Thoughts Aloud

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; But if you really make them think, they’ll hate you. -Don Marquis (1878-1937)

I suppose that it is a good thing that I do not need much love, and don’t mind at all being disliked. 🙂

College professor, Lori Roman, has submitted an interesting perspective entitled “We cannot be Ignorant and Free“:

I keep hearing the same question asked:  How could so many Americans vote for Barack Obama, a man who advocates socialist policies and associates with radical people who hate America?

I believe the answer is simple:  We are not teaching our young people to understand and value the American experience and moral relativism has robbed them of their ability to make ethical judgments…

Academically our children are not equipped to appreciate and pursue the American Dream. Many children graduate from high school with good grades, but without fundamental skills…

Uninformed people are easily fooled.  Thomas Jefferson said: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”…

My students believed that “government for the people” means that the government is supposed to do everything for the people.  My classroom would become quiet when I would tell them that the Declaration of Independence only gives them the right to PURSUE happiness–they have to catch it themselves.

This may seem bizarre, considering that my students were usually business majors, but they also had no appreciation or understanding of the beauty of the free enterprise system, or its role in the prosperity and freedom of our country. But the good news is that when I explained Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand Theory and showed them how one person’s quest for personal profit ultimately brings prosperity to others, THEY GOT IT!

I can take a classroom of statists and turn them into capitalists in 10 weeks.  This is not because I am such a great teacher, but because truth and common sense prevail…

My most discouraging day was in an ethics class in which I had asked the students to list the characteristics of an ethical person.  After a few minutes and a lot of silence, they listed: “A person who recycles and who does not make ethical judgments about others”. The reason they had such a difficult time with this exercise is that they have collectively been taught to believe the only truly unethical act is to brand anything that anyone else does as unethical.  That night I thought, “I can turn a socialist into a capitalist, but I cannot, in ten weeks, undo the damage of a lifetime of being taught that there are no moral absolutes.”

…We must reclaim our heritage and pass it on to our children before it is too late.  It is time–it is past time–to take back the textbooks and the classrooms and teach young Americans what it really means to be an American.

Only then will we see an informed electorate that will recognize socialism for the evil that it is–an attack on the God-given human right called liberty.

Indeed… if it is not too late already.  Stunningly, one commenter, “Way2Frank” submitted this gem:

74% of my economics students in a pre-test assessment believe “to each according to their needs, from each according to their ability” is a guiding American principle. Most colleges are not educational institutions, but rather political institutions that squander money on people and programs that offer little educational value. A government-run educational system has a difficult time teaching free market capitalism… because they cannot teach individual thought in a collectivist society.

If that is an accurate statistic, no wonder we are in the mess we are in… and I wouldn’t give you a plugged nickle for our future.  â—„Daveâ–º