Teaching Your Children Civics

As a run-up to our 350th Independence Day, I thought it would be good to revisit some of our episodes related to that. Today: teaching your child civics. This vital education is entirely missing from our government schools -- intentionally so. Something else has been substituted: being a world citizen. Oh, that sounds great, but when you investigate, what has happened is an entire switch from Christian, American, community values. Even character training has been entirely erased. Instead of character, a training in tirggered feelings. Instead of moral and civic engagement, a weaponization of activism, whole based on feelings generated by someone else. Critical thinking is not analytic and synthetic, but critical meaning Marxist deconstructionist. (If you question this, check out the little booklets that come yearly to every professor's mailbox that supposedly encourage critical thinking and discover that the conclusions are all Marxist. Never could logic come out conventional or Christian -- apparently -- based on those booklets. By contrast, I think you know that there are many apologetic references that do use logic and come out with conventional morals.) In short, for 2 or 3 generations, our government schools (and many private schools) have taught a substitute value system, contrary to the Christian view of the founders of The United States. In previous decades any apparent morals or civics may have not been taught. Then we had "values clarification" which many thought was only "morals deconstruction." Then we had obvious Marxism/socialism/Climate Change, etc. Now we have a pitched battle for hetero-normativity in sexual behavior. But maybe, just maybe, you want to be sure that your child understands American values, the need to both restrain oneself for the community, and the need to contribute toward that community. For no student is this more important than for "the learning disabled" because the system focuses so much on "accomodation" and falsely so called "remediation" that normally these students do not get the normal kind of student engagement that other students get. Further, any reading problems mean that these shtudents do not get "the between the lines" comprehension of classic civics texts -- even if they were presented with such. Manners, getting along with others, and civics is exactly the kind of socialization that SHOULD go on in education. It just seldom does -- unless the parent or rare school focuses in on it. So, today, I give you the episode on teaching your children civics, found in our Manners series. You can get the Manners series in the SHOP tab of www.greatshalom.org