- Abraham Lincoln, January 1861, Fragment on the
Constitution and the Union
 |
| Dr. David J. Bobb Photo: Ileana Johnson |
The Republican Women of
Clifton hosted at their October 15, 2014 meeting Dr. David J. Bobb, President
of the Bill of Rights Institute. Founded in 1999 as a 501(c) non-profit, the
organization is “focused on providing educational resources on America’s
Founding documents and principles for teachers and students of American History
and Civics.”
With a vision to shape
knowledgeable citizens with values and skills to exercise their God-given
rights and responsibilities in order to maintain a free society, the Bill of
Rights Institute educates young people about America’s Founders, the liberties
guaranteed in our Founding documents, and how these principles are relevant
today.
Dr. Bobb worked with
Hillsdale College for 12 years and realized how malleable high school students are
and how important it is to teach them what it means to be an American.
He compared the status quo
of our country with the Office of Personnel Management, a dinosaur staffed by 600
people who bureaucratize all the paperwork necessary for federal employees to
retire. The work is done entirely by hand, at great expense to the taxpayers,
in windowless offices in a cave in Pennsylvania. People are crabby because they
never see the sunlight. One employee finally quit, taking a job in handling
explosives.
The American people are in
that cave where the situation is so dark and dim, that taking a job as an
explosives handler seems like a happier alternative. We are a nation “mired in
debt,” and our economy is choked by a myriad of regulations under the control
of progressives who are sclerotizing economic activity, in a schizophrenic state
of affairs that dominates our political landscape.
Dr. Bobb’s organization is
in touch with 35,000 teachers of the 120,000 teachers in the nation who teach “what
used to be called Civics,” now called Social Studies, a substitution that
treats the Declaration of Independence as an old artifact that has no bearing
in your daily life, it is just a dusty museum piece.
The Constitution has
become a “living document,” accountability is no longer present. Congress
rubber stamps anything the administration throws their way. Congress has
created a system of confusion and disorder, a lack of sense of reason, with a “mindboggling
complexity made possible by a Constitutional illiteracy.”
The Constitution has
become irrelevant, an obstacle to be overcome, an afterthought which prompted a
college professor to write that there is no reason why we should abide by and
be governed by a Constitution written by a bunch of dead white guys. “It is no
taken seriously as a controlling document. You don’t take the structure that
has been set up seriously.” That is the way academics treat it, Dr. Bobb said.
Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, when asked by Egyptian officials, recommended as a model the South
African Constitution, a very complex and lengthy document, 100 pages or more,
with a section on “rights” longer than our entire U.S. Constitution. The South
African Constitution promises a right to education, health care, and a job, all
the progressive utopia which is so appealing to our young people today.
MTV reached out to young
people through Rock the Vote, using rockers and rappers to promise students that,
if they vote, they can vote their way into prosperity. The reality is that
young people, some of whom have yet to graduate, are saddled with $1.2 trillion
in college debt, no job security, just a verbal con job. Why not “Teach the
Vote” and “Reason the Vote?”
Young people can sense
that something is wrong but they are not blaming the administration or the
progressivism that created their economic situation. They are not seeing the
real culprits because they’ve been told that the deck is stacked against them
since 1980 when Howard Zinn wrote his book, The People’s History of the United
States, a sort of Bible for Hollywood A-listers who shamelessly quote from it
to young audiences with brains full of mush. Young people are shaped to work in
activism for the left, in social justice, and schools groom and churn out students
for activist causes.
Dr. Bobb does not think counter-curriculum
control is the solution and the most effective way to reverse the trend. Students
have to learn how to think and how to become careful evaluators of history.
Outlines of history
classes are huge, sometimes 94 pages long, leaving no time for George
Washington, resulting in neglect of important topics. And who decides what the
important topics and standards are? Progressive standards in education neglect
human nature, the fact that teaching is an art.
Dr. Bobb explained that the
default setting of young people is progressivism. How can we get them to think
and question the way in which they are brought up, he asked. Often they don’t
even realize that they are progressives. They have no sense of history. What
does it mean to be human, to be good, to be great, and to really connect with
other people?
The Bill of Rights
Institute advocates for a non-political curriculum developed from primary
source documents with professional development programs for 21,000 teachers so
far from all 50 states.
© Ileana Johnson Paugh
2014
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