07/02/2026 – A short excerpt, concluding summarization from the book – pages 103 through 105. Note!: “… We have become a nation of children…” I would add: With much support for that premise throughout! // Read on for the good news! + biblical verse support below!
“It’s perfectly obvious from our society today what those specification were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then buy the things we see on television. We buy $ 150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon, we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we’re upside down in them. And, worst of all, we don’t bat any eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to “be careful what you say,” even. if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one, too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.
Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach you own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology – all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone; they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired, quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more important life, and they can.
First, though, wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids can do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”
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Bible verses and commentary:
Right behind “The Shema” , the greatest commandment:
“Listen Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is One. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. These words that I am giving you today are to be in your heart.” (Deuteronomy 6: 4-6):
“Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you sit in your house and when you. walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them be a symbol on your forehead. Write them on the doorposts on your house and on your gates.” (Deut. 6: 7-9)
Question: If my children, from birth to high school graduation, spend significantly more waking hours in the public education gulag and day care, how do I even approach obedience to this command in Deuteronomy 6: 7-9?
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“Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.” Romans 12:2
SolI Deo Gloria!