1. What Would the Founders Do?

2. Preparing Children to Be Voters

1. What Would the Founders Do?

Since paragraph two today is about training young minds in the form of government our Founders conceived, one is reminded how often today we hear from voters (particularly Ron Paul supporters) that we need to get back to the basics of what the Founders envisioned.

I’m in the process of readying a new Preface to go with the coming re-release of my book as an eBook. Concerning the abuses of our political system, one of my reviewers asked the specific question, “What would our forefathers think?”

I replied as follows: Your comment about what our forefathers would think reminds me of a story about the Disney companies from many years ago. It was the 1970’s, Walt Disney himself had died and the kind of movie Disney made in the 50’s and 60’s wasn’t selling anymore. There was a meeting of the corporate executives and one of them asked, “If Walt were alive today, what would he say for us to do?” As a result of that meeting, the group decided to form Touchstone Pictures to make films with a more contemporary feel. The decision, as we know now, was a good one.

So, expanding on that answer a bit, what the Disney executives did was acknowledge the times and the tastes of the viewing public had changed. If they really considered the question about what Walt would say, then they had to know Walt was someone who not only wanted to be with the public’s times and tastes. Walt was someone who wanted to help determine what the times and tastes were. The executives therefore made a decision they needed to modify their product to satisfy those changing times and tastes. They implemented their decision in a very smart way. The general public was unaware Touchstone equaled Disney, so if something went awry the Disney Brand would not be tarnished.

So, yes, going back to the original thought, what would our forefathers tell us to do if they were alive today? Would they tell us to adapt to the current times using the knowledge and opportunities science and technology gives us today?

Or would the Founders tell us we need to bring back Slavery and rescind Women’s right to vote?

Probably some of the Founders would argue for both things. The question is who would we listen to?

2. Preparing Children to Be Voters

Retaining a healthy democracy means training its citizens in how their government works. Reading a recent newspaper article* about the knowledge displayed by American students regarding America’s history and government spoke to how poorly the task is being accomplished. The testing results quoted were jaw droppingly abysmal. Here are some of the statistics quoted.

Among 30,000 students tested in a prestigious national sample:

• Fewer than one in four students scored proficient and student performance got worse with age.
• Half of fourth-graders could not identify Abraham Lincoln from a photograph and give two reasons why he was important in history.
• Only 22 percent of the nation’s 12^th-graders were able to identify China as North Korea’s ally during the Korean War.

The article went on to describe efforts to revise the curriculum for better results and the difficulty in the age of the Internet to sort out what to teach. Be sympathetic for the challenge to educators. Some time ago (at least ten years) a lecturer said the body of knowledge is now doubling every five years. Yet educators have children in their charge for the same fixed hours from ages 6 to 18 they have had children for the last century. If the time availability is fixed, but the potential knowledge for teaching is expanding exponentially, then something has to give. What is that something?