Has Character Building Been Canceled?
I received my primary and secondary education from my parents and Parochial Schools. My tertiary schooling began in the military and continued in the classroom of life as a husband, father, friend, neighbor, and employee. As a kid in the 1950s, I had no idea that American Education was already in decline.
It started a couple of generations before me, when academic (and political) movers and shakers, like John Dewey and his humanist pals, decided that materialism was the foundation of a more perfect union, not virtue. The first things on the hit list were the trivium, quadrivium, and Bible. Next, parents started to cede more and more of their child-rearing responsibilities to the schools.
Fast forward to today; now indoctrinated fools swarm like flies over a dogpile spewing anti-American vitriol, as others squander their lives away on mindless monkey business.
There's a lot more:
D.E.I. huskers, race-baiters, and climate alarmists rarely receive the scoffing they deserve.
Supreme Court nominees can't define the nature of a woman.
College presidents are afraid to condemn evil.
Transgenderism has become a socio-political issue instead of a mental health issue.
Aborting pre-born children is accepted as reproductive healthcare.
Killing off old and sick people is called compassion.
Turning rivals into enemies, and destroying them by any means necessary is becoming commonplace.
In your face, sexual deviancy is now socially acceptable behavior.
The family home has become a rest stop, instead of a special sanctuary and training ground.
Churches display rainbow flags on the outside as they turn into ghost towns on the inside, and people like me are considered haters for telling it like it is.
Let's cut to the chase. We the people, must do a better job forming souls (especially our own). For starters, every child should be offered the opportunity to study the classical liberal arts which include old-school grammar, logic, rhetoric, literature, art, music, science, and mathematics. If school districts won't, or can't provide these basics then public-funded school choice must be on the table.
Next, we have to seriously revisit the separation of Church and State issue. The current separation isn't a wall, it's an intellectual and spiritual siegework designed to starve souls by censoring knowledge. This reprehensible sham deprives young minds of the big picture and prepares them to accept a lifetime of godless propaganda.
This is where the finger-pointing and crying usually begin. Enough already! Faith, reason, character-building excellence, productivity, and education must be harmonized if we are going to retain our humanity and survive as the United States of America.
Today, I'm an armchair student of classical literature, the Bible, the Church Fathers, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I'm constantly being challenged and informed by the sharpest minds from Western and Christian antiquity, without accumulating one cent in student loan debt and so can you. The soul was created for sublime things because the soul was created by God.
I have made my peace, for abandoning this stuff after receiving a little taste during my youth. Fortunately, things that promote personal and communal excellence never go out of style. Unfortunately, they're useless if we continue to let mediocrity be our high bar.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
 | A guest post by
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In short, yes. It's been cancelled. I worked as a Social Emotional Learning Specialist in Austin from 2014-2021. Somewhere around 2017 I encounted the idea that "Character education promotes white supremacy culture". The overarching idea I encountered from 2017-2021 was that everything that promoted "the individual" (i.e Character Ed), capitalism and Classical Liberalism promote "white supremacy culture". I never subscribed for this thinking and constantly tried to get my colleagues to discuss it but they refused. Guess what they called me? Yep, a white supremacist.
The left has captured the mechanism of public education and have promoted the concept that the values that we used to consider part of "character" are relative, simply "value judgments." To assess values is, in their mind, racist (White supremacy)--thus we get the nonsense such as being on time is a White supremacist concept. It's part of their intentional deconstruction of society.