eager to join this more advanced society.  But are they?  

Some of the questions I think the book asks are:
1.  if you remove the ability to choose wrong from a people will they automatically always choose the good and right? Will they be happy?
2.  Can you train people to always be good? Should you?  Why/why not?
3.  How much are we willing to give up for security?
4.  How much are we willing to give up for freedom?
5.  What are some of the freedom's we have lost that should have fought for?  Why didn't we?
6.  If a person is raised without agency, once it is granted to them what will they do?  
7.  What happens do a generation if they have not developed their own moral character but have been forced to "be good"?
8.  What do we do know to promote freedom?

Once again, the power of mentoring takes a book brings out more meaning to me.  I don’t believe I would have had as many notes or thoughts without the guides I used to help me as I read this book.  In this case I used Jacob Allee from Study the Great Books to help direct me as I read through this book for the first time.  Several questions he posed:

1. Dracula is evil incarnate.  Who can stop him?
2. Who can save you and the others you love from his irrepressible grasp once he sets his sight upon you or someone you love?
3. Where will you really, truly, and finally be safe?

Deep ideas to digest and find answers for.
One of the characters, Johnathan is exposed to ideas that he doesn’t quite understand but begins to fear states: “It is only when a man feels himself face to face with such horrors that he can understand their true import (Chapter 1).”
Wow.  How that speaks to me.  There have been times when I did not understand enough to know that something was wrong, so I accepted it as okay.  Now I can see that it was so damaging and continues to create damage in others for the same reason.  This could be as simple as a song or a book that is bent or broken.  If we don’t know enough, we can take in ideas that will take years to label as wrong and then root out.  It could shape our character in very negative ways without our even understanding the damage that has occurred. 
How many times have I thought, ‘well it is not a big deal or not really my problem to say anything about’?  When will it become my problem?  Will it be too late if I wait until it affects me directly?  As that wrong continues to grow it becomes harder and harder to root out.  How big does the issue need to become before I actively do something about it?  Will I ignore those that are trying to warn me in their limited way also?  In the book Jonathan meets several people along the way that try to give him some warnings, one of the first “went down on her knees and implored me not to go”.  Jonathan charged on because he didn’t fully understand and there was business that needed to be done.  How am I like that?
After the death of a female character that unites the characters of this book to find a way to stop Dracula much sacrifice is required to learn what they can do to stop the wrong that is happening.  The group of characters needs to keep at a problem that has many mysteries and scares them.  They have determined that Dracula is the monster, but can they stop him?  How do they stop him?  Their search challenges their beliefs and ideas.  Yet for the sake of love they continue searching.   One of the best lines in the book occurs during this time of struggle:
        “When he had finished he came back and sat near me, reading, so that I did not feel too lonely whilst I worked.
         How good and thoughtful he is.  The world seems full of good men, even if there are monsters in it (Chapter 17).”
 The book ends with success because they can stop evil from destroying others’ innocence and lives.  Now for me to apply that to my life.  What ways do I need to prevent and stop the evils I see from destroying the innocence and lives of those around me?  What do I do now?  Who do I gather around me to help me as I fight the battles I see need fighting? 

​ “No number of policy victories can make up for the country’s loss of shared vision and the institutions of civil society that nurture it.” p. 8
I like the way that sounds and it resonates with the my beliefs.   In the book The Coming Aristocracy I highlighted:
                “Without shared values and standards of truth, there is no shared civilization” (O. DeMille, The Coming Aristocracy p. 89).
Where are these values first taught?  In the family.  To me the family is a vital force in civilization.  It is the foundation of civilization.  Dr. Roberts spends time talking about the importance of the family very early in this book.  I can picture in my head Little House and Little Britches scenes of what families looked like in the past.  They worked hard together and gathered around the table or fire together.  They understood ownership and hard work.  They had home businesses so to speak that they worked at every day.   It would be wonderful if our government made it easier to create this environment again.  A place where family, family work and family business could thrive without interference from the government.  I don’t think you can force this or legislate this.   
There are many points in this book that I agree with and several big points that I have concerns with.  Those points that I have concerns with revolve around family, education and economy.  I might be wrong, but I feel that Dr. Roberts things you can legislate this more with Sabbath Laws and Tax cuts and credits.    In the Coming Aristocracy it talks about the difference between Governance and Establishment principles.  It seems we turn to Legislative measures (compromise with the power players) instead of focusing on the principles and not compromising those principles.  If we are all equal before God and have been all given unalienable rights, we should all be equal before the law.   Single people or people without kids should not be punished for their choices.  Yes, I believe families are incredibly important to society but why legislate that?   I would rather see the 16th and 17th Amendment appealed instead of more legislation to benefit only those with families. 
If Communities want to have Sabbath Day laws, then let the town meetings decide that.  If families want to practice a Sabbath Day, then no one can stop them from choosing to not spend their time and money at places that don’t honor their beliefs.   For those that have work issues, I think it will be hard but possible to work with employers in a way that could benefit both.  This allows for each family to keep their personal Sabbath in a way that they believe.  I believe that everyone should have a way to practice their beliefs without laws to force one set of beliefs.  Yes, we are a Christian based society, however we have enough diversity that it would be unfair to impose Sabbath laws on those that have a different day for Sabbath observance.  Besides just because there is a Sabbath Day law, does not mean it will be followed the way the creator of the law intended. 
Dr. Roberts moves from Family and Family Practices (Sabbath Observance) to Education.   The books title is called “Schools Should Teach Piety”.  Intriguing title.   What does piety mean?  How is this enforced?  I am not sure I saw a definition for piety.  I did see “parental rights” along with many ideas about what is broken about the education system.  And then I saw some words that concerned me:  “We want to teach our students the right things to love (p. 90).   Who decides the right things?  Is that not what is happening now?   There is a government group in power that has decided what they believe is the “right things to love”.  How is that different from what?  Seems like it is still a force-based system to me.  I am not sure how piety fits in there.   I love the idea of having classics in the education models.  But who decides the classics?  Which classics?  Why?   I will hold out for the hope that parents will have more rights in the educational systems and wish to continue to make those choices myself.   I might get it wrong but that is okay with me because I think my goals in education are different from many people’s.  I love the idea of the Hebrew model of education where the focus is training on HOW to think and lead while caring about what is right and true.  I try to focus my time on learning wisdom still to this day so I would like to pass that model on to my family.
How can you talk about Saving America without talking about economics?  There has been a lot to say here.   Dr. Roberts talks about the need to fix our economy in a way that supports the small businessman.  Sounds good on the surface.   Small businesses should have the same opportunities and privileges as big business but that is not the plan to make all equal before the law with Dr. Roberts.  He would like to penalize and punish big businesses.  That is concerning to me.  There are some businesses I think that work better as large businesses (like phone services and internet to name just two I use every day).  I don’t believe it is far to punish a person for being too successful.   I do believe that EVERYONE should be equal before the law.  No special perks and privileges for the big guy or the little guy sounds like more freedom for all to me.  I would rather have a free enterprise system not more regulations.  We have so many regulations now.    I think that it is important to have small, localized communities and services based on the needs of each community.  I believe in regenerative agriculture and the potential that we bring to our communities as we revitalize the land and our communities.  I disagree with a legislated action that forces these ideas.  Force has never worked in my home, and I have never appreciated force (even and especially when it was for “my own good”).
In my head I picture a teeter totter that has Anarchy on the far end of one side and on the opposite far end is Tyranny (Making of America).  For me the perfect spot in the middle is where Liberty sits.  Just enough government to not have anarchy and mob rule but not so much that we have regulation and abuse of regulation.  It’s a hard spot to manage.   Even though I disagree with many parts of this book, I love the conversation I had because I read it.  I took the time to clarify and record my thinking.  I researched past books to help me better understand and support my ideas.  It was a great experience.