OPINION:
This past week, in an interview on PBS’ “Firing Line” with Margaret Hoover, the actor Richard Dreyfuss said: “I think we’re in the endgame right now.
“We could let slip the greatest idea for governance ever devised, and we won’t even know that it happened. … Our democratic republic is failing, and it shouldn’t be a surprise. We can’t fly a plane without training; we can’t practice medicine without attending medical school. And yet we expect the American people to wield the full power of their citizenship without an education.”
He went on: “We no longer teach our children the Bill of Rights or the Constitution. … We don’t teach them critical thinking skills. … We’ve stopped teaching civics, and now we can’t have a civil political discussion. The American experiment may fail if we don’t act.”
Mr. Dreyfuss’ description of American education is spot on. His warning is not exaggeration or hyperbole. He’s absolutely right.
Your public schools are no longer a place where your children are taught to read and write, nor is today’s academy nearly as interested in your sons’ and daughters’ understanding of science as it is in teaching them to parrot the talking points of social justice.
Gone are the days of teaching American history and celebrating our Constitution. Activism is now far more important than getting a good grade in algebra. Critical theory now supplants critical thinking. From elementary school through 12th grade, our next generation of leaders are being taught to fixate on America’s flaws rather than celebrate its virtues.
This is the reality of our public schools. It’s a mad hatter’s world where, as C.S. Lewis warned, the elite among us actually claim it makes sense to geld the stallion and then “bid him be fruitful.” This is a time where the wise ones in our faculty lounges work to remove a child’s civic soul as the remedy to the to the cultural hell they’ve created for our progeny.
When will we learn? Bad ideas will breed bad behavior as surely as an acorn will grow an oak or a hurricane will bring a flood.
Why are we surprised at the selfishness of our culture when we have immersed several generations of our children in a curriculum that teaches self-esteem more effectively than it does science and civics? And how can we possibly think that teaching values clarification rather than moral absolutes will raise up a virtuous people?
This is American education in 2023. We are destroying ourselves by our own dishonesty. We boast of freedom, yet we live in bondage to our own deception.
We champion human rights, yet we ignore what is unalienably promised to us by Scripture, tradition, reason and our own Constitution. We say that women should not be subjugated to the power and passions of men, but we then we subject women to the selfish whims of males who pretend to be female.
We draw a line in the sand and defend the rights of children, but then we support adults who claim it’s their right to surgically alter little boys’ and girls’ sex organs. As M. Scott Peck warned, we have become a “people of the lie.”
It seems as if the road to hell is before us, and we enter its gates strutting with the confidence of an emperor with no clothes. And, when challenged, the educationally elite among us belittle the naivete of the masses who shout out of our nakedness.
The evidence is clear: All we need to do is turn on the evening news to see the proof. We are becoming a nation of “men without chests” (C.S. Lewis) where there is nothing but a gaping cavity in the center of our being — where instead of finding the fullness that comes from fidelity and faithfulness, we find the emptiness of a love affair gone bad.
The lessons of history are shouting out to us, and we had better start teaching them. Liberty is given by God, not government. Ideas have consequences. Education matters.
And the ideas we are teaching in our schools are leading us to the hellish existence of our own making; a servitude to a sovereign government rather than the freedom that is only found by obeying a sovereign God.
Mr. Dreyfuss is right. America is about to crash because we’ve taught an entire generation of “pilots” that pigs can fly.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host.
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