It’s not only that everyone appreciates the information that Orrin Woodward and the LIFE business have provided, it’s the breath of fresh air that comes from learning subjects that make a difference to the way we live. Learning energizes the soul. I’ve become passionate about learning historical leadership because of the difference it makes to our freedom. Why has this subject that is so important to our life and our freedom been diminished from mass education and the media? This subject is about our roots. It is important to the preservation of our freedoms. Why have our educational curriculums watered down our historical information to just names and dates? We must make it our responsibility to take on a self directed education as our founding fathers did. This is why the LIFE business has an infinite value.
In the last article we discussed the fact that principles are truths. They have “cause and effect”! This means there are predictable results. The struggle for freedom and liberty has been evident for several thousands of years. The struggle is between people who want to be free to achieve their full God given potential and those who either have an ambition for power or think their ideas are above the less informed masses. Both philosophies believe that they know what is best.
I feel a great example of cause and effect leadership is what happened one hundred years after the philosophies of Rouseau, Voltaire and their metaphysical theories. We see the appearance of bankruptcy, revolution, chaos, and death during the French Revolution. These were their ripple effects. The philosophies from Montesquieu, Locke, Sidney etc. had cause and effect as well. The leaders of the American Revolution who wrote the Declaration of Independence quoted Montesquieu more than any source outside of the Bible. His ideas contrasted sharply with those of Rouseau. Montesquieu, John Locke, and Algernon Sydney led to the freest, longest lasting democratic republic in modern time. The principles of limited government, private property, and the opportunity to pursue one’s dreams led to the model democratic republic government that many are forgetting. “To form a moderate government,” Montesquieu tells us, “it is necessary to combine powers. To regulate them, to temper them, to make them act, to give, so to speak, a ballast to one in order to put it in a condition to resist another; this is a masterpiece of legislation, which chance rarely produces and prudence is rarely allowed to produce.” Although James Madison endorsed Montesquieu as a guard against government tyranny, he reminds us that “ancillary precautions” and “primary control” on the government is “a dependence on the people.” Thomas Jefferson said, “It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes.” These principles are not being taught today although this is the nation that drew so many looking for freedom to achieve their dreams. Make a note, however, that without the proper education of our historical roots and the principles they supply, we are doomed to repeat the patterns that occurred leading up to the collapse of all civilizations.
Influence from those theories is connected through the eighteen hundreds from Karl Marx who gave birth to the Communist Manifesto in 1848. He favored abolition of private property, a graduated income tax, education toward industrialization, all brought about through class warfare. Do you see similarities to the theories that brought on the French Revolution? Frederic Bastiat and Alexis de Tocqueville passed on warnings from what they learned from the French Revolution. Bastiat warned, “I believe we are entering on a path in which plunder, under very gentle, very subtle, very ingenious forms, embellished with the beautiful names of solidarity and fraternity, is going to assume proportions the extent of which the imagination hardly dares to measure.”
Education then becomes the key. The LIFE business provides an additional source of information not taught by mainstream educational curriculums. This is called ‘Self Directed’ education. Developing a self - directed education about Historical Leadership ‘cause and effect’ is not just important to understanding principles but teaches how divergent philosophies led us to our current state. Call the theories what you will. ‘Progressivism’ was the name that was coined in the nineteen hundreds but was really an extension of more state influence and gradual Constitutional revision. A new weapon of mass instruction was brought into play in the early 1900's with the vocational training act. Woodrow Wilson, then President of Princeton University said in 1909, “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” In other words, control the education control the people! Ellwood P. Cubberley, Dean of Stanford’s elite School of Education wrote in his book, ‘Public School Administration’ in 1922, “our schools are…factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned… And that it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to specifications laid down.” These thinkers began to re direct education from the classical liberal model which had been in effect since the founding of our country. Classical education provided critical thinking, self - mastery, and created a revival of learning. Professor of Education at the University of Liverpool William Harrison Woodward wrote in 1906, “The term education is to be treated as belief, thought, and social ideal in their application to the up-bringing of youth, the study of its history implies of necessity acquaintance with the ethical and religious concepts, the literature, the politco-social environment of the period whose schools and teachers are under review. Hence the claim is reasonably made that the history of education is primarily a liberal rather than a professional subject.”
Add the creation of the Federal Income Tax, Vocational Training Reform, Federal Reserve Board, and FDR’s Entitlements and compare what we learned from the philosophies from the early 1700’s. What would you imagine the effect to be in the Twenty First Century? According to the nation’s top auditor David Walker, “the sum of all benefits, programs, debt payments and other expenses has grown from $20.4 trillion to $56.4 trillion – a 176 % increase. Will this have an effect similar to the French Revolution? Doesn’t it sound like a good time to compensate communities for a self directed education? God Bless, George Guzzardo
