In the Essay A Dissertation on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind, Jean Rousseau was looking at all the wrongs of the feudal system.   He shares what he believes are the four inequalities between mankind. 

1.  Merit – individual differences
2. Power gained by those that use the individual differences
3. Rank gained because of the use of power
4. Wealth gained because of the use of rank and power.

 
We do have individual differences – that is so great!  Is not man amazing!  We see that we can progress and grow.  We have developed such a complex language to share our thoughts and communicate with each other.  We have developed so much good in the world, each in our own way.  I love my washing machine and refrigerator.  There are so many, many things that I am enjoying because many have individual differences and can progress!  With these same advancements, we see that bad things have occurred with them.  People have used their differences to gain power over others in good ways and in bad ways.  The good ways included having wonderful mentors, teachers, and leaders.  The bad ways are there also unfortunately, because we believe in choice.  We just have to look around us and see how people have used their individual differences incorrectly.  There is crime all around us, both at low levels and high levels of society.  So what do we do about it?  Rousseau suggests that if we take away property, we will not have as many problems.  If we return to the state of nature or what he calls the “savage” man.  Things will be better.  But will we? 

Rousseau states:  It is in fact impossible to conceive why, in a state of nature, one man should stand more in need of the assistance of anther, than a monkey or a wolf of the assistance of another of its kind:  or, granting that he did, what motives could induce that other to assist him; or, even then, by what means they could agree about the conditions.”
 
He continues, “... it is easy to conceive how much less the difference between man and man must be in a state of nature than in a state of society, and how greatly the natural inequality of mankind must be increased by the inequalities of social institutions.”
And
“Without my expatiating those uselessly on these details, everyone must see that as the bonds of servitude are formed merely by the mutual dependence of men on one another and the reciprocal needs that unit them, it is impossible to make any man a slave, unless he be first reduced in a situation in which he cannot do without the help of others: and, since such a situation does not exist in a state of nature, every one is there his own master, and the law of the strongest is of no effect.
“Having proved that the inequality of man is hardly felt, and that its influence is next to nothing in a state of nature, …”
 
As much as he points out the abuses of power that are true, I do not want to return to a state of nature.  I don’t want to return to the law of the jungle, where only the fittest survive, and where we don’t have a society or community of other people around us.   Maybe it is because I am not the strongest and the fittest out there.  But I think it is more.  As I reflect on the influence my family and friends have had on me, I see how much progress I have made as a person.  I see the amazingness of family and friends.  The power of a great education.  I think I have the capacity to have more sympathy towards others and more kindness to all mankind because I love my family.  If I didn’t have other people around me who cared for me and helped me to develop, I would be more animalistic.  I would have fewer skills for helping others, and I would have less empathy and compassion when I see those who suffer.  I don’t want to go back to the jungle; I want to march forward and keep progressing.  Revolution is not the answer, love is.  Rousseau will tell you we are worse off because of society, but I think we are better off.  We have so many, many amazing things in this world because of our metallurgy and agricultural advances.  True, we have used some of those advancements incorrectly and wrongly.  We have used power incorrectly and wrongly.  But we have also used it well and correctly.  We have raised the standard of living for so many people, and if we unite and work to lift others with us, imagine the world we can build. 

Paul Johnson in “A History of the American People” asks the readers this question, “[C]an a nation rise above the injustices of its origins, and, by its moral purpose and performance, atone for them?  All nations are born in war, conquest, and crime, usually concealed by the obscurity of a distant past.”

Yes!  I think we can.  Of course, it will be a lot of work – hard work.  But I think we can.  I think we can show the way that everyone can live a better way with freedom instead of with oppression.  The American Founders had so many things right when they set out to create a government where all men were equal before the law.  Yes, they had some things wrong and so do we.  Through a superb education, we can as families and communities, bring back all the great things of the Founding Fathers and work on fixing the wrongs.  It is up to us to gain the tools we need to fix our communities and nations so that we can all live better lives.  One of those inequalities is that man will use their wealth and power to legally plunder from others. Frederic Bastiat in his essay, The Law, shows us another alternative to Rousseau’s solution in how to deal with the inequalities in society.  Rousseau was correct in stating that institutions of religion and government support plundering people.  However, instead of revolution and the breakdown of societies back to a primitive state, I think we should consider Bastiat’s solutions of establishing or reestablishing a government where the laws are set up to guard against legalized plunder.   And to establish a family culture of education that the Founding Fathers had so that we can establish freedom and opportunity for more people to share their greatness with the world and help all mankind.  Imagine if we had an education like was described by Edmund Burke.

               "Burke told Parliament that nearly all Americans read the great classics on these topics, and then he said:                          This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defense, full of resources. In
                other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less [brilliant] caste, judge of an ill principle in government
                only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the
                badness of the principle. They [foresee] misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in
             every tainted breeze."  (Quoted in The US Constitution and the 196 Indispensable Principles of Freedom by Oliver DeMille, page 108)

This book is a challenging read, no doubt about it.  I am learning a trick with books to help me not only keep focus when a book is harder to understand.  I have been writing in books for a while and love it.  This week, I am adding to my writing in books.  A new skill I have been practicing is creating a concise bullet-point summary of each chapter. 

I struggle with this because it means I have to slow down and think.  As I am saying this, I am reminded of one of the author’s points.   The author compares what he sees in America with what is traditional in Europe among the aristocracy.  One of his points is that Americans are always in a rush to produce; they don’t take time to meditate or ponder their ideas.  Yep, that definitely is true for me many times when it comes to reading. 

Alexis de Tocqueville took a long time to put all this information together.  It is quite impressive.  He looks at many examples as he compares the democratic ideal with the aristocracy or caste system of Europe.  It is interesting to see how culturally different we are from our roots.  So many events went into changing our culture to even make it possible for a different form of government to be instituted.  The more I read this, the more miraculous the founding of the USA becomes.  Wow, so many things that needed to be changed to help prepare for a Republic.  It’s truly amazing!

​I have been reflecting about what I thought college would be like when I was young compared to what I experienced. What I thought was all fuzzy to me now, but I did think that there would be more group discussions and class discussions. What I found was those group projects were one or two people doing most of the work individually and then others getting grades they did not earn because you cared more. I knew that college would require reading and assignments, but I had this image of more group discussion. That did not happen to me. I spent a lot of time alone working, trying to balance work and school. Prepare lab reports, running tests based on those reports that I had no idea why I needed to do the experiment or what I was to gain from it. As a young person, I had an image of having discussions in class and plenty of reading assignments. I remember watching the TV show The Paper Chase. That definitely swayed my thinking.
In the book “A Thomas Jefferson Education” by Oliver DeMille, it shares a list of essential skills from Harvard School of Law:

1.  The ability to define problems without guides.
2. The ability to ask hard questions which challenge prevailing assumptions.
3. The ability to quickly assimilate needed data from masses of irrelevant information.
4. The ability to work in teams without guidance.
5. The ability to work absolutely alone.
6. The ability to persuade others that your course is the right one.
7. The ability to conceptualize and reorganize information into a new pattern.
8. The ability to discuss ideas with an eye toward application.
9. The ability to think inductively, deductively and dialectically.

 
As I compare the above list with my experience, I think I missed out of several of these skills. I think that I was able to accomplish #3,4, 5, & 8. #2 would put your grade in jeopardy. #6 would be true but the right one was whatever the professors’ thought was true.  New patterns (#7) were challenging the system and discouraged. I still feel that I am lacking an education, but I have several pieces of paper that say I am educated.
I started homeschooling with my eldest child during his kindergarten years due to some personal struggles he was experiencing. I was given the first edition of the A Thomas Jefferson Education book to read.  I read it and put it on the shelf.  I had no idea how to deal with it.  I didn’t have an education like that at all.  I was introduced to the TJE philosophy several more times before I decided to try parts of it.  I started reading the books in the back.  Finding others to discuss the books with was much harder to do.  I reached out to some online groups to help me out and then attended a seminar put on by Aneladee Milne who was with LEMI (Leadership Education Mentoring Institute) at the time.  I had some life-changing experiences and fumbled my way through implementing this in my own home.  I changed so much about who I was because of this book.  I renegotiated my core phase and started to get to know myself in new ways. One of the ways that I have changed is that I like Wythe skills better. Harvard skills are good too, but I think if I can work to achieve the Wythe skills I will have achieved an education.
  Wythe Skills:

1.  The ability to understand human nature and lead accordingly.
2. The ability to identify needed personal traits and turn them into habits.
3. The ability to establish, maintain and improve lasting relationships.
4. The ability to keep one’s life in proper balance.
5. The ability to discern truth and error regardless of the source, or the delivery.
6. The ability to discern true from right.
7. The ability and discipline to do right.
8. The ability and discipline to constantly improve.

Achieving both sets of skills, that would be pretty awesome. 

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.     

​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. 

​This would probably be a fun play to see.  Moliere seems to know how to poke fun at hypocrisy.  

In Act 1 the Dancing Master says, "There is nothing, in my opinion, that pays us better for all our fatigue; and it is an exquisite delight to receive the praises of the well-informed."

I find this very applicable today, there are many people who feel that they deserve more for their efforts (and maybe they do) but this Dancing Master seems to spend very little time working or helping Monsieur Jourdain master the art of dancing.  

Later he states, "All of the misfortunes of mankind, all the dreadful disasters that fill the history books, the blunders of politicians and the faults of omission of the great commanders, all this comes from not knowing how to dance".

How easy it is to make such a broad declaration without much evidence to support the opinion.   That seems to be the way of many experts.   As an ex-teacher, I spent so much time discussing or debating different philosophies with other teachers who were never parents yet felt they were experts in how to raise a child or what a child needed to be successful.  

A friend of mine once defined an expert like this:
ex - a has been
spert - drip under pressure

His definition makes me laugh. However, there can be a serious problem when we rely on experts and an even bigger problem when we rely on those who think they are experts but are not.   Having experts in our society is not a bad thing but it does become a bad thing when we stop thinking for ourselves or discount our thinking solely on the word of another.  I love that my mechanic can figure out what is wrong with my car but how do I know I have a good mechanic without out some knowledge myself?  Another problem I see is when we hand off responsibility to someone else in the name of being an expert so we don't take the time to figure out what we should do or what the principles should influence us.    This play shows what Mr. Jourdain did.  He allowed other people to think for him and act for him, instead of figuring out for himself how best to be a true gentleman.  Everything in this play was focused on the appearance of what a gentleman should be like and not on becoming a true gentleman.  

For me, it was frustrating to hear teachers who were not parents express theories that they had but have never attempted to apply or practice themselves.  The teaching license and time in the classroom does not make you an expert on parenting or any particular child.   To give advice in this situation is to be a hypocrite. 

 Another place where there is so much discord is in the bureaucracy of our country.  Many of the experts only see the problem based on their expertise and entity.  There are so many entities within the bureaucracy, how would you pick an expert?  Those individuals will be so focused on protecting their interests that they may not hear another’s opinion.   Just like in this play in which each master thought their subject was the most important.  Each wants to have the money and recognition for their teaching.  Each needs to justify their position and belief of why a gentleman needs to have the skills they can offer.   Or a would-be gentleman.  Mr. Jourdain will not become a “people of quality” until he determines for himself what that means.  Experts do not mean “people of quality”.   Poor Mr. Jourdain is so focused on being popular and accepted that he is listening to the wrong voices.   How about me?  How am I just like Mr. Jourdain? 

I have had on my list to read many of the works of philosophers.  I tried it several years ago to go through the Great Books but put it aside as I was not ready for it.  I could read the words but I was not so sure why I was reading the words.  Nor could I figure out why I should puzzle through the ideas.   I wanted to give it a try again this year but knew I was going to need something to help me out.   I didn't want to read just because it is on the list of "classics".  I wanted to read it to understand better why reading the works of philosophers is important. 

This year with the Scholar Mom's we have been reading and discussing Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle together.  It has been a fabulous discussion.  One of the helps I have been using is Hillsdale College's Online courses.  They are definitely helpful to me.   I am getting much more out of this then I had hoped.

One further piece of help came in an unexpected way.  Starting last April,  I have gone through some of the Blackbelt in Freedom (BBF) course by Oliver DeMille and during that course a book that was used helped me learn more about how to better read the works of philosophers.  The book was called ​Great Political Thinkers  by Ebenstien & Ebenstein.   But it was not the book that changed my thinking, it was the mentoring. I took a break from the course but decided to keep reading the book.   The book started to sit on the shelf instead of getting completed.  I had just a couple of chapters left but it still sat on the shelf.   So I decided to return the the course to see if I could finish up this book and then read a couple of books that I have really been wanting to get to.   It was so worth it.   In the course are mentor recordings by Oliver DeMille connected with each book and ideas to discuss and think about.  In the set of recordings connected to Great Political Thinkers that I was listening to recently he tied together how each of the philosophers influenced the ideas of 'how we should live and how we should govern'.  In just one hour my thinking was expanded in a way that I was not able to get on my own.  It was amazing!

I was so eager for the next set of recordings to help me better use and understand the purpose of what I was reading.   It helped turned my checklist into a learning experience!   

“For we pay a price for everything we get or take in this work; and although ambitions are well worth having, they are not to be cheaply one, but exact their dues of work and self-denial, anxiety and discouragement.” 
 
As I think back over my past I have to say that I find this statement true.  As I have worked hard to do some tasks or goals, the cost was not cheap.  It took my time and effort.  Sometimes I had to listen to lectures 3 or 4 times to get what I needed to get out of it in understanding about Scholar Skills.  Sometimes I have had to read a book over and over again and then discuss it with people in order to get a better understanding of what it meant to me or how this information could change me. 
 
As I pay the price to learn to read well, I find that I enjoy it more each time AND I am learning faster each time.

My friend Kathy Mellor created the word MentorHeart. As I have been reading Charlotte’s Web this time through I thought of Charlotte and her role. If you remove Charlotte, the story changes. If I remove mentors from my life, the story changes. Mentors are such a huge part of personal growth. Most of my life I did not even know what mentors were but as I look back, I see people that helped me along the way and books that helped me grow. INCREDIBLE books. Books have been a mentor for much of my life and I did not know that. Why do people choose to mentor? Why do some books mentor us while others do not? I can’t answer that but I have been thinking about how to grow my MentorHeart because I want to follow an idea that Charlotte shared: “By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle.”