In response to the abridged version of how to get the country back, I had just one point of disagreement:
“We need to get rid of all the useless French/Latin teachers, and teach Arabic and Farsi instead.”
I would agree that we need citizens whom we know to be loyal who know Arabic, so we don’t have to rely on translators and intelligence agents of very questionable loyalty. We need people who are familiar with Islam who are not Muslims.
Similarly, we needed people who spoke Russian and studied Communism without succumbing to it back during the Cold War.
But it’s extremely important that school children should learn the basics of history, culture, literature, and what lies behind our civilization: Athens, Greece and Rome, and some familiarity with the rise of Christendom during the middle ages.
So, I think Latin is valuable. It’s important to know something about the Greeks and the Romans, and the ideas that our civilization is (or was until recently) based on. People should know the Classics. They were taught when England was a world power, and they were a very effective basis for the soldiers and politicians who built civilization around the world.
History, too. Not social studies. Not how we mistreated the Indians ten times over. But how the Greeks defeated the Persians and how our civilization was built and who the ancient heroes were. The left has been desperately eager to suppress all that, so they can turn American history into nothing but killing Indians, destroyingn the environment, abusing slaves, and raising and lowering tarrifs.
And we need to read at least the basic books like the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, and Shakespeare, instead of the latest nonsense that the teach in the public schools today. We also need practical, professional education; but it should be based on a classic liberal education in the old sense of the l-word.
P.S. Maybe I should add that if you teach everyone Arabic and Farsi, you’re going to end up giving the impression that that’s what civilization is based on.
Matthew Arnold’s father famously said that schoolboys should learn “The best of what has been thought and said.” That means Greece and Rome and Jerusalem, not Mecca.
Some people should learn Arabic, but as a professional accomplishment, not as a basic part of education. But everyone should have the opportunity to learn Latin and the Classics. Otherwise we’d actually be doing our enemy’s work for them without realizing it. And perhaps we can teach them enough about Muslims and Arabs to put them on their guard.
What say we take MM’s work as a PROPOSAL, get rid of the slugs that are constipating the country and have somebody responsive and responsible to the people legislate all the dotted eyes and crossed tees later on?
Just for now, we got some deadwood to cut and burn, and standing around chatting about the fine points could get somebody smacked upside the head with an axe.