In my previous blog I commented on President Obama's lamentation over Americans losing their entrepreneurial and industrious spirit. The sorry state of K-12 education in America is most certainly behind it. The question is how do we fix that? Where can we start that is both 'necessary and sufficient'? That's a high tech term for fixing something that actually fixes a problem and is not overkill. Unfortunately, what government does to 'fix' things is too often neither of those things.
Liberals, especially progressives have been attacking the school environment and the curriculum with lots of experiments that didn't work at all. What they shied away from, naturally for progressives, is personal responsibility at the parent and local school level. Has 30 years of their failed approach taught us anything yet? The one thing we can do for, in fact owe, our kids is to prepare them for real life after K-12 schooling. The one most singularly spectacular failure has been not instilling a sense of personal responsibility in our kids. That must start with the practice of personal responsibility by their parents which has also been spectacularly missing among most of the kids who fail in school.
Where ought we begin in our efforts to address the failure of parents regarding the sorry state of K-12 education? The answer if we're honest is with men in general, dads in particular. While the following article isn't directed at what the behavior of men has done to families in general and K-12 education in particular, the point it makes is relevant equally to the problem with education:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/281490/blame-sexual-revolution-br-not-men-mona-charen
The bad things that men are doing politically, socially and relationally are completely in line with human nature. That doesn't make it okay but it's important to understand that's true in order to deal with it effectively. The progressive solution to that is to have the government take over control from families and communities (ie, from responsible men, husbands and fathers). But you have to realize that the only reason they feel the need to do that is because men in families and communities aren't doing the job. The best and correct fix is to get men back on track, not for government to become the father (and mother!) figure.
Progressives deny the problem as I've defined it because that would mean that our Founders were absolutely correct. The Founders' understanding of human (mainly man's) nature is what led them to construct the constitution and through it our government the way they did. For progressives to accept that would mean accepting they've been leading our country down the wrong path all this time. (Of course, the history of progressivism (socialism) throughout the world already teaches us about its inevitable failure but they deny that too and are therefore obliged(!) to make a strong effort to edit that out of K-12 history books/teaching but that's an entire subject for another day.)
American men by and large (and undeniably) have become deadbeats and/or players at living and acting responsibly. The article linked above attests to the fact that women get it. They've tried moving ahead without men but are realizing that's not working out so well either (surprise!). The fix for this must be for men to man up rather than for women, kids and governments to write them off.
Getting men to man up would address the most fundamental root cause of many of America's ills. Poverty for one and that's a pretty big one. Broken/hurting families and divorce for another very big one. A general decline in civil, lawful, principled, and moral behavior for another. There's a reason why 99% of the really, REALLY lame and downright stupid things shown on America's Funniest Home Videos are being done by men. To understand what's wrong with America, one only has to watch that TV program a few times. It's a joke but the joke's on our culture and at its core it's not really funny at all. It's quite sad.
Men need to do a better job living with a sense of dignity, self-respect and responsibility. They need to make better choices. After all, all their bad/undesirable behaviors are nothing more nor less than choices. Narcissism has grown among American men to a culturally (very) destructive extent. They get disrespect from women for a reason: just like the Smith-Barney commercial used to say, they earned it.
Conclusion: When a big majority of men begin putting their girl friends, wives, children, community, and especially godly(!) principles ahead of their own narcissistic desires more of our problems will be substantially resolved than by any other means. There is no singular other 'fix' that'll do so much good so quickly and so cost-effectively. It won't cost the taxpayer anything and it'll work. What's not to like about that?
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