"Ignorance is Not Bliss"
Sydney M. Williams
“We must provide for our nation the way a family provides for its children.” Those words were spoken by President Clinton at the time of his first inauguration on January 21, 1993. Is this what we have become – a nation whose culture has been turned inside out? A President who serves as the Great Father and we, his dependencies? At the time of our founding, the emphasis was on independence – as a nation and as a people – from the tentacles of the British Empire and from the claws of any over-reaching government, including the one then being established. The American people were proudly independent.
But, things have changed. Over the years, especially since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and now with Obamacare and a trillion dollar stimulus, our federal government has increasingly caused people to become dependent, dependent on the caring hand of a benevolent government (our “bettors”, as Governor Mitch Daniels describes them.) Such charity, with seemingly good intentions has been sold as compassion; but dependency is a disease and government is not the cure. A federal government that consumes 25% of GDP is crowding out private initiative, impoverishing millions of people.
In his book, Keeping the Republic, Mitch Daniels writes: “Maybe solving our debt problem starts with vocabulary.” He disagrees with the use of the word entitlements when it comes to describing Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and similar programs. He goes on: “When one stops to think about it, an American is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, period.” The rest are choices we make as a people.
According to census data, in the first quarter of 2010, 48.5% of all U.S. households received some form of financial assistance, from food stamps to Social Security. That number compares to less than 30% during the double dip recessions of the early 1980’s. At the same time, the number of households paying no federal income tax in 2010 was 46.4%, compared to 21% in 1964, the year I was married. Yet the gulf between rich and poor has widened, not narrowed. As any Wall Street trader would tell you, the message of the tape is clear. This growing usurpation of power by government has fostered a series of unintended consequences. Government has become more intrusive and the results have been widening gaps in income and wealth. The reason, in my opinion, is that government has created a class of people increasingly dependent on government, stifling initiative and destroying aspiration among millions of people.
A significant cause of the problem lies with our schools, and the culture they have propagated. Two of the most powerful unions in the country, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), with about five million members, represent public school teachers and administration personnel. Despite whatever positive things those unions may have done in their formative years, in recent times they have protected bad teachers and created too many administrative jobs. They have fought progress in the form of competition from charter schools and voucher programs. Together, they generate about $450 million in union dues, 80% of which goes to support Democratic politicians to maintain the status quo. They also have supported programs like ACORN, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation and Aids Walk Washington.
What they have not done is improve education for the roughly 82 million students enrolled in our public schools. According to the Broad Foundation, American students ranked 25th in math and 21st in Science out of 30 countries measured. The national high school graduation rate is a disappointing 70%. A recent USA Today poll noted that only 38% of Americans could name the three branches of government and that 55% confused the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence. Our students have become ignorant when it comes our country’s history, unable to express themselves clearly in writing or in English and uncompetitive when it comes to math and the sciences.
Additionally, individual competition has been subsumed by the perceived need to reward everyone equally, regardless of talent or determination. In a speech at Stanford University in July 2007, Dana Gioia, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts spoke. He quoted Marcus Aurelius who believed that “the course of wisdom consisted of learning to trade easy pleasures for more complex challenging ones.”
Successful adults were once successful children who understood their strengths and weaknesses, exploiting the first, while buttressing the second. A school or sports program that finds it difficult to let their students learn the meaning of failure is one that will not allow them to appreciate success. Our culture has become one of molding children according to a predetermined formula, creating obedient dependent voters, while stifling the creativity that allows genius to blossom. “In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous,” so said Robert Green Ingersoll, American orator and politician. Political correctness, so rampant in schools that are designed for teachers and administrators, is destroying the creativity that education should unleash. Wealthy parents have options. Poor ones do not. The irony is that the teacher’s unions, so supportive of Democrats, are hurting the most vulnerable of our citizens.
Ignorance and dependence are inexorably linked. Independence relies on an understanding of history and, for Americans, a specific understanding of the principles of our democracy. The fact that our society has grown increasingly dependent is a condemnation of our education system, one that has put the careers of teachers and administrators ahead of students, and it is an indictment of the political correctness which has become endemic in our society and is the enemy of freedom.
These thoughts occurred as I filled out an absentee ballot on Friday in Old Lyme, when I noted that instructions in this almost exclusively white, middle class Connecticut town were printed in Spanish, as well as in English. In 1975, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was expanded by inserting special protection for “language minorities,” including American Indians, Asian Americans, Alaskan natives and those of Spanish heritage. I suppose if you were a newly arrived citizen from Monte Negro you were out of luck! But the fact that an understanding of English was not required to vote seemed at odds with our notion of a multilingual nation with equality as our core.
Most of the problems we face, from living beyond our means, to a sense of being entitled to social programs, to a widening income and wealth gap can trace their origins to a government that has tread where it shouldn’t. An old Chinese adage says, ‘giving a man a fish is not as compassionate as teaching him how to fish.’ We are, as Governor Daniels wrote, entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There are those that society must care for; but for those that are able, happiness descends from a sense of personal independence.
Thought of the Day
“Ignorance is Not Bliss”
November 7, 2011“We must provide for our nation the way a family provides for its children.” Those words were spoken by President Clinton at the time of his first inauguration on January 21, 1993. Is this what we have become – a nation whose culture has been turned inside out? A President who serves as the Great Father and we, his dependencies? At the time of our founding, the emphasis was on independence – as a nation and as a people – from the tentacles of the British Empire and from the claws of any over-reaching government, including the one then being established. The American people were proudly independent.
But, things have changed. Over the years, especially since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and now with Obamacare and a trillion dollar stimulus, our federal government has increasingly caused people to become dependent, dependent on the caring hand of a benevolent government (our “bettors”, as Governor Mitch Daniels describes them.) Such charity, with seemingly good intentions has been sold as compassion; but dependency is a disease and government is not the cure. A federal government that consumes 25% of GDP is crowding out private initiative, impoverishing millions of people.
In his book, Keeping the Republic, Mitch Daniels writes: “Maybe solving our debt problem starts with vocabulary.” He disagrees with the use of the word entitlements when it comes to describing Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and similar programs. He goes on: “When one stops to think about it, an American is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, period.” The rest are choices we make as a people.
According to census data, in the first quarter of 2010, 48.5% of all U.S. households received some form of financial assistance, from food stamps to Social Security. That number compares to less than 30% during the double dip recessions of the early 1980’s. At the same time, the number of households paying no federal income tax in 2010 was 46.4%, compared to 21% in 1964, the year I was married. Yet the gulf between rich and poor has widened, not narrowed. As any Wall Street trader would tell you, the message of the tape is clear. This growing usurpation of power by government has fostered a series of unintended consequences. Government has become more intrusive and the results have been widening gaps in income and wealth. The reason, in my opinion, is that government has created a class of people increasingly dependent on government, stifling initiative and destroying aspiration among millions of people.
A significant cause of the problem lies with our schools, and the culture they have propagated. Two of the most powerful unions in the country, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), with about five million members, represent public school teachers and administration personnel. Despite whatever positive things those unions may have done in their formative years, in recent times they have protected bad teachers and created too many administrative jobs. They have fought progress in the form of competition from charter schools and voucher programs. Together, they generate about $450 million in union dues, 80% of which goes to support Democratic politicians to maintain the status quo. They also have supported programs like ACORN, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation and Aids Walk Washington.
What they have not done is improve education for the roughly 82 million students enrolled in our public schools. According to the Broad Foundation, American students ranked 25th in math and 21st in Science out of 30 countries measured. The national high school graduation rate is a disappointing 70%. A recent USA Today poll noted that only 38% of Americans could name the three branches of government and that 55% confused the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence. Our students have become ignorant when it comes our country’s history, unable to express themselves clearly in writing or in English and uncompetitive when it comes to math and the sciences.
Additionally, individual competition has been subsumed by the perceived need to reward everyone equally, regardless of talent or determination. In a speech at Stanford University in July 2007, Dana Gioia, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts spoke. He quoted Marcus Aurelius who believed that “the course of wisdom consisted of learning to trade easy pleasures for more complex challenging ones.”
Successful adults were once successful children who understood their strengths and weaknesses, exploiting the first, while buttressing the second. A school or sports program that finds it difficult to let their students learn the meaning of failure is one that will not allow them to appreciate success. Our culture has become one of molding children according to a predetermined formula, creating obedient dependent voters, while stifling the creativity that allows genius to blossom. “In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous,” so said Robert Green Ingersoll, American orator and politician. Political correctness, so rampant in schools that are designed for teachers and administrators, is destroying the creativity that education should unleash. Wealthy parents have options. Poor ones do not. The irony is that the teacher’s unions, so supportive of Democrats, are hurting the most vulnerable of our citizens.
Ignorance and dependence are inexorably linked. Independence relies on an understanding of history and, for Americans, a specific understanding of the principles of our democracy. The fact that our society has grown increasingly dependent is a condemnation of our education system, one that has put the careers of teachers and administrators ahead of students, and it is an indictment of the political correctness which has become endemic in our society and is the enemy of freedom.
These thoughts occurred as I filled out an absentee ballot on Friday in Old Lyme, when I noted that instructions in this almost exclusively white, middle class Connecticut town were printed in Spanish, as well as in English. In 1975, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was expanded by inserting special protection for “language minorities,” including American Indians, Asian Americans, Alaskan natives and those of Spanish heritage. I suppose if you were a newly arrived citizen from Monte Negro you were out of luck! But the fact that an understanding of English was not required to vote seemed at odds with our notion of a multilingual nation with equality as our core.
Most of the problems we face, from living beyond our means, to a sense of being entitled to social programs, to a widening income and wealth gap can trace their origins to a government that has tread where it shouldn’t. An old Chinese adage says, ‘giving a man a fish is not as compassionate as teaching him how to fish.’ We are, as Governor Daniels wrote, entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There are those that society must care for; but for those that are able, happiness descends from a sense of personal independence.
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